Michael Levitt's Love of Laptop Computers

Michael Levitt's Love of Laptop Computers (May 2004)

I fell in love with my first Apple PowerBook 170 (it still runs after 12 years) and then in 1994 had my life dramatically changed with my first Linux laptop (A NEC Versa with an 800 x 640 screen).

After using an Apple PowerBook 5300 (which was fortunately stolen), an Apple PowerBook, a NEC Versa 6030H Laptop, a Dell Inspiron 3700, a Dell Latitude 600C and an IBM Thinkpad T30 I now have an IBM Thinkpad T40. The T40 is pretty loaded with a 1400 x 1050 screen, an 80 Gb main hard-drive and a 60 Gb secondary drive, 1 Gbyte memory, etc. all in a slim package weighing about 5 pounds.

When I first got the T40 in June 2003, getting Linux to run was a serious pain and I cannot thank Fabrice Bellet enough for his T40 Linux page. The T40 is still a wonderful machine after almost a year. In fact I like my laptop screen and keyboard so much that I use VNC to open a window to my Windows XP desktop so that I can run Linux and Windows together and not have to get up from my favorite arm chair. I use a large scrolling desktop supported by the FVWM desktop manager (one of the oldest but I still like it best). I also run a local version of Windows 98 under Win4Lin (better than VMWARE as it uses the native Linux file system and is very happy running several big applications in 130 Mb). I still use text-to-speech all the time and prefer TextAloudMP3 with the high-quality AT & T voices. In Linux (RedHat 9), the T40 happily switches between different networks (wired and wireless) and sleeps (and wakes) flawlessly.