Day: February 7, 2009

Pimp my pad

Junior’s three-year old ThinkPad Z60M bought the farm yesterday, the hard drive is toast and it is flashing a BSOD with statements of pain like “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”

The drive was pretty cramped to begin with, so I figure it is time to rebuild the machine from scratch — it has a big screen, good speakers, an optical, and in these days of economizing, I am not in the mood to buy anything new. It has two gigs of RAM (I added a SIMM), the processor is a little wimpy, so it will need to remain an XP box for now.

Original description: Celeron M 360(1.4GHz), 256MB RAM, 40GB 5400rpm HD, 15.4in 1280×800 LCD, Intel 900, CDRW/DVD, Intel 802.11abg wireless, Modem, 1Gb Ethernet, UltraNav, Secure chip, IEEE 1394, 6c Li-Ion batt, WinXP Home

Having taken the RAM way up to 2 gigs, now the pimping needs to focus on the drive. I’m thinking a 7200 rpm SATA – but am worried about compatibility issues and overcoming the Celeron with too much RAM or drive. It’s all about weakest link.

Memo to Lenovo support — bundle all drivers for a specific ThinkPad into one mongo archive .rar file and be done with it. The onesie-twosie-download thing is horrific.

New Kindles on the way?

Some speculation emerging on what Amazon will announce this week (I hope to get some disclosure in Seattle on Monday) around a new Kindle and perhaps the opening of the platform to permit Amazon e-books to be read on cell/smart phones — eg the iPhone perhaps.

An interesting piece in Computerworld by Mike Elgan speculates the new device will be cheaper and more featured that 1.o — which is to be expected — but Elgan touches on an interesting possiblility by speculating authors will soon be able to self-publish e-books and bypass the medieval functionality of the publishing industry. So, will Amazon open the Kindle SDK to writers? That would be very interesting and be the right move in my opinion.

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