Brief Report: IBM/Lenovo z60t notebook with FreeBSD

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Vladimir Egorin wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 11:36:28AM +0000, Robert Watson wrote:
> 	>
> 	> Last week, I ordered byself a new notebook -- for reasons of price, stock,
> 	> features, etc, I went with the Lenovo z60t 2511.  This is IBM part number
> 	> UM3EJUK, and comes with a 14" display (1280x768 widescreen), 1.86GHz
> 	> Pentium M, 512M of memory, and a 60GB hard disk.  It also has hardware
> 	> fingerprint scanner, bluetooth, SD card reader, broadcom gig-e, firewire,
> 	> atheros 802.11 chipset, and various other neat things.  Obviously, I
> 	> installed FreeBSD on it.  Throughout, I found the
> 	> http://www.thinkwiki.org/ site useful.
>
> how good is the build quality of the laptop?

The software bundling is terrible -- it seemed like it hadn't even been 
tested.  When I first booted the notebook, it decided to spend several minutes 
converting from FAT to NTFS.  Maybe this is a standard thing, but it strikes 
me as silly to ship with one file system only to have to wait for it to 
convert when the notebook is first used (!).  After that XP popped up lots of 
dialog boxes about various things, got confused registering fingerprints for 
users as it claimed they didn't have accounts, and soon.

However, since I plan to use almost the notebook almost entirely with FreeBSD, 
this is all pretty much ignorable. :-)  The hardware in the machine seems 
solid -- the case is sturdy, there's not undue flexing of the case (a common 
problem for Dells, for example).  As to how well it lasts under real-world 
stress, I'll let you know after a month of travelling around India in January 
:-).

Robert N M Watson