Author Topic: TAC! About the ThinkPad and OS choice... (Read 586 times)

LePaul · « **on:** December 06, 2001, 09:37:00 AM »

Haven't seen you on for the past few days and wanted to followup our disussion.

As I'd mentioned, I just bought an IBM Thinkpad 600E on eBay incredibly cheap...$325...the seller had many for sale, most sold for $500 and up, I managed to find an auction that ended in the wee hours of the morning and got lucky! Unit is gorgeous, lightly used, if at all. Its a P2 300, 288mb ram (max'd out)and I already bought some nice goodies for it (DVD PCMCIA decoder card...takes all the decoding load off the CPU).

We'd discussed in the buffer what OS would be best. Would Win2k be a bit too much for a P2 300 or should we kick it down to Windows 98/Me. Since I do a lot of development stuff in Delphi 6 and VB, I wanted the stability of Win2k.

Well, I'm tapping away on it now and its running fabulously with Win2k/IE6 with all the product updates installed, etc etc. Sadly, the computer is too wimpy for Aces High but man, going from a P133 to a 300 is a nice jump up! If my home desktop didn't need an upgrade soon, I would've bought a faster laptop!

So anyways, with out polluting the chat buffer the next time I see you, I just wanted to pass along that we were right, she runs great under Win2k Pro.

bloom25 · « **Reply #1 on:** December 06, 2001, 04:07:00 PM »

A friend of mine was running win2k on a P1 233 Mmx laptop. It was slow but usable (and stable). On a laptop win2k is a FAR better choice than win9x or me. Since you aren't really going to play 3d games on a laptop stability should be the main concern. Win2k also has superior power management options, thus your battery might actually last longer with 2k than 98.

Tac · « **Reply #2 on:** December 06, 2001, 09:33:00 PM »

if you're gonna be doing coding, use win2k. I remember using win98 when I was doing SIMPLE C++ for my intro to C++ class and the damn thing kept slowing down to a grind and blue screens o' death in the middle of compiling.

Never did figure wtf was going on, even after several full formats and loading the thing without any drivers (coding in VGA..yuck).

iceydee · « **Reply #3 on:** December 06, 2001, 09:44:00 PM »

with the amount of ram you have, I'd choose
XP... it will run faster than W2K, and will
be atleast as stable...

LePaul · « **Reply #4 on:** December 07, 2001, 11:41:00 AM »

I'm leery of XP right now. Put simply, I hate running any new MS OS until at least 2 Service Packs have been released.

But while you mention XP, I have a friend telling me that the Home flavor is OK, while the bigger version for $199 is awesome. Being Christmas Time, I have to buy presents but once the first of the year rolls around, I want to inquire with more people about XP Pro. If its worth the extra dough, great. But from what I have now, this ThinkPad is running very nicely. I just can't beleive how THIN this thing is. The keyboard has a great feel to it and I'm anxious to plop in the DVD drive and PCMCIA decoder card and play some movies during work's slower times. The "Blue Thunder" DVD is standing by!

To think I used to despise laptops...wow. Now I'm itching to upgrade to a P3 800 sometime! The IBM ThinkPad A series really has me drooling.

Only snafu so far is not all of the Directx stuff will work in this laptop...obviously with 2.5mb video ram, there isnt any video acceleration. But I can sure do a lot more than the 133 could!

I dunno, for $320 and $32 to max the RAM to 288mb, its a sweet deal. God love eBay

bloom25 · « **Reply #5 on:** December 07, 2001, 02:48:00 PM »

No way, Win XP wouldn't be faster than win2k sp 2 on that laptop. IMO if you have win2k sp2 working correctly there is no pressing reason to go to XP. It's MUCH more sluggish than win2k. Also, win2k has a lot of features that aren't in winxp home. To get all the functionality of win2k you have to go to winxp pro (which costs $200 for the upgrade, not $100 like xp home.)