As many of you have read I more or less despise my work-issued laptops mostly because I forced to run a horrendous excuse of an operating system, XP, while enjoying technology that can only be described as "more inspired" while at home (OS X and Linux (and BSD for the record)).
But what about the lesser machines? Can there be a "king of crap"? I think so. Here is what I like and dislike about my two work-issued laptops:
T-42: The Likes: IBM built a small LED light into the lid of the laptop that could illuminate the keyboard and other buttons at night. It sounds like a cheap excuse for a back-lit keyboard but it was somehow more than that. I just loved that little night light. I am on-call quite a bit for work and it was nice to leave that little light on and if I was called to do something there was my little T-42, sitting awaiting me in a warm glow of light on the table. It was a nice touch that was more than the sum of the parts. Very nice.
The T42 had built-in 802.11b/g which was nice. Draft N did not exist so I can't fault it there. 802.11a would have been nice to have, though. The optical drive was DVD+RW and that was acceptable as Blu-Ray was so new it was not expected to have been supported. The built-in screen was acceptable, but nothing to write home about in today's standards. The keyboard was beautiful, nearly as good as my MacBook Pro. It was clear someone put a lot of thought into that keyboard, how it felt, the placement of the keys and how the mouse worked. Kudos for that.
The bad? Not a lot. Even the battery was still going strong after nearly four years of daily use. All in all it was a great laptop. Even the monitor port could be used to extend the desktop (not just mirroring). Nice. The only thing missing was the nine pin serial cable.
The Dell: The good: Intel Core 2 Duo processor and the ability to install a lot of RAM (that XP can't use past 3.5 gigs so what's the difference?) The Dell also has a nine pin serial port which is more handy than you can imagine if you work with Cisco routers every single day. Oh, what's that? Just get a USB to serial converter? They don't always map key strokes correcltly and it's one more thing you can't forget. A nine pin serial cable comes with every Cisco product that needs one. If you work with Cisco gear as often as I do it's a huge plus.
The bad. The keyboard on this laptop sucks. The mouse is far worse. There is no back-lit keyboard or LED light. It's flimsy, and it feels cheap. Howso? Resting your palms on the case below the keyboard you can feel the plasic case "flex" and that just screams "cheap". Could be beacuse I so used to the nice, cool, metal case of my Mac. Probably is in fact. Heck, if I had never had a Mac I wouldn't know about better and could further debate the merits of Dell vs. Thinkpad. But that's all for naught. Why?
My Mac is a superior machine to both. I want to make a VMware image of my work laptop and put it on my Mac to use under virtualization and probably will very soon. I won't be able to use that machine at work but I could "deploy" the work laptop image anytime I liked when using the Mac. In fact I think I'll do that after this week (I'm oncall this week so it's best not to screw with the only interface you have to the corporate network while you are required to provide 24x7 support).
And that's that.
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