One month (and counting) with the ThinkPad SL400

I got myself a Lenovo ThinkPad SL400 about a month ago – 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, 1.8GHz Intel T5670 Core 2 Duo, 14” screen, BlueTooth, WiFi, 4 USB ports, 1 FireWire port, Vista Starter. Good bargain, too – I paid much less than the PhP48,745 price quoted on the Philippine section of the Lenovo website. That price includes Vista Business and 1GB or RAM. For what I paid, I got a “free” Vista Starter pack and an additional 1GB of RAM. The specs should be good enough even for Vista Ultimate, although that’s not in my radar anytime soon. In fact, that has to do with my wish list. But more on that later.

Vista gives me more than decent performance, in part because the SL400 came without the usual demoware that slowed down “my” previous laptop, an Acer Aspire. (In case you’re wondering, that was a project-assigned laptop that I’ve since returned to its rightful owner.) Also, Starter lets me open only up to three applications at a time, although one of them is a “heavy” – Sun’s xVM VirtualBox virtualization software, which I use to run the OpenSolaris distro BeleniX and Windows Server 2003 with a 180-day evaluation license. Fortunately, I haven’t yet found a need to run more than three applications at a time. If I ever run into such a situation, I may use BeleniX under VirtualBox to run additional applications.

I get more than three hours of battery life on this machine. We conducted one-on-one orientation of a payroll software system my friends and I developed, moving from one office to another. We started about 2pm, finished up 5pm, and still had about an hour of battery life left. We were shutting the lid between visits to offices, which may have contributed to the low battery consumption. The next day, same thing: started at 9am, finished up about noon, and worked for more than one hour more on battery power before I had to resort to the power sockets. The current power plan was “Balanced”. We couldn’t conceive conducting that training without this laptop.

For all its virtues, I still wish it would run DesktopBSD or BeleniX. DtBSD does have a utility called ndisgen which creates a kernel-loadable module from a Windows driver. Thing is, I need the source code for the system, and the only instructions I’ve read indicate that I need to be connected to the Internet, which I can’t do because DtBSD doesn’t recognize my networking hardware. There may be a way around that, though, which I’ll try once things slow down a tad. BeleniX, on the other hand, did install although the bootup would stop with some error. I’ll have to run BeleniX under VirtualBox until I sort that problem out.

A minor annoyance: if I plug in the power adapter after using it in unplugged mode, the screen practically screams — i.e., it turns considerably brighter.

So for now, it’s Vista Starter for me, at least until the FreeBSD project can come up with drivers for the Intel WiFi Link 5100. Or, I could buy a WiFi adapter which has Free Software drivers, but that may negate the bargain. Still, I always believed that Software Freedom had a price. Nevertheless, even at the quoted price of PhP48,745, the SL400 is a bloatware-free bargain if you’re not too concerned about running a Free Software OS like I am. It took me some time to finance this purchase, but the wait was well worth it.