Computers

(update: the battery died three months later)

Liv is now the proud owner of a tablet. An IBM Thinkpad X41, used. General piece of advice for the future: do not acquire 3rd party batteries. Yes, they are less expensive. And they may be equally safe. However, both replacement batteries that I have tried to acquire for this have had their capacities over-advertised and are notably less than Lenovo's replacement. (Though, it more or less matches the price.) Almost more alarming is that they do not fit well. The first replacement battery was Very Difficult and needed to be forced against its will into the laptop. The second didn't enter smoothly but was better. Neither fit in the laptop when using the dock. Which will prove a great inconvenience. The laptop will always have to be hibernated or shutdown to be transferred to the dock which contains the DVD/CD-RW. Sigh. However, the stylus works nicely.

Her acquisition of a tablet got me working on improving the tablet experience for myself as well. I've installed software that does some handwriting recognition (hurrah!). The updated version of the Silicon Motion graphics driver for my tablet is the first that has enabled me to rotate my screen. I've learned a bit about the xsetwacom application that lets me reconfigure what the buttons are for the stylus (I now have a right-click instead of a middle click!) and rotate the stylus for when I've rotated the screen. (Which unfortunately introduces an offset over time, and should be done automatically and correctly anyway.)

I am still waiting to acquire an updated laptop myself at some point. My RAM is at its maximum of 256MB(!), the processor is a PIII at 800MHz. It has no USB 2.0 ports (so any USB devices like external hard drives are 10x slower or worse). It supports 802.11b at best (802.11g is about 5x faster, 802.11n is faster still). Except by ethernet, data moves at about 1MB/s off my computer at best. I'm often better off connecting a USB device to one of Liv's computers and transferring data there via ethernet. It's rather amusing :D It's case is deteriorating somewhat rapidly now. I'm not particulary harsh with it, either, I think.

I suppose I should start creating a list of candidates for Skedge's replacement.