The UPS Man Came

So I ordered my T43, customized, last Thursday, I was told it'd take around 4 weeks to ship, will its 8 days later and I've got the laptop in hand! Even though I didn't pay for the 2 day ship, they shipped it Express and it arrived (from Hong Kong) in 2 days, the UPS man came today around 9am. Maybe I'll do a review once I'm settled in.

 

Congrats.

First impressions?

 

I love it. My girlfriend has a T42 15" so this wasnt a big suprise. When I first turned on the machine, the fan was load, but that's the only time I've heard the fan. Its the perfect size (14.1" screen), thickness, sturdiness. I like the weight, lighter would seem more fragile. Compared to my desktop Sony LCD, the colors aren't as vibrant, but its still very good. Very clear. I'm suprised that the 1400x1050 is completely usable. Doesn't seem too small because the display is so crisp. It gets a little warm, but not as hot as a lot of other notebooks I've used. The wireless has amazing reception, I'm in an apartment building surrounded by other apartment buildings and the list of wireless connections is pretty long, but I have a wireless router, so just using mine. I love the pointing stick, its so much easier and less stressful than touchpads. Once I went through the settings and got it configured, I actually like the IBM software (it drives me nuts on my girlfriends because she never configured it properly). I kinda wish 10GB wasn't taken up by the recovery partition (only got 70gb of an 80gb hard drive), but eh. Its speedy, I got a 2.0ghz processor, 768MB ram (came with an extra 512MB free as a promotion) I'll prolly buy another 1GB stick soon. Also need to buy a good notebook sleeve, prolly a Tom Bihn Soft Cell.

 

Hey, that's really neat getting that T43 that fast. I ordered mine yesterday and was told it could be less than two weeks. Then today I checked order status and it said "backordered." Bummer.

Anyway, I'm glad for you and will look forward to more of your impressions as you become more familiar with it. Enjoy!

Larry

 

The 14" is the perfect size to me. I wish they offered FlexView on 14", I may have gotten in.

 

What has to be configured, other than wireless? The T43 will be my first notebook, though I have used my son-in-law's some.

Larry

 

Well i've only used her notebook on serveral occasions. She's a bit flighty and usually will ignore an inconvenience so she can concentrate on something else more engaging, although she is capable of fixing the problem herself. The last time I got to it, it was infected with a few dozen viruses, several hundred spyware apps, etc. After about 36 hours (in a 48 hour time period) of attempting to salvage the OS, I had to reformat her system.
Aside from the viruses she had some strange settings, not sure how they got to the way they were. When her laptop was unplugged, it would override whatever brightness you set it to and end up flickering brightness levels. Neither of us at the time understood the IBM Access Connections, which is actually really useful if you use it right, to make a profile for your connections at different locations. She had nestumbler, and IBM's wireless app, and the built in windows wireless app all running and it was confusing and a little conflictory. On my system I don't have netstumbler (the reception is exceptionally good enough that I don't need it) and I have the windows wireless manager hidden when connected. I don't rememer what she had it set at, but I've enabled IBM's message center but only for updates and drivers. However because of the huge amount of IBM apps in the system tray, I decided I don't need it running on startup. I got rid of all the Sonic software for burning because I rarely burn stuff and usually just use Nero. I replaced Norton Antivirus with Norton Internet Security, but thats because I had the license.
If I think of anything else, I'll post again.

 

Thanks for the info. Interesting.