My new ThinkPad T500 – Rock solid

ThinkPad T500 @ my desk

My Debian developer friend Recai Oktaş loved it. My statistician friend Sinan said next time he buys a laptop he’d buy a ThinkPad again. My big hacker friend Can Burak just bought one and liked it. My friend at http://www.aklahizmet.com heavily used it for his business.

Heck, even NASA used some of these.

So now, I have my ThinkPad T500 finally. After using a a heavyweight Lenovo 3000 N100 for about a year this brand new piece of equipment is lighter and performing much better.

Here are some photos and specs:

– INTEL Core2 DUO CPU P8700 @ 2.53 Ghz
– 4 GB RAM
– 250 GB SATA HDD
– Li Ion battery (giving me about 6 hours)
– Integrated keyboard light! (check photos below)

Running Ubuntu 9.04 in VirtualBox

Above is a screenshot, running Ubuntu 9.04 inside a VirtualBox virtual machine. The performance is very good, I forget that I’m in a guest operating system 🙂 Installation was a breeze, too. Thanks to Sun Microsystems for a polished product.

Along with the integrated camere ThinkPad T500 has a nice integrated keyboard light at the top of its screen. What does that mean and is it useful? Let’s check it out. Here’s the laptop in a dark room with the integrated keyboard light turned off:

ThinkPad T500 with keyboard light off

Now, lets turn on the keyboard light with a key combination (Fn + PgUp):

ThinkPad T500 keyboard light at the top of the sreen

See that it is turned on by looking at the OSD (On Screen Display):

ThinkPad T500 OSD showing that keyboard light is on

And here is the net effect on the ThinkPad keyboard in a dark, dark room:

ThinkPad T500 with integrated keyboard light turned on

I think the difference is really visible.

Here the same machine photographed on a sunny day with a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse attached:

ThinkPad T500

So now, it is time to have some fun:

Required reading for ThinkPad :-p