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I'm on a T420 for that reason. The T420 isn't a bad machine, oooold though. 2011 old.

You can cram a T420 keyboard on a T430 and get a 3rd gen Corei7. Not sure I would recommend the hack:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Classic_Keyboard_on_xx30_Series_ThinkPads

The only difference to me is that they messed up the insert key, but the esc key position is an improvement.

I think that was one of the points of the Middleton BIOS for some Thinkpad models: getting rid of the miniPci Wificard whitelist. Other points were the ability to use a Penryn on a Merom board, and to use 3Gbps SATAII instead of half speed SATAI.

Using this without problems because of the Penryn, cannot vouch for the other effects but have no reason to doubt them.

I have always used a ThinkPad that is off lease and verified. Newegg has a host of models listed between $200-$300. And the ThinkWiki will help you with the particulars if you aren't familiar with the model you get.

An interesting keyboard hack came up for the T430 : http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/...

The T420 (which I'm using heavily as a lab machine (16G RAM, 512G SSD, 1TB HDD, + empty ultrabay) has a CPU which runs a bit hot and has poor battery life. The T430 changed the keyboard layout, but better CPU, the T440 has an insanely bad touchpad design with no physical buttons. This meant for a while if you wanted a reasonable touchpad and keyboard on a Thinkpad, you had to look backwards to the T420.

Compared to other manufacturers though, the T440 and T450 at least have home/end/ins/del/pgup/pgdn and prtsc reachable without fn-key combinations, Why they put prtsc next to ctl is beyond me though, but at least they stopped screwing with the design for a while, refined the T430 design instead (grouping function keys by 4s etc.) and they didn't follow the Apple to put the power button next to backspace.

...now the T460 threw out the ins key... I think for an oversized delete and oversized escape next to all their already undersized function keys. "Improvements". Maybe they'll fix it in the T470...

LSC is a basic tool to scan for hardware malfunction on the machine. It is not critical and also does not have any third party publicity. I think that since SuperFish Lenovo has been watching his back about this subject. Specially on Thinkpads the software on Windows 10 is very limited and controlled (for the moment). Here it is a list of what I have found: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/...

In terms of laptops, it used to be my policy to stay well away from Dell. My thinkpad X61T has been going strong for o so many years, but the dell laptops from that generation were garbage: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/...

I actually found it cheaper to buy a Dell-outlet-store desktop than to build my own.

Of course that probably doesn't reflect state of affairs today. I am a little annoyed by Dell's inferior Linux offerings. If you want the best deal from Dell, you are paying a Microsoft tax :(

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/...

What exactly was stupid about my post? Take it you have never heard of ACPI Source Language or the Embedded Controller?

Seriously where should you more worried about NSA exploits1) a de-compilable and OS visible byte code that controls thermal and power management or 2) An invisible micro controller firmware that converts signals from your scan matrix laptop keyboard into P/S 2 signaling?

Seriously dude, I write firmware for a living... I know a thing or two about what it does and the state of Linux's ACPI stack.

Actually, this is one of my favorite little-known Lenovo innovations:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Ultrabay_Plus_Numeric_Keypad

A solution that should keep everyone happy!

No, it's not truly free unless it comes with exactly zero mysterious binary blobs calling home (or NSA, which may be the same thing).

If that's the criteria then its pretty much impossible for these laptops to meet it. That coreboot firmware is going to carry microcode updates for the CPU which are encrypted and signed by Intel so it would be impossible to replace them with free microcode. I bet the EC and the bluetooth and the hard disk controller are still running the original binary blobs too.

But don't tell RMS, he hasn't realized how much embedded firmware has proliferated in the modern PC compared to the 1990's when the LinuxBIOS (now coreboot) project started.

Even the old 16-bit BIOSes could have had anti-competitive restrictions bolted on, but it wouldn't have been as easy to sell.

Obviously said by someone who didn't use PCs much in the past.

Laptops were notorious for having proprietary bits in their BIOS - some won't even boot unless you put in their specific version of MS-DOS.

Hell, even these days you find laptops that complain on bootup when they don't find an "approved" hard drive .

Anyhow, it's time to move away from the crap that is BIOS - besides 16-bit issues, the MBR's had its day (it can't support >2TiB drives), and booting by loading 128kiB of code that randomly hooks the BIOS is always calling for trouble. Like how you could boot form internal disk, onboard disk controller, external disk controller, NIC, or CD, but only one of them because the BIOS ROM hooks would get overridden and strangeness ensues. At least with everything integrated the BIOS could be written without needing ROM expansions so you can boot off floppy, CD, NIC, USB and then internal disk controllers without having to enable individual ones.

Hell, a better BIOS that enumerates things properly would be a dream - having disks that initialize the same way every time in whatever OS you use so the first disk in the system would be the first disk Linux and Windows sees.

Get a Thinkpad. I just got a W530 with a 1920x1080 screen, one of the few you can find outside Apple. It has great Linux support, even down to the silly fingerprint reader. I can easily get 7 hours or so on the battery with the recommended tweaks. There's a whole wiki just for Thinkpad stuff.

It ships with Windows 7, but you never have to boot into Windows. You can blow away the whole drive, "recovery" and "boot" partitions, and never look back. It has a conventional BIOS in addition to UEFI (disabled by default; leave it that way), so you shouldn't have any issues there.

It's a tank, it's not terribly sexy like an ultrabook, but it's great if you want a desktop-fast Linux-friendly workstation laptop.

As a user of ThinkPads for nearly as long I have a TP I cannot install a miniPCI wireless upgrade into without hacking my system because it is not an approved part for my specific ThinkPad. Even a miniPCI from another ThinkPad won't always work.

This is my favorite solution, but only you have certain models of Thinkpads and you are willing to give up your optical drive.

Ah, one of those stupid Windows-only features. Sigh.

There seems to be a reverse-engineered driver for Linux but support is sketchy for the X220. I guess I'll try it and see.

Thinkpads are one of the best laptops in terms of Linux hardware support on many counts (and then of course there's http://thinkwiki.org./ They're also fantastic for getting shit done, but for many people this ain't the primary purpose of a laptop, and they want something more lightweight & less bulky.

The T and W-series ThinkPads have socketed CPUs.

And the displays can be upgraded.

And the drive is removable, so you can add Blu-Ray or whatever you'd like.

And Lenovo publishes complete manuals with step-by-step instructions detailing how to disassemble everything and how to replace pretty much any part (along with a list of the FRU numbers for said parts.)

And they let you order individual parts (or you can just get them from any number of third party suppliers.)

And replacing CRUs doesn't void the warranty.

Your turn.

The WiFi card in one of my Lenovo laptops was defective, so I ordered a replacement mini-PCI Express card off of Amazon. Card shows up, I pop it in, and BAM, BIOS reports error 1802: Unauthorized network card is plugged in - Power off and remove the miniPCI network card.

Apparently (only some?) Lenovo laptops have a whitelist of approved devices stored somewhere in the BIOS. To get around this, I had to weed out a number of dead links (thanks a lot, Rapidshare) and find a modified BOIS update that removes the whitelist. Without the whitelist, everything works perfectly.

I'd heard pretty much the same thing - that keeping lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries fully charged or fully discharging them reduces their lifespans. Some Thinkpad laptops actually have battery charge control functionality in the hardware that can be used to stop them charging the batteries fully in order to extend battery lifespan if you're using them on the mains most of the time.

Your Dell's native resolution can suck my Lenovo's 2048x1536 dick.

(Seriously, if vertical is important, get yourself a 15" 4:3 T60 (or similar) and the parts for a screen upgrade, they're not making 'em anymore. If you wait till your Inspiron dies, they're gonna be real hard to find. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_a_QXGA_display_in_a_R/T60_or_61)

I know this is slashdot, but really, Read The Fine Original Post, the one at the very top before all the comments.

For practicality reasons, an external USB keypad is less convenient than a built-in one.

I know this is slashdot, but really, you should have clicked on the link he referenced. It is not an "external USB keypad". It's a built-in tray, just like one you might use for Reading/Writing CDs/DVDs on a laptop, but instead of having a CD/DVD tray that pops out from inside your laptop, it's a numeric keypad that pops out instead.

And the only issue I see is that this solution looks great on a ten year old A31p huge beast of a laptop, but I don't know how many newer laptops these days would have the room for it and the corresponding sturdy structural support for such a huge tray. I guess, a thinner tray for the keypad could be made for newer thinner laptops, but these days I don't trust big manufacturers to implement something like this very well. It would have to be made by an independent hardware shop that was obsessed with making high quality products, before I'd even consider buying such an accessory at all.

I know this is slashdot, but really, Read The Fine Original Post, the one at the very top before all the comments.

For practicality reasons, an external USB keypad is less convenient than a built-in one.

I know this is slashdot, but really, you should have clicked on the link he referenced. It is not an "external USB keypad". It's a built-in tray, just like one you might use for Reading/Writing CDs/DVDs on a laptop, but instead of having a CD/DVD tray that pops out from inside your laptop, it's a numeric keypad that pops out instead.

And the only issue I see is that this solution looks great on a ten year old A31p huge beast of a laptop, but I don't know how many newer laptops these days would have the room for it and the corresponding sturdy structural support for such a huge tray. I guess, a thinner tray for the keypad could be made for newer thinner laptops, but these days I don't trust big manufacturers to implement something like this very well. It would have to be made by an independent hardware shop that was obsessed with making high quality products, before I'd even consider buying such an accessory at all.

The reason keypads aren't or real ThinkPads is that by including the extra 4 columns of keys, the whole keyboard and TrackPoint (or trackpad, if you're that sort of person) has to be shifted left. This means that you end up either sitting in middle relative to the screen with the hands positioned awkwardly, or having to look at the screen at an angle.

I have a T520 and while I was initially upset that it has huge speaker grilles on both sides, I actually came to appreciate this decision, though admittedly it would suck if I had to punch in numbers into a spreadsheet all day. Just get a ThinkPad and this baby

Is it possible that you are thinking of the 'IBM Ultraport'(Yup, IBM has at least two physically nonstandard USB variants...)?

One wonders if the almost-total invisibility beyond POS systems is because IBM is really nasty about the license fees(from what little I've seen, your basic semi-embedded wintel gets an impressive markup when it becomes a 'Point of Sale System', so it is conceivable that IBM has no real interest in cutting margins in that market) or whether the USB-IF got cold feet because of concerns about consumer confusion...

USB's power delivery capabilities are puny, and only fully standard in theory(y hello thar, laptop drives with 'Y'-cables, and devices that work with some ports but not others, never mind the entire genre of devices that use USB for data/tethering but use USB-shaped AC adapters pushing an amp or more, often at something other than 5volts, when they need to do some serious charging); but they are substantially more consistent than those of powered USB. I wouldn't want to be the chap in charge of choosing what mixture of standard, 5V powered, 12V powered, and 24V powered ports to put onto a motherboard's I/O plate, that's for sure... On the plus side, assuming no nastiness from IBM, the full data bus compatibility with normal USB would make it pretty simple to whip up a 'Powered USB hub' that turns 1 normal USB socket into 4 of whatever flavor your application requires.

I have an HP laptop ca. 2007. It's perfectly capable of handling pretty much any task a home user would need, and it makes justifying the cost of a replacement much more difficult.

My father still uses my old IBM Thinkpad T22 (ca 2001). It's perfectly functional for his purposes, and even plays his favorite internet radio station while he does his Quickbooks 2008 tasks. Best of all, it has a 4:3 1400x1050 screen. Can you even buy a new laptop with a 4:3 screen?

The hard drive died a year ago. He thought about upgrading to a newer laptop. But I ended up just replacing the drive for $20 or $40, and installed a fresh copy of Win2k.

***

I accidentally dropped my own ca 2001 dell laptop an inch or so to the table a few months back. It never booted again. "crap". I took the hard drive out and put it into my sister-in-laws' 2005-or-so Dell Inspiron 8600 (they gave it to me for disposal after removing the hard drive - the XP install must've become corrupted, 'cause there's nothing wrong with it). Found a power adapter on teh craigslist. The Lubuntu install from the old dell booted without a complaint on the 'new' one too. It's a little pokey, what with 512MB memory, but that's about to be fixed.

I'm also about to buy a 20-year old aluminum sports car. Drove it the other day, and there's nothing better on the road today.

I seriously suggest you try running Chrome 9, Firefox 4 or IE9 under Win7 or Ubuntu 10.04 a P2-400 with 256 to 512MB RAM.

It works very well, thank you.

I haven't tried streaming video yet though, but given how much of a resource hog h.264 is, I doubt it'll work very well. Still, I'm sure it'll do just fine with all other HTML5 features, far better than IE5 does for you Mac users thanks to Apple's planned obsolescence.

Sure, it's kind of off-topic on this discussion, but do keep in mind HTML5 is far more than a video codec or two.

I've got Ubuntu 10.10 on my Thinkpad X200 Tablet. It works pretty well, but not everything works perfectly. I've had every version of Ubuntu on it since 9.04, and some of the earlier ones actually seemed to work a little better. There are still a few kinks, though. Thankfully, sites like ThinkWiki exist to help with some of the problems.

I'm still having a few issues, though, such as the fingerprint scanner not working or when rotating the screen, the touch sensor doesn't translate its coordinates properly (so left-right becomes up-down when the screen is rotated 90 degrees). The mute button doesn't work properly either, but other than that it runs pretty well.

Good riddance to optical drives. Outside of spending a few minutes trying to get a Playstation emulator working, I haven't used one in at least a year - including an OS reinstall; I haven't used optical media on a regular basis since probably 2005. For the longest time I've been hoping someone will make an adapter which will allow me to swap my DVD drive for an additional battery, something that I haven't seen as an option since using a Thinkpad Ultrabay probably fifteen years ago. If Apple finally does this across their entire laptop line rather than just the Airs, so much the better.

Actually, just a ThinkPad X41 Tablet, but you swivel the screen, and presto, tablet. I bought it used, cheap, so it's fun.

It needs a Wacom style pen, but it's a tablet, just not touchisensitive.

And even accounting for the pen, it's not all that.

And this kludge by Dell looks equal parts flimsy and flaky. I give it a C- on sight.

Now the Lenovo S10-3t was interesting. And the U1 was very cool looking. Can I find one?

Complaining about tone is ad hominem. Address the argument:

An ad hominem is when you use personal attacks in place of argument. I certainly did address his points (the post is just above for anyone who doubts this). That I also observed he had a particularly nasty tone and showed prejudice against people for being poor and considered calling someone poor an insult, is a freebie that he gets in addition to having his arguments addressed. May I ask why you didn't feel the need to pull him up on his post which was much more of an ad hominem than mine given that he actually was using personal dislike as an argument?

You can't just whinge that the market isn't serving you.

"Whinge" is a low term used to try and dismiss other people's needs. If the market doesn't provide something we want, then yes, actually, shocking though this may seem to you, we bloody well can say so. I don't know why you would have a problem with people saying what they want and don't want from a product.

Are you willing to pay more money than the cost of an iPad for a device that is bigger, has worse battery life, runs windows and lets you manage your own synchronization?

The truth is, those devices have existed since the ThinkPad and still exist -- and yet you aren't saying you use or still use yours (never mind that the Newton was better by every metric that doesn't include running PhotoShop 3.5).

E.g., I've had one of these for almost 20 years: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:710T

What is this absurd false choice you're presenting? "If you don't like the iPad you can get one of these twenty year old lumps"? We're saying what we want to see produced, not that we'd prefer to use something decades old instead. That's just gibberish. Technology has moved on enormously even over just the last five years. We want to see that technology put to use to make something equivalent (or better) than the iPad that suits our needs. I don't know why you're trying to argue against that or how you think that are. Something as bad as an ad hominem is making a post that creates strawmen. Or strawgiants in the case of yours.

Complaining about tone is ad hominem. Address the argument:

Are you willing to pay more money than the cost of an iPad for a device that is bigger, has worse battery life, runs windows and lets you manage your own synchronization?

You can't just whinge that the market isn't serving you.

The truth is, those devices have existed since the ThinkPad and still exist -- and yet you aren't saying you use or still use yours (never mind that the Newton was better by every metric that doesn't include running PhotoShop 3.5).

E.g., I've had one of these for almost 20 years: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:710T

What do you mean "that's why SpeedStep is used, against normal CPU throttling"? SpeedStep is CPU throttling; but on top of that C-states are also highly effective, or at least Thinkpad Wiki thinks so, and I see no reason to disbelieve them...

I have a X31 (see http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X31 ) and I am thinking about upgrading to a X100e, X200, X201/X210 -- but I am not sure how my trusty X31 compares to current low-end hardware.

Hard requirements:

* At _least_ 3-4 hours of run time with normal workload (KDE4, konsole, half a dozen ssh sessions, no flash)
* TrackPoint - I hate touchpads
* sturdy - those things are there to be used, not pampered. I don't abuse them needlessly, but I will not go out of my way to make sure the purty purty thing does not get a scratch, either.

It's not as far fetched as you think.
Intel has been developing a "manageability engine" that lives in the ICH and MCH. Now while this is on the up and up, the tech is obviously there.
http://www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/intel-amt/
-nB

Some of the older hardware have displays that compare favorably with the the stuff that is sold nowadays on cheap laptops. I'm talking LCD quality, as in viewing angle, etc. and not necessarily LCD resolution, nor the ability of the GPU to render images. Some older laptops also have great keyboards, say, take any old Thinkpad. Lastly, some of the older hardware also have unique styling like the 486 Thinkpad 701C (the famous Butterfly, see ThinkWiki's page http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:701CS ) Thus for certain things (e.g. if you can offload heavy processing to another machine) running an old laptop maybe a reasonably good experience.

The single best laptop ever made.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2864

Pros:

• IPS display gives you nearly 180 degrees viewing angle -- no more of the annoying color shifts or inversion when looking at the screen off-axis
• Native 1600x1200 resolution in a 15" form-factor. Wide-screen displays are teh suck for coding. The T60p's "standard" display ratio and absolutely insane resolution means you can fit dozens of lines of code per page. Combine this with the beautiful IPS technology, and you have tiny-ass, legible fonts. A godsend for coding.
• 15" form factor-- pretty-much the best trade-off for "I need to read lots of code" and "I don't want to lug around a lot of weight." Additionally, the T60p is (like most ThinkPads) all modular. So you can leave out the optical drive and put in another battery if you like (giving you 7+ hours of battery life).
• ThinkPads are the greatest Linux-friendly laptops in the world.
• The processor/RAM combination is perfectly adequate (i.e., not some underpowered piece of shit)

The only drawback to the T60p is that they are discontinued, and Lenovo no longer carries the IPS LCD. Why not? Because the suppliers realized they could make more money using the technology to build TVs than replacement screens for laptops. More information from a Lenovo insider. And if the suppliers aren't making them, Lenovo can't sell them. Simple as that. You can still find them (rarely) on eBay, but they are some of the most price-drop-resilient laptops ever made.

Way to miss the point.

Please clarify the point, then.

Anyway, windows 7 = "almost" as fast as XP

In UI responsiveness, perhaps - assuming adequate specs to run both operating systems. I have a feeling Win7 will be horribly slow if you actually got it to run on a P3 with 256MB of RAM.

XP = not fast enough for netbooks and definitely not the OLPC

OLPC 1.5 has a 1.0ghz C7-M, I thought? That's quite a bit beefier than the laptops XP originally shipped on. And if I read the specs correctly, 1GB of RAM too?

XP is faster than Ubuntu, and people try to run that on their netbooks. Seems to me both are decently suited to the task. You could also strip XP down with a tool like nLite. I did that for a relative that had an old Thinkpad 390e, which turned it into a speed demon. Booted in about 30-35 seconds, started Firefox 2 in about 12, and OpenOffice 2.x in ~15. Warm starts were only a second or two. Hibernation only took ~20 seconds from power-on to desktop.

To compare, I have Ubuntu installed on a 1.2ghz Via Eden computer, and it's nowhere near that fast. Booting takes a long time, and OpenOffice takes forever to start up. Firefox is faster, at just 8 seconds, but Firefox is also newer, so that's not a fully valid comparison. Memory usage at boot is 3x higher, at just over 130MB.

However, I'm not a linux guru, and I haven't finished tweaking Ubuntu yet. To give it a fair shake, I need to be able to claim equal expertise at Ubuntu modding as I have with XP modding.

Also have to consider the real cost of windows is, MS ULTRA CHEAP OMG WINDOWZ LIZENZES are actually meant to be paid for real later...

Windows isn't suitable for the OLPC. Microsoft has very corporate motivations rather than charitable ones. The main reason it isn't suitable isn't cost, but rather how quickly they drop support.

Microsoft is unwilling to customize XP for such a device, because they'd have to support it - and yet they want XP on it, because it's great marketing.

As far as I'm concerned the OLPC project should stay the hell away from Microsoft - but XP still makes a fine choice for netbooks, especially for someone willing to dig in and mod it a bit. :)

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop

Use powertop to analyze power consumption.. and try the various things specified on the following site:

  http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption/

This page suggests that ATI chips can be made to support at least some powersaving measures under linux. It has been several years since I've had an ATI based laptop, so I can't personally vouch for this.

Touchpad in Thinkpads is also from Synaptic... http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/UltraNav

Anyway, I have to wonder to what degree greater usage of touchpads is simply because of smaller, now, inertia of people against this change - after all, everybody now has a laptop, usually with touchpad, so "it must be good"; in other words there might be social factor at play here. Trackpoint suffers mostly from this IMHO (since it's not very common, it ends up beeing "this weird thing on this one laptop").

And now, with ultraportables readily (cheaply) available, carrying a mouse has become somewhat bigger burden than with "standard" 15' laptop.

I'm not denying of course that touchpads have become better, it's just that, IMHO, there's this one pointing device that doesn't get given a chance, that is significantly closer to mouse (really, try UT or D2 with a touchpad ;p )...ESPECIALLY in context of ultraportables, where touchpads almost end up beeing letter-stamp sized.

I have a t61. Type 7658-CTO to be specific. It works flawlessly under ubuntu. It suspends every time, it comes back every time. Wireless works, usb works, sound works, brightness keys work, etc, etc , etc.

Check out thinkwiki if you havent already. They'll tell you the little tweaks that are needed now and then to make things perfect.

Actually I've gotten the fingerprint reader to work on my T60 in Ubuntu, even from the command line. My guess is that it wouldn't be too terrible to get it working on this machine either...

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader_with_ThinkFinger

I can confirm that the issue does occur on a Debian lenny (testing) laptop (Packard Bell BG45-U-300) with minimal packages installed.

This is easily fixed, however:
apt-get install acpi-support

I don't know how etch (the stable version) is affected, and/or whether the fix has been applied in updates to acpi-support, but it would be worth checking, since there are several pages documenting how to fix the issue when installing Debian etch on a laptop (e.g. here).

I had the same kind of grey lined textured look on a thinkpad and came up with a test image that made the issue more obvious. I was never able to get satisfaction.

Look at the bottom of this page:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Talk:Intel_Graphics_Media_Accelerator_950

Same virtual screen ('Virtual 2800 1050' in xorg.conf), in /etc/kde3/kdm/Xsetup :
xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode 1280x1024
xrandr --output VGA-0 --right-of LVDS

I had seen similar advice before but assumed since my monitors were different resolutions it wouldn't work, but it works fine (except that suddenly my title and desktop fonts are twice as large). Cool.

ThinkWiki has a good writeup of the steps to automate this, and tie it in to your function keys:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2

I have just acquired a hp tc1100 tablet and am happily using ubuntu on it. It does require a fair bit of configuration though.

1) ubuntu now comes with xorg auto configuration, you need to undo that and write a custom xorg.conf to include tablet support (plenty of guides out there)

2) you need to modify /etc/gdm/Init/Default to launch an on screen keyboard (OSK) so you can log in and /etc/gdm/PreLogin/Default to kill the OSK after logging in if you want to use another one for normal text entry. Also, you need to turn off the fancy login screen and use the plain one

3) get cellwriter and train it, it's good and comes with an integrated OSK

4) configure your drivers to support RandR and use the script here http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Wacom_Serial_Tablet_PC_Stylus to enable rotation between portrait and landscape mode

5) if you are using intrepid and have nvidia hardware, nvidia binary blob drivers will not work yet (nvidia has not updated for new xorg yet)

6) xournal is easily comparable to windows journal but requires a bit of fiddling to get the preferences just right. Also, it has drawing problems if you set your zoom level to anything BELOW fit to width

7) I use opera for browsing as the sidepane menu is so versatile. Also, it supports drag scrolling by setting the about:config options "scroll is drag"

8) evince unfortunately only supports drag scrolling using the middle mouse button and does not offer any way of configuring that. (bugs have been submitted though)

Non-functional fingerprint reader

Non-functional microphone array

Have you tried http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader? I am not really sure what to do about the mic array... I have no experience with more than 2 channels in Linux because I only need stereo. Have you asked for help in the Ubuntu forums? You might as well be watching a movie or something with a media player that does not support multiple channels. Is not PulseAudio able to mix/change channels on-the-fly?

Would that be the rdiff frontend that freezes kinit on KDE's startup if a backup is scheduled. I love not being able to launch applications for 30 minutes while a backup is running (yes I have experienced this).

Have you tried grsync? That is rsync with a GUI that is able to configure rsync as well. Screenshot from the official website: http://www.opbyte.it/grsync/screenshot.html

Also, not viable by your own reasoning, because I should read Linux as Gnome.

No that is just what my dad thinks. Gnome will be the only thing my dad sees when he uses Linux. Therefore he thinks that Gnome (which could also be ran on *BSD) is Linux.

Sure, and I can have a virtual printer, just like in Linux that exports PDFs.

I am not reffering to that. You can actually import and export PDF files in OpenOffice.org3 and not by hitting the print button and selecting something like ÂPrint as PDF to fileÂ.

And you just listed the fact that your Dad uses a whole bunch of windows programs in Linux, which means MS isn't going away.

My dad works in a hospital and there they have Windows Mobile PDAs (there are alternatives). He requires Office 2003 because they use paid-for exotic non-MS developed plugins (that also do not work with MS Office 2007) that they require for certain files he uses. Doom3 and Quake4 are not Windows programs (cross platform)! He also uses MS Exchange at work (which is, together with Windows Mobile, not a program and not run on his Linux laptop) which he needs to be compatible with, but there are Exchange alternatives for Linux.

Also, if you Dad is dual booting, clearly some need isn't being fulfilled.

He has a dual boot but is not dual-booting so to speak. He just has it in case he needs to install something that is XP only (which never happened). It's also a sence of safety that he can go back into XP anytime he wants (he is new to Linux remember?)

The deficiencies of Gnome in regards to the technologically unimpaired have been well documented. Gtk+ tabs are my favorite example.

My dad knows how tabs work in Windows and IE7, so no problem here.

Wait, Amarok2 was released. Intruiging...

It's cross platform, but still in beta fase. I have it installed on my KDE4 box and have yet to encounter any bugs.

Sorry, [ubuntu 8.10]'s not released yet. XP is up to the task and it was released what, almost 8 years ago?

Yes XP will do everything, including letting you pull out your hairs for not doing what you ask it to do (virus here, malware there). After 6 months you can't play games at reasonable frame rates anymore (Dad: "Vince, Quake4 is stuttering. It didn't happen when the laptop was new.")

Sure, we can go back and forth about what deficiencies are, but ultimately, you will defend Linux and I will be amused, because I used to be the same way, hell, I even contributed a few patches, but in the end, it wasn't worth it for me.

I am not defending it because I want to win. I am also not a Linux fanboy (I would love to be able to use FreeBSD instead). I just have the nasty habit to try to correct everything that I think is incorrect. I am helpful and creative, but can also be a pain in the ass sometimes because of that ;)

Check out the guides at http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption, they are of course mostly ThinkPad-specific, but most of it works just as fine for other centrino-based laptops. If I remember correctly it's about unloading the USB1.1 modules (unless you need them!) and telling the UBS2.0 module to power down the ports if they're idling.

You do realize that that has to do with incompatibilities with a SATA->PATA bus and not TPM, right? The BIOS warns when there is a firmware on the hard drive that is "incompatible" with the chipset.

I assume that you're talking about this issue. You could also be complaining about your BIOS reporting that your hard drive doesn't support active protect. Neither of these issues has a thing to do with TPM.

You do realize that that has to do with incompatibilities with a SATA->PATA bus and not TPM, right? The BIOS warns when there is a firmware on the hard drive that is "incompatible" with the chipset.

I assume that you're talking about this issue. You could also be complaining about your BIOS reporting that your hard drive doesn't support active protect. Neither of these issues has a thing to do with TPM.