racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

My first notebook computer was a Thinkpad, and so reading this post on Yugatech made me wax nostalgic. It’s not that Lenovo hasn’t been releasing Thinkpads since it acquired the brand from IBM. But what I find interesting are the form factor and price of the latest Edge and x100e series.

Yugatech cites the x100e to have the following specs:

AMD Athlon Neo single and dual core processors or a Turion dual core. It comes in an 11.6″ form factor, a multi-touch trackpad. Aside from black, it’s also available in color red. WiFi 802.11n is standard but Bluetooth and 3G is optional.

The retail price of PhP 28,990 is particularly attractive, I think. Thinkpads used to be quite expensive (think PhP 100,000 plus expensive). I guess with the popularity of smaller, inexpensive computers, they need to compete. Thinkpads are, after all, geared toward the business market rather than the consumer market. Maybe that’s why I’m so attracted to it.

From the Apple website, something new for Apple fanboys and gadget geeks to drool about.

The new MacBook features a glass screen, a glass multi-touch trackpad and a discrete NVIDIA graphics adaptor, and LED backlighting among other new features. And its shell is now aluminum, much like the MacBook Pro!

The new MacBook Pro, meanwhile, has similar upgrades, and is, of course more powerful. And Apple has highlighted that their new design, packaging, and production and shipping processes are more environmentally-friendly.

I was hoping they’d come up with ultraportables, or at least something in the leagues of the old 12” PowerBooks. but sadly I don’t think that’s the case, at least anytime soon.

You can check out the video of their new releases.

I made a few calls to HP Support, and I was able to solve the heating and battery life issue on my new Presario B1256TU. It turns out that a resetting of the BIOS to defaults would solve things. Now SpeedStep works even at first power-up (without needing to wake up from sleep first).

Next up: making some modifications to the BIOS, to see if things work well even with BIOS changes. I also need to see if disabling the onboard LAN from the BIOS would help extend battery life.