Wednesday, August 26, 2009

An update of sorts

What can you say about an eighteen-month old laptop that died? My attachment to my Ideapad could be crafted into a Love Story in itself, prematurely cut short when my laptop died earlier this week. I had a Lenovo Y410, bought when the Ideapads first came out. I paid close to $900 for it, getting along with it a 250GB SATA hard drive, 2 GB of RAM, and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It also had a 14.1" glossy widescreen monitor, facial recognition software, a dolby sound system and an integrated webcam. It was a good machine for the price. An the harddrive came already partitioned, allowing me to install Ubuntu with ease.

And now it was gone.


I had done several things that now looking back was very foolish of me. As a graduate student then, about to finish her M.S. and potentially move into HPC, I wanted a laptop with two cores,so I could run MPI on it. I was also hurting for money; I did not get the extended warranty. The machine came with a one year warranty, and I naivelly though that a.) if anything was defective, it would break within the first year, and b.) I would remember to buy an extended warranty anyway, before the warranty period was up.

Now, with the machine four months out of warranty, I bitterly look back and realize how wrong I was. The motherboard was shot: when I plugged in the machine the battery would no longer charge (and yes, I did confirm it had nothing to do with the AC adapter). Thinking back, I always remember that I had an issue with the way the charger plugged in on this laptop. It was a tight fit; whenever I unplugged the damn thing, the sensation was more akin of having dislocated a shoulder than having removed the plug from the machine. This sensation of the charger being ripped out of my laptop's socket should have tipped me off that something could seriously be wrong. Alas, I ignored it.

The motherboard would cost almost $200 to replace, plus I had to pay Lenovo's $50 out-of-warranty penalty. This did not include the cost of installation and taxes, which would be a lot extra. I had a choice now: I could either fork over $250+ dollars or buy a new machine. But could I afford a new machine? If I fixed my current machine, I'd have to fork over $250 plus realize that if the machine breaks again, I'd have to pay for parts and the $50.00 out-of-warranty charge. With the technology progressing the way it is, is it really worth it to pay to fix this machine?

Lucky for me, I happened to be in NYC on vacation when this occurred.Since classes start next week, I knew that if I needed to buy a new machine, there would never be a more perfect opportunity. Even luckier, I was reminded about this wonderful deal at J&R: A refurbished T42 laptop, for a measly three hundred dollars. For an additional $90.00 I'll get a 2 year warranty. Well, why not? While some may sneer that this is a serious downgrade, it may not be for me. Let's put the two machines side by side:





Lenovo Y410


  • Intel Core 2 Duo, 1.66Ghz 2MB L2
  • 2 GB DDR2 RAM
  • 250 GB SATA HD
  • Intel X3100 Integrated graphics card
  • 14.1" Widescreen VibrantView screen, glossy
  • Full complement of ports
  • Sound system(?)
  • Integrated Webcam
  • 5.6 lbs
  • Windows Vista Home Edition

ThinkPad T42


  • Intel Pentium M 1.7Ghz 2MB L2
  • 1.5GB DDR RAM
  • 40 160 GB IDE HD (thanks Kevin!)
  • ATI Radeon 7600 32MB graphics card
  • 14.1" TFT Active matrix display (1024x768)
  • Full complement of ports
  • Trackpoint button
  • Better keyboard (and webcam -- thanks Ethan!)
  • 4.9 lbs
  • Windows XP Pro



So specs are specs, but specs outside the context of usage mean nothing. If I was super-gamer, a laptop power-user, or even if I were expecting to the majority of my development on this machine, this would, in truth, be a downgrade. The truth is, my computational needs 1.5 years ago is radically different from my current needs.

My primary machine is a quad-core sitting in my office. All of my development is done on this machine, and any basic testing is done on this machine. Actual benchmarks are run on a remote cluster. In other words, anything requiring HPC performance is already taken care through my desktop or the cluster. So power is moot.

So what do I use my laptop for? These days I'm either using it to work remotely or messing around on the internet. Thus, I require only the basics for development. Will this machine suffice?

Let's do a run down on the specs. We first start with the processor. The Pentium M chip was designed for mobile computing efficiency. Reasonably fast and power efficient, it's probably the most I could ask for from a single core option. Clearly, a dual-core solution is more powerful, but do I need that power? The laptop comes with Windows XP, not Vista, and therefore should be fine if I ever decide to use Windows. Secondly, I do most of my work in Ubuntu linux anyway, so efficiency is not necessarily an issue.

Next we have a memory and hard disk. What really is the practical difference between 1.5 and 2 GB? How much usability does that extra 512MB really give you, especially in linux? I'm sure with gaming, every extra megabyte counts, but for what I'm using it for, it probably doesn't matter. While the 40GB hard drive is woefully small, I could subsist on that. The 250 GB SATA hard drive in my old laptop is now sitting comfortably in its new external enclosure, so if space really becomes an issue, I can rely on that. Lastly, as an early birthday gift, my wonderful boyfriend gave me a new 160GB IDE hard drive for this laptop. Freakin' yes.

There are a couple of things I wasn't too thrilled about. For one thing, the maximum resolution on this machine is only the same as what was there on my T30, and the video card is not that great. There was also the issue of the webcam, but my good friend Ethan was kind enough to give me his (you're amazing, Ethan!). But for under $500, I got a great machine with a 2 year warranty that interfaces great with Ubuntu.

Ask me later about my experience at J&R. It took me a few iterations to get the machine I actually wanted, and the Windows install they gave me was defective at best. Thankfully, as an ACM student member I'm entitled to free software, including Windows XP Pro. It's so good to be a student sometimes! Now I have a Windows disk that I can use if necessary. What more can I ask for?