The new T61

Got a heck of a deal on my new T61. Core2duo, 4GB, bluetooth, 100GB 7200 RPM drive, 15″ wide screen, DVD+-RW. All for $1800. Gotta love ebay. Anywhoo, my new machine has Vista Business on it. Being the Linux fan that I am, I am skeptical of it. I want to like it. Its got a pretty interface. Very pretty. Beryl and Compiz have a couple of things to learn from Vista (i.e. stability).

So, like most new Windows machines, this one comes loaded with “trial” software. The Mac/PC commercials are so spot on about it. This thing, fresh out of the wrapper has 67 out of 100 GB available. Granted, about 6.5 GB of that is for the restore partition, but still. We’re talking trial versions of Office 2007, Norton Antivirus, SQL Server….blah blah blah. It does have a tool called Diskkeeper, which is basically a fancy GUI for an automated defragmenter – something I used to do with a batch file and scheduled tasks. For those of you not familiar with Linux – there is no such thing as a defragmenter – Linux is smart enough to managed the file system during down time to keep it running optimally. With NTFS or FAT32 you have to schedule defragmentation often or end up with an unbearably slow computer.

I’m going to try this thing for a couple of weeks and see how it goes. My preference is to actually wipe the whole drive (restore partition included) and start new with either Ubuntu or Suse and run Windows in VMWare for those apps I have to have that only run under windows.

But I must say Vista is pretty. So is the 15 inch display on this thing.