Far below us, the rims of ice edging Hell's lakes of fire are hardening and get
ting thicker. The flames will dim and the damned's breath will fog. Fur coats w
ill be in short supply. Sometime soon, Satan will finally slip on the thick sno
w on his morning rounds of the cooling sulphur pits and break his neck.
Why? This rabid Mac fanboy, this former two-year Chairman of the Philip
pine Macintosh Users Group, this current owner of four Macs and four i
Pods and a Newton, this early adopter of numerous Apple first-iterations, this
Bill Gates heckler, this Mac-A-Doodle blogger ...is using Windows XP on an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T43.
Wait, there's a backstory. In the magazine company where I've been working for
close to two years, I have not had a computer to use. Until yesterday. I have
refused the desktop Windows boxes they've been trying to assign me all these mo
nths, holding out vainly for an office-issued Mac. No joy; only the Art Departm
ent boys get the tricked-out Intel iMacs, and the F.A. guy is the one gets the
shiny new Mac Pro.
So I've been using my Powerbook since, bringing it to work everyday and general
ly beating the heck out of the poor thing. Been feeling a little down looking a
t the wear and tear it's been going through and having nothing to blame but my
own stubbornness and recalcitrance. Well, the past few months I've been softeni
ng up and thinking about succumbing to the inevitable. What the hey, I thought,
a lot of my comrades with new Macs are regularly double-booting into the Twili
ght Zone anyway. But somehow I couldn't bring myself to going through with it.
Until yesterday, when they b
ribed me with the Thinkpad.
It's not a big chunky beige box with a cheap monitor and plasticky mouse and ke
yboard. It's sleek, jet-black and fancy with three magic letters on it that any
one, even Mac fanboys, would respect: IBM. And it's a notebook that'll let me w
ork anywhere and won't take up valuable real estate in my tiny office. Hmmm.
It's a nice machine, despite what my gut instincts scream out. The Thin
kPad T43 has been an Editor's Choice of PC Ma
gazine (the Philippine Edition of which I used to edit), and is consid
ered one of the emerging classic business machines with surprising longevity. T
rim, compact, stuffed to the gills with frills. From a little lamp at the top o
f the screen to light the keyboard in dark work areas to a biometric fingerprin
t reader on the deck. From dedicated keys for flipping between webpages, a rock
er switch for scrolling up and down, a hard-wired blue key for model-specific s
upport called "Access IBM", that red little eraser-nubbin in the middle of the
keyboard, to great battery life - it's even got a surprising snappiness to it.
But still.
Anyways I'm taking the plunge and using the ThinkPad as my work machine startin
g today, and give my Albook a well-deserved break. I will also take this opport
unity to do the big thing: live with the enemy, and see how it really is. We Ma
c heads scoff and mock (it's fun, right?), but we do it from a safe and sanitar
y distance. In this age of detente and convergence in the OS world, I'
ll see for myself how it really is, and I'll chronicle the experience slowly, i
n bits and pieces, over the coming months in Mac-A-Doodle.
I got the ThinkPad up and running tonight, downloading shareware and configurin
g the thing, tweaking the settings, getting the wifi to run, putting up firewal
ls and running anti-virus software and ad-and-spyware blockers, and rebooting c
ountless times and getting confused and mixed up - but still becoming pleasantl
y surprised a couple of times despite myself. I'd forgotten how fun this mess c
ould be. Already I have a bunch of stuff I'm itching to say, but we'll save it
for the next entry in this series, which I'll call The Big Experiment.
All I can say now is, I composed this post entirely on the newly set-up ThinkPa
d, and it ain't so bad.
But we'll see, won't we?
Until yesterday, when they b
ribed me with the Thinkpad.
It's not a big chunky beige box with a cheap monitor and plasticky mouse and ke
yboard. It's sleek, jet-black and fancy with three magic letters on it that any
one, even Mac fanboys, would respect: IBM. And it's a notebook that'll let me w
ork anywhere and won't take up valuable real estate in my tiny office. Hmmm.
It's a nice machine, despite what my gut instincts scream out. The Thin
kPad T43 has been an Editor's Choice of PC Ma
gazine (the Philippine Edition of which I used to edit), and is consid
ered one of the emerging classic business machines with surprising longevity. T
rim, compact, stuffed to the gills with frills. From a little lamp at the top o
f the screen to light the keyboard in dark work areas to a biometric fingerprin
t reader on the deck. From dedicated keys for flipping between webpages, a rock
er switch for scrolling up and down, a hard-wired blue key for model-specific s
upport called "Access IBM", that red little eraser-nubbin in the middle of the
keyboard, to great battery life - it's even got a surprising snappiness to it.
But still.
Anyways I'm taking the plunge and using the ThinkPad as my work machine startin
g today, and give my Albook a well-deserved break. I will also take this opport
unity to do the big thing: live with the enemy, and see how it really is. We Ma
c heads scoff and mock (it's fun, right?), but we do it from a safe and sanitar
y distance. In this age of detente and convergence in the OS world, I'
ll see for myself how it really is, and I'll chronicle the experience slowly, i
n bits and pieces, over the coming months in Mac-A-Doodle.
I got the ThinkPad up and running tonight, downloading shareware and configurin
g the thing, tweaking the settings, getting the wifi to run, putting up firewal
ls and running anti-virus software and ad-and-spyware blockers, and rebooting c
ountless times and getting confused and mixed up - but still becoming pleasantl
y surprised a couple of times despite myself. I'd forgotten how fun this mess c
ould be. Already I have a bunch of stuff I'm itching to say, but we'll save it
for the next entry in this series, which I'll call The Big Experiment.
All I can say now is, I composed this post entirely on the newly set-up ThinkPa
d, and it ain't so bad.
But we'll see, won't we?
Hah! Now you'll feel my "pain" -- using Windows for "business" and Mac for "per
sonal stuff". Just make sure not to carry over your Mac habits over to your Wi
ndows *and* don't forget your anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-adware, anti-troja
ns and all the other "anti's" Windows needs to run with minimal problems. :)
Good luck!
They sure are a lot, aren't they? And the incessant updates and upgrades and wh
at not. Even IBM/Lenovo itself kept me busy most of the night updating the Thin
kpad stuff. And the constant rebooting! Grrr...
Well, there IS a solution to that conundrum... configure it to dual-boot with U
buntu Feisty Fawn! Now if you have to do office stuff, do it in the problemati
c Windos partition... if you want to something really productive, fire up Ubunt
u!
Well, the Feisty Fawn DVD is just waiting in my desk drawer, Berns. I'd install
it, but doing it on a Thinkpad is a little complicated because not all of the
hardwired features will work, and the Rescue & Recovery/ Install partition
on the hard drive might get wiped out and I wouldn't be able to roll back easil
y. But it is certainly tempting. Maybe someday when I get up the nerve.
I'm a recent Mac user myself, starting with an iMac then to a MacBook scant wee
ks later, though I wouldn't call myself a convert just yet, because as much as
I am amazed at how friendly a Mac can be, it could still be improved. For examp
le, a better keyboard for the MacBook is in order, something that IBM Thinkpads
excel at.
Mobile connectivity is another. I still haven't found a driver that will let me
use my old Nokia 6630 with my MacBook as a wireless 3G modem.
That's why I'm hanging on to my old IBM X31.