The laptop that could

-
I've never heard about a "flash sale" before, but recently I saw an ad on a local retailer's website offering a cute Toshiba laptop (M50-137) for a really low price only if you buy it on December 23rd. They take 200 Euro off the list price of 1200 Euro. I thought it was making it sweet. The system was a 1.7 Ghz Pentium M, with a WXGA Ultrabrite 14" display, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, Wifi+Bluetooth, built-in SD-card reader, and a multistandard optical unit (DVD+-RW/DVD-RAM) weighting 2.4Kg.

I took the deal and I picked it up at the local store. It took them longer than the advertised delivery time but eventually I got it home. First impression was good, system was fast and quiet. Sorry, you cannot get along without accepting the Windows blue thing: You have to provide some user and location data so Windows gets happily installed. Till you do this, SuSE Linux repartitioning failed to work. After that, I successfully installed SuSE Linux 10.0 and it almost worked fully. I decided to disable Bluetooth and my Wifi LAN was working ok (the unit had a ipw2200/centrino chipset). What was not working ok was the video as it was using fdev and it refused to accept 1280x768 WXGA resolution. So the unit was running at 1024x768 and all the display was stretched to fit the panoramic display. It did not look pretty.

When running Windows and using Mplayer to watch a movie, I needed to use -aspect 1.5 to get the right display aspect. I never need to do this with other systems (maybe it's because I use 4:3 displays).

I noticed that battery time was under 3 hours of casual use. I did not like to see that it will only allow you 16 hours in "Hibernate" or 22 days in "Suspend". The system got warmer than I would like when using it off the batteries and the panoramic screen did not please me a lot. Ultrabrite technology creates good colors but uses a highly reflective coating on the display so a headlight will create some reflection. The viewing angle is also a bit critical with this display. So, after pondering all the cons and pros I decided to return the unit.

Maybe I'll be getting another 12" iBook soon. It is not lightning fast but it gives you solid 5 hours of use and it does not get that hot. It feels way more comfortable on your lap, maybe due to not having protruding parts. It all depends on what you value more.

Comments

Hiroshi Ikeda said…
A good and interesting review fellow!
Time over time I think I'm gonna move to Linux at the same time DSL comes home.
I am tired of Windows and all the restrictive politics of propietary software. Altough I use some of this software I'm searching for free ones.
Salutes my friend!!
12:20 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VFD control with Arduino using RS485 link

-
Image
Variable Frequency Drives ( VFD ) allow the control of spindles so speed can accurately be controlled and a detailed acceleration profile for the spindle and reverse rotation can all be handled. In essence a VFD is an three phase inverter for three-phase AC motor. I am using a popular (I mean cheap) Chinese VFD and though the reference manual is not great, I could see there is a built-in RS-485 port. I usually control the start, stop and speed selection using the keyboard on the unit but I thought it will be more useful if I could control everything from the same Arduino is doing our CNC table control. Some cheap RS-485 off eBay and some lines of code later, I can start, stop and change the speed from an Arduino. What a cool thing to have! Some configuration of your VFD are needed before you can use it like that.  You need to set PD163=1 (I am using address 1 in the code). PD=164=1 (for setting serial to 9600bps) and PD165=0 (for using ASCII and 8N1 character format)
Read more

How to get sinusoidal s-curve for a stepper motor

-
Image
After some experimentation, and delving a bit into the math of motion, I realized there can be a significant difference on the motion of a machine by just making small changes. A common and popular approach to smooth one axis of motion is to use a trapezoidal speed pattern, where acceleration and deceleration are uniformly accelerated movements (aka constant acceleration motion) separated by a portion happening at cruising speed. The problem comes with the fact that, while that approach is simple to understand and to code, it does contain sudden changes in the acceleration, that show as spikes on the acceleration derivative, called jerk. These sudden changes in the acceleration translate into undesired vibration in our machines. Most of that can be eliminated by selecting a motion pattern that does not contain sudden changes of acceleration. If we chose a mathematical function for our speed whose second derivative is continuous, then we reduce system vibration quite a lot. One ma
Read more

Importing OpenSCAD designs into Onshape

-
Image
After using Onshape CAD software for a while I am really fond of it. So one natural thing to do, specially once they have released the Instructor's kit is to start using it in the classroom too. But one thing I was not so sure how to do was to use old designs I made using OpenSCAD. It does not mean I am completely quitting using OpenSCAD but suddenly I can see I can do assemblies in Onshape that will look quite nice for showing and documentation purposes if only I could easily import from OpenSCAD. I am glad to report that the route OpenSCAD --> FreeCAD --> Onshape worked brilliantly. Even more when a few tricks were applied. While some people suggest to import CSG files from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD, I have had more success by directly importing SCAD files into FreeCAD. One trick that worked well for me was to get rid of $fn references, so now circles become real circles (or cylinders) in FreeCAD. If a part keeps some $fn references then your cylinders or circles wi
Read more