ThinkPad A31
From Superk
These are some notes of mine about my previous laptop, the ThinkPad A31. I really did like this laptop for many reasons, not the least of which was it's great compatibility with Linux. However, despite my likes about this laptop, there were a few things that really caused me some problems. For the sake of helping others interested in picking up one of these laptops, I'll try to outline my problems here when I can.
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General Gripes
Not much to complain about here. I would probably categorize my gripes into two areas:
Weight
This is not a light laptop. It weighs close to 9 pounds and is quite a tank of a machine. While 9 pounds isn't horribly heavy, it does become a bit of a burden on your arm after awhile. Now that I have a 5 pound laptop, I don't think I could ever go back!
Battery Life
This machine really is a portable desktop machine and it's battery life reflects that. When I first got it I was happy to get just over 1.5 hours life out of it. That since degraded to around 1 hour max. This is really unacceptable if you want to do any mobile work (like show off your great laptop to friends in a wifi-enabled coffee shop). Any laptop should get at least 2 hours of battery life (5+ would be ideal in my opinion).
Major Gripes
There were some real major gripes (well gripe) that I did have with this laptop. Here they are:
Video Issues
It's really unfortunate, but I had some very serious video issues with this laptop that forced me to purchase a new laptop. It appears that this particular video issue is not unique in my laptop. There have been reports by others with similar issues around the web. My best guess is that there is something either wrong with the physical connection of the GPU to the mother board (ie, solder joint broke) or there is something wrong with the GPU itself (or even attached memory). It seems that physically "banging" on the computer would affect the video issue, but not always "fix" it. There has been speculation that temperature differences may also have some affect, but I can't say one way or the other. Here is a small gallery of photos I took of the issue for illustration purposes:
| Note: This is an ATI 7500 Mobility chipset. |
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Things I Like
After all that complaining about the things I didn't like about this laptop, it's only fair that I mention some of the things I really did like. There were definately several & I'm sure I'm going to miss some of them here:
The Screen
When the video isn't acting up, the screen is absolutely beautiful! My particular model sported the 15" 1400x1050 screen and it was perfect. It had the technology (the name of which is slipping my mind at the moment) that enabled it to be seen from nearly every angle up to nearly 180°. It's clarity was magnificent and it was very bright. It was nice to compare this laptop with friend's of mine outside and actually be able to see my own screen somewhat clearly. This feature definately has to be one of my overall fravorites.
The Little Things
There are a couple features that don't really deserve an entire category, but are certainly worth mentioning. In particular, the "ThinkLight" & the G-force harddrive parking mechanism (again, I'm forgetting the official name). The ThinkLight was a small light embedded into the top of the screen bezel that would shine (very brightly) onto the keyboard making things very easy to see/read. Such a handy feature when hacking away at night with the lights off while watching TV. The G-force harddrive parking mechanism would actually sense significant G-force differences and instantly park the hard drive before impact with anything! This would greatly extend the life of the drive and increase it's reliability substantially.
UltraBays
The UltraBay idea was another favorite of mine. It made it so easy to swap out accessories. Not a whole lot to expound upon here, but worth the mention.
The "Nub" Pointing Device
I expect a lot of flak over this one. I actually prefer the eraser-like nub mouse pointer over the touchpad. It never seemed to get in the way or start doing funky things when I brushed it or anything else I didn't expect. It was a nuisence to get used to at first, but eventually it was a breeze to use. Very nice feature indeed.
Linux on the ThinkPad
I won't go into great detail in this section since I'm not actively using this laptop anymore, but it is always worth mentioning how Linux behaves on any computer hardware. Fortunately for this laptop the news is good! I started by running SuSE on it with great success. I have had much frustration with Linux on laptops in the past so I thought it would be best to take the simplest route and just install a distro I was fairly confident would work out of the box. SuSE did just that and ran very well for a long time.
Then peer pressure sank in (be sure you're running Debian if you want to be part of TFUG!). In a previous life I had been a staunch supporter of Debian, but mostly for the server realm. I had never bothered to spend much time in getting a GUI desktop working in Debian much less a laptop with all it's associated hardware oddities. However, most of my computing friends are also big fans of Debian and the constant haranging over running SuSE as opposed to Debian finally sunk in and I decided to take the plunge and switch. Needless to say I was very happy with that decision!
Debian ran (and continues to run) without a hitch on this laptop. Everything worked flawlessly for the most part. The only real issue was the fact that ACPI was not supported and I had to revert to APM for power management functions. Not a real issue per se considering APM really does most everything necessary for a laptop.
| Here's another minor issue I have with this laptop. Because it is a Pentium 4, it is limited to only 2 steps for CPU throttling with the slowest step being 1.2GHz! In my opinion this is far too fast for any kind of substantial battery savings. I would have liked to have seen the CPU throttle down to the 500MHz range. |
Conclusion
Over all I'm very sorry to see my ThinkPad be resorted to an ultra-slim server puttering away on the shelf due to the intolerably video issues, but it did serve me well while it worked. I'm definately happy with my new laptop though I do miss some of the old features of my ThinkPad as I hack away at my new keyboard. C'est la vie!
See Also
Here are a couple great sites for ThinkPad owners to check out:
- ThinkPad Wiki - Excellant place to find details about your laptop model and possible issues other's have had with them.
- ThinkPad Mailing-List - Mailing lists are always great places to see how other people have dealt with some of the same problems we all have.
