Iain’s Blog

One of my first blog posts last year was on my new T60 - I was really pretty happy with the purchase - at least after wiping it to get rid of all the pre-installed nonsense and sticking on a nice fresh install of Vista . So after 15 months hard use am I still as happy?

Amazingly the answer is yes - a fairly remarkable achievement given that I normally tire of my new gadgets before a week is out and start looking towards the replacement which will do things better. But the T60 really has delivered - and in fact the only problem which still bugs me slightly is the low screen brightness - something which has been annoying since day one. That and the fact that very occasionally it doesn’t hibernate properly when I close the lid and then my bag turns into an oven as it runs away until the battery dies - I think this one’s fixed by a recent firmware upgrade though.

I’ve used the laptop a lot over the year - done lots of development work on it - and lots of the usual email & web browsing when travelling. It really is the perfect balance for me - substantial enough to use every day - and small enough to make a good travelling partner.

However it has suffered the usual fate of a geek’s laptop and had hundreds of programs installed, uninstalled, upgraded, uninstalled, then reinstalled again! As a result it’s starting to grind a little. Ok .. starting to grind a lot actually …

It was time for a reformat and reinstall! I’ve been putting it off for months due to the sheer hassle of it all - but it had to be done sometime  … so I’ve bitten upon the bullet this weekend .. stuck a bit more RAM in it … imaged the old machine off using VMWare Convertor (a way cool tool by the way) … and installed XP SP3 RC1!

As for the XP as opposed to Vista .. I’ll explain why later!