I've never seen a need to run on the bleeding edge of technology. I don't even know what it's like to own a brand new computer of the current generation because the last time I experienced the current generation as it was happening, it didn't stay fresh for long and this was in 1995.
Maybe I'm an elitist of sorts? That's entirely possible. It was only a year ago that Doom was still my favorite game and that was made in 1993 or something. As of last week, my new favorite is Half Life 2, which is a decade newer. Doom is a distant memory as it should be.
Back to hardware, it was in 1997 when I received my first taste of Windows 95 that I realized multimedia was going to be a big thing for computers. Videos under Windows 3.1 were just plain ridiculous, even on my family's Pentium 60 PC. When I ran the Goodtimes demo video under Windows 95 for the first time, I was absolutely floored to see it running at better than VHS quality with stereo sound--on a 486 SX 33.
Two years later, I found out about MP3 and started ripping and encoding my own tracks. My 2 gig hard drive was no longer enough. I wouldn't reach the point of "enough space" until 2005 when I built a 750GB RAID5 array. It never filled up and the disks are due for replacement.
As for CPU power, I happened upon a wonderful gem back in 2001. This was my first taste of Dual CPUs. Granted, I had built the system a year before, but I was running a single CPU OS on it so half the power of the rig was going to waste. While each CPU was only running at 550MHz, I could still multitask like crazy, using an entire CPU to decode video while another was used for PhotoShop or whatever.
I've always tended more toward portable computing than deskbound computing so most desktop technology is of little interest to me. It was the advent of multicore CPUs in mobile systems that caught my attention. When they became mainstream, I set my countdown. I figured it would be three years before I could get ahold of an off-lease system that matched what I wanted. I had one in two.
So yeah, the system I have now is my personal Good Enough.
I've had it almost two weeks and haven't talked about it here yet so here goes.
Toshiba Tecra M7
While I could run down the spec sheet list and call it a day, I'm not going to do that. I'd rather talk about why each spec is important for me.
Core 2 Duo T7200 - The part number means shit to most people. This requires a bit more explanation than the later stuff so I'll just dive right in. The Tecra M7 was originally released with Core Duo CPUs. These were good, but finding one with the Core 2 Duo meant it was about a year newer as I was getting the refreshed edition of the Tecra M7 so it was like getting something for nothing, but that was only the start of it.
Compared to the Core Duo, the Core 2 Duo is 20% faster at the same clock speed and includes 64-bit support. While I may never use the 64-bit stuff, it's nice to have around. That 20% thing is important, though, beyond another case of getting something for nothing.
Getting into the numbers, the T7200 is a 2.0GHz chip. That's as far as most people go in checking the numbers. The Core Duo of the same speed is the T2500. Other than the differences I discussed above, there's another trick--twice as much L2 cache memory. While the Core Duo carried 2MB of L2, the T7200 carries 4MB. More L2 cache is never a bad thing, especially when it's being shared between two cores. Something for nothing again.
Another something for nothing came along in unexpected form when I found that the CPU would undervolt very well, maintaining perfect operation down to 1.0V at full speed, down .16V from stock. While it doesn't help my battery that much, it keeps heat down and that's always good.
That's basically it for the CPU side of things. Now for the other stuff.
When I started looking for an upgrade, I knew I wanted a convertible notebook/tablet with a good 3D accelerator. That narrowed the field a lot since most tablets use integrated graphics. I had looked at the Tecra M4 model, but there were two vastly different GPUs found in those and getting the sellers to differentiate was like pulling teeth. Even the high-performance one was a sneaky bastard, claiming to be a 6600 while it was clocked so far down from stock as to necessitate a dedicated TE (Toshiba Edition) trim level.
The Tecra M7 was the most recent tablet available from Toshiba so I looked into it. It had two different video options as well, but they were real easy to spot since one was integrated while the other was a dedicated Nvidia 128MB Quadro solution based on the GeForce 7300. I hoped it would overclock and it did, by 50% on the core and 25% on the memory. While it wasn't enough to push it to mid-range performance, it was a decent boost, allowing me 2024 3DMarks in 3DMark 2005 and 10310 3DMarks in 3DMark2001SE.
So why dedicated 3D graphics? Because I'm never giving up my dream of making a video game, that's why. I need a 3D chip with enough power to allow me to design stuff. While I may not play many games, I design stuff.
The display was important. The panel in my Tecra M2 was of the variety I can barely stand. When a black screen doesn't look black and starts to go light grey at the bottom, that's a bad sign. The Dell C840 I tricked out does not suffer from this, but IPS panels are hard to come by in a laptop. The happy medium? A panel like the one in my Alienware M9700. I don't know what it is about that thing, but it looks good. Fortunately, the panel in the M7 looks the same other than having the pen surface in front of it. It's more than good enough for my needs.
CardBus versus ExpressCard - The M7 has a CardBus slot while other systems based on PCI Express use the ExpressCard interface. This is fortunate because I have use for CardBus still while I don't really have use for ExpressCard. I need to be able to read CompactFlash cards, for one.
Speaking of card readers, the one on the M7 is great. Where my M2 had an SD slot, the M7 will accept SD, XD and Memory Stick. The MS feature is important since that's what my digital camera takes.
What else? The system has a metal case, which I absolutely must have, a great keyboard and a SATA hard disk. SATA is important since the PATA drives are dwindling in number and won't be available soon (I'm talking about five years from now).
I was looking for a system I could work to death like I did my old T1850 that was made in 1992, bought by me in 1997 and only put out to pasture when the greyscale display became too big of a handicap. Well, that and the lack of a sound chip... and networking... and expansion card slots. This one has no such limitations and it's a lot faster than the T1850. How much faster? Well, the T1850 was tested with Norton Sysinfo under DOS back in the day and scored 16.6. I seem to recall a score of 1 was the speed of an 8086 machine or something like that. After the CPU upgrade to a 486slc25, the system scored something like a 42.
How do we compare that to a modern system? You run the freaking program. A little bit of abandonware searching yielded a copy of Norton Utilities 8 for DOS. While I do have a legal copy somewhere, this was faster for me. A bit of USB floppy disk magic later, this was the result:
Yes, that says 5039. The Tecra M7 is 5039 times as fast as the base system. Notice at the bottom how the frequency isn't even showing up correctly. Even with this CPU throttled all the way back, it's still off that scale at 1GHz. Even more remarkable, this is all on one core. The second core isn't even visible under DOS. If it were, that's a score over 10,000.
I swear I heard guffaws of mechanical laughter when the system finished booting from that floppy, which took as long as it takes the system to start Vista from the hard disk if that tells you anything.
This is most definitely my "Good Enough" point and I'm sure I'll stick with it until the hinge on the M7 breaks and I can't find a replacement. That's the only weak point I can see.
Using machines way beyond two or even three lifetimes (lifetime for a laptop = lease term, which is standardized to three years) requires a bit more attention to detail than the usual approach of buying new. I've already discussed some of that within my search for the ideal system, but it's time to lay it all bare here.
Q: What kind of system has the best chance of lasting ten years?
A: I'll tell you with a hyphen list of stuff to look for.
- Metal case
Plastic, whether glass-reinforced or otherwise, just sucks for longevity. I've done extensive epoxy work on a Compaq LTE/286, Toshiba T1800/T1850, Toshiba 300CT/320CT and a few others. Plastic is fine for a couple of years until the brass inserts your case screws grab onto start pulling out of the holes. The only exception I've seen for the plastic casing rule involves Lenovo and the Roll Cage used for the Thinkpads. Those have metal in all the right places.
- Strong Hinges
Nothing defeats the purpose of a laptop faster than a display that won't stay where you put it. If you open your display, start typing and the display rotates further back with each keystroke, you've got a problem. From another angle, there are also those systems which have the strong hinges, but lack the casing to back them up. One such system was the Toshiba Portege 300 series, which required the hinge screws be tightened on a regular basis to avoid starting a crack in the mounts that would quickly lead to the hinge on the left side completely breaking away. You can't have strong hinges without a strong case. You need metal. Granted, some systems with plastic casing still use a cast Magnesium alloy piece for the hinge mounts.
- Sturdy motherboard mounting
Here's another one the goes hand-in-hand with a metal case. If you've got a metal case, you don't have to worry about your motherboard flexing. Nobody picks their laptop up the perfect way every time. If you can't hold it by one corner without damaging it over time, it's not designed for human beings. I'm talking to Fujitsu, for one. I ended up with a pair of S7010D systems with the same problem, which a search showed was caused by picking the system up with one hand at the left corner. There's no way in hell this should matter for a sub-4lb system so why did it? Plastic case. The case screws were even the kind you see in a kid's toy. What? They didn't have money for the brass inserts?
- Aftermarket batteries
Unless the battery pack in your machine is being used in a lot of other machines, you're not likely to find a replacement when you need it. Even the manufacturer is unlikely to be making batteries for your system five years after it was introduced. Lithium Ion batteries start dying the moment they're born, whether you use them or not. After three years, your battery pack is unlikely to be working at all. I see this with my Alienware from 2006. The battery pack in that will give a charge life of twenty minutes. It was never really meant for unplugged use, made perfectly clear by the flashing orange power switch LED when unplugged. This is to be expected for a system that was designed for a purpose that drains the entire pack in less than an hour when used at full potential.
You can't get an aftermarket pack for the Alienware system. Why? Because it's really an Arima W830 that was customized and sold by a few boutique vendors like Alienware for $4000 each in numbers that probably total 100,000 or so, far short of the millions that would cause a third-party battery maker take notice.
If you want to see a good example of a battery pack that just wouldn't die, look at the PA2487U from Toshiba. The 1996 vintage 430CDT I bought back in 1999 for $500 used this model of pack and when I bought a 2805-S603 at the ass-end of 2001, it used the same pack in updated form. I don't think that was the last system to use it, either.
- Drive interface that won't go obsolete for a long time
My T1850 used a 120MB 2.5" IDE hard disk that was something like 19mm thick. While IDE lasted for a long time (even the 2005 Tecra M2 used it), the T1850 was crippled by the fact it couldn't take a drive other than that 120MB drive.
While we have no such limitations today unless you count the 128GB/137BB limitation thing, the IDE interface itself is marked for extinction. SATA is the new standard and it's mainstream. If you want to find hard disk storage in the future, go for a SATA system or be prepared to invest in solid-state storage to limp along. SATA is going to be around for a very long time. IDE went through seven generations after being standardized in 1994. SATA 3.0 is only just starting to show up.
- Spare part stockpile
When you have a system you really like, you want to keep it useful. Start collecting parts when they show up cheap. Buy a couple of new keyboards to keep on-hand. You never know when you may face a spill, lost keycap or just worn out keys. Buy a couple of hinge assemblies and display cables if you can. Maybe buy an extra display to keep around for when your backlight tube starts to wear out. Keep a few compatible power supplies around. Don't bother with the aftermarket ones. Chances are your manufacturer uses the same power supply for a lot of different models so you should be able to get the real deal for only a few dollars more than the aftermarket junk.
- Do it right the second time
Mass-production of anything requires the cutting of corners in the name of efficiency. This is made painfully obvious in the assembly of cooling systems. If you've got a CPU that's designed to take a top temperature of 200F and the cheap, foamy, uneven thermal pad between it and the heatsink will keep it under this limit, the manufacturer won't care as long as it will outlast the warranty. Same with the GPU, too. What's the solution? Better thermal compound. Get some high-grade compound and use that between your CPU and heatsink. Since mobile CPUs generally have the bare silicon die exposed, good thermal compound is even more important due to the smaller surface area.
- Get your hands dirty
When your warranty is gone, there's nothing stopping you from opening your system and taking care of business. Clean the dust out once a year or so, tighten all the internal screws and re-seat all of the connectors.
- Body Doubles
If your machine supports docking and you can stand using it that way, got for it. Using external gear will save wear on your keyboard, backlight and optical drive, which will also reduce stress on your power conversion circuitry by not having to run so many components.
