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The following is a summary of my experiences w/ my 760CD which I got just before X-mas ;-) FEATURES -------- 1) MPEG2 Played with the MPEG2 HHR decoder. This is a decoder that supports Half Horizontal Resolution. This allows MPEG2 streams to be played from 4X CDROM drives (full MPEG2 streams require 5X drives). The True Lies clip is as cool as people say it is. There still appears to be a bug w/ the driver because it leaves a one pixel vertical line of garbage on the right. The Thinkpad also comes installed w/ 256 color drivers whereas the demo needs 64K color drivers...no idea why IBM didn't install 64K color video drivers as the default. I still haven't been able to play the common Xing MPEGs that are common nowadays; these MPEG's only contain I-frames. The media player doesn't show anything :-( 2) 12.1" Screen This is finally a good size for laptops. 10.4" screens are just too small and the 9.5 ones were worse :-) One interesting thing to note is that the manual for the thinkpad lists the specs on the display as being able to show 16.7M colors. Could it be that the chipset VRAM is limiting the display capabilities? 3) Enhanced Video S-video in/out is supported. Playing games in 800x600 mode (HVexp on :-) works relatively well. The resolution on my TV (a Panasonic GAOO 27") looks like it is slightly below 400 interlaced lines in resolution. Win95 on the TV is mostly unreadable (the text on the taskbar is unreadable) in 800x600 mode. Presentations should be done in 640x480 mode or large fonts should be used in 800x600 mode. I haven't tried video capture as the manual indicates that at least 12MB of memory is required. 4) Mwave Under OS/2 Warp Connect loses characters according to the slip program. It can't write characters to the Mwave driver (possibly because of the heavy swapping) at times. The modem doesn't like hooking to Hayes 28.8K modems at full speed but a Microcom Deskporte EP I have does. It hooks up to USR 28.8K modems with no problems. The games mode doesn't allow me to use SBPRO mode with Effects or Qsound. It complains of insufficient resources. This happens in MSDOS mode under Win95. Hong Kong MahJong Pro can't see the DAC in SB emulation mode, so there is no voice output :-( IMPROVEMENTS ------------ 1) PCMCIA Door The doors are now spring-loaded and fold inward as you put the PCMCIA cards in. This is better than the old 75x series pull-off door. 2) LCD Fuel Gauge This is useful extremely useful in telling you how much charge the system has left. The Fuel program doesn't have to be run any more :-) 3) Lithium Ion Batteries One battery generally lasts me 4 hours unless I am trying to boot Warp Connect on 8MB RAM (where each boot sucks up 4% of the battery)-: PROBLEMS -------- 1) MPEG2 driver bug (minor, see feature description above) 2) When I put it into suspend by closing the cover w/ a battery plugged in, I managed to get it into a hung mode where the power switch didn't work. I think I was looking at the memory expansion area. The fix was to pull the battery out, then plug it back in. 3) The memory expansion door bulges outward a little. This can be fixed by adding a front edge tab similiar to the ones on the sides of the door. 4) Be careful of the EM shielding fingers on the memory expansion door. They can be bent pretty easily. They contact some copper tape on the inside of the door; this tape looks like a last minute hack. 5) My floppy drive couldn't write to most diskettes because it complained everything was write-protected. On the one disk it formatted, it only formatted to about half capacity. After a call to IBM Easyserv, I got a replacement in a day. I guess this is the best reason for spending the extra $$$ for Thinkpads :-) 6) VGA non-compatibility bug caused difficult installs of some operating systems. GRIPES ------ 1) Can't install the floppy drive plate without removing the battery. This makes floppy/CDROM swaps on the road a pain. The problem is the floppy drive gap filler. Someone on the thinkpad mailing list pointed out that you don't have this installed to put the floppy drive in, but then you have dust problems with the big hole around the floppy drive. 2) The wrist rest is not deep enough. When I use the wrist rest as I normally use my desktop wrist rest, my fingers end up on the QWERTY row of keys instead of the normal home position for a touch typist. As someone else mentioned, my palms also seem to cover the speakers when I'm typing. 3) Fit and finish are good but need a bit more work. The memory expansion cover (see Problems section above) comes to mind. The external power jack also seems to be too high because I can see the silver part of the internal connector inside the case. 4) There is no uninstall program for all the software they give you and also no way to reinstall anything after you delete it. IBM should send out uninstall REXX scripts and a CDROM which you can use to reinstall the factory drive setup and separate programs. The CDROM could have a copy of the gzipped tar image I made and a full disk image of the C: drive. At the very least, an electronic description of what is in each directory would be helpful in deciding which directories to scrap. 5) I can overrun the key rollover buffer in the keyboard. I don't have a problem w/ my desktop's Northgate keyboard. 6) I'd still like some way of swapping the ctrl and capslock keys as I can do with the Northgate. Using my thumb to control the ctrl key doesn't feel right. On the thinkpad keyboard the proximity of the ctrl/alt keys also causes me to hit the fn key when I want the ctrl key. INSTALLATION ------------ 1) Backup I backed up the entire drive (I can't believe they formatted the 1.2 Gig drive as one huge FAT partition!) using the OS/2 version of tar which preserves extended attributes. The result was a 187MB gzipped tar file. 2) Repartitioning I repartitioned the drive using Partition Magic. I made a D: partition that was 150MB for Warp Connect. I shrunk the first partition down to 550MB. The rest of it is a partition for data and a 2MB partition at the end for Boot Manager. 3) Windows 95 Installed this onto the C partition with no real problems. The display blanked out (probably because of the VGA problem described below) during the install, but a reboot caused it to continue. It recognized the Trident chip and installed 256 color drivers automatically. It also recognized the IBM Etherlink II card I borrowed from a friend; Win95 picked up the IRQ/IO settings automatically which neither Warp Connect nor NT did. There is a conflict with the Win95 CDROM drivers and the DOS-based CDROM drivers; the CDROM is only visible if you are in Win95 or Win95 restarted in MS-DOS mode, but not both. This and the VGA problem are detailed in the Win95 install manual packed with the machine. You have to disable the DOS CDROM drivers for Win95's CDROM support to work, but when you do this, you can't see the CDROM drive when you shutdown into MSDOS mode to play games :-( 4) Warp Connect This is not described in the manual that comes with the system. I copied the \os2image files and modified the Disk 1 as described in the manual. However, Connect wants more because it didn't think the stuff on E: was the CDROM. I ended up labeling the partition LANCLNT to match the CDROM. I also copied everything in the root directory of the CDROM to the partition and also the \grpware directory. After the initial install, I put the CDROM back in as suggested in the manual and the LCD screen turned black. OS/2 wasn't hung because hitting return still worked. The IBM PC Co. Web site had a VGA driver fix that solved the problem. Installation was a little tricky, but documented. Someone on the thinkpad mailing list mentioned that the .cmd script is buggy, so I copied the four fix files by hand. Installation of the network drivers failed because I hadn't copied the \cid directory over; editing the \grpware\client\lanstart.ini file to reference the CDROM drive allowed me to continue installing the networking components. Be sure to specify a "Non Listed IDE CDROM" when you do the initial install or you won't be able to see the CDROM. If you intend to use Warp Connect, be sure to get more than 8MB of memory; Warp (unlike NT and Win95) doesn't understand that network protocol drivers don't have to be loaded if there is no ethernet card in the system. Warp Connect with 8MB is like watching icicles grow on a winter day. Before you install the Mwave drivers, be sure to install the system management driver (aodbsmd.sys) or the Mwave stuff won't work. Mwave also needs more memory or you will get these weird 15sec delays between opening a window and having sound come up. 5) Windows NT This was the trickiest of the installations. Turn off the OS/2 Boot Manager partition using fdisk first; otherwise, you will boot into NT's boot loader first, then OS/2. Place the CDROM in the drive and boot to DOS. Run winnt.exe with the /b and /x switches to do a floppyless install. This will copy all the install files onto the hard drive. Replace the CDROM drive with the floppy drive. On the second reboot, boot using a DOS diskette and copy the NT Trident lcd.sys driver from IBM's Web site over the vga.sys in the \winnt\system32\drivers directory. If you do not do this, you'll be greated with the lovely blank screen which is the symptom of the VGA problem. Install NT as usual, then copy the old vga.sys back in after you boot up. At this point, set up the NT video drivers as usual. Do not ever go into emergency VGA mode in NT; this will use the buggy NT vga.sys driver again. I still haven't gotten NT to recognize the ATAPI CDROM drive. 6) Convert drives to HPFS At this point, I converted my D: and E: drives from FAT to HPFS using Partition Magic. The reason I did this is that HPFS has a lot less wasted space when you have a lot of files. My development environments are mainly OS/2 and NT with Win95 relegated to games :-) 7) Tried installing a Xircom IIps ethernet card. Oddly enough, this works in NT, but the driver doesn't load in Win95. In Warp Connect, the whole system hangs hard (power cycle is needed). After talking to Xircom tech support, I found that the configuration info was in the registry for Win95. I deleted the key, reinstalled the card, and Win95 even knows how to bring the network up if you put in the card after you boot Win95. This is definitely how networking should be, unlike the horrible OS/2 network install process which still doesn't work. :-( SUGGESTIONS TO IBM ------------------ 1) Increase the depth of the wrist wrest by half an inch. The 13.3" model next year will need a larger case anyways, and this would be a good time to do it. 2) Include an external floppy drive cable w/ the 760CD. This would have made the installs a lot easier. Anyone buying the system should probably get the external floppy cable. 3) Switch to using ultrabay cartridges that can be hot swapped. The CDROM and floppy are difficult to swap because the battery has to be removed each time. The holder for the hard drive for the ultrabay will then no longer be necessary; the holders for the hard drive should also be available for no extra charge if the current Ultrabay design is kept (though not shipped unless needed because most people don't use two hard drives). 4) Provide some sort of hardened case for the floppy and CDROM. They are both very fragile if the warning labels are correct, so they can't really be carried around. 5) Upgrade the 760CD memory to 16MB to compete w/ the Toshiba Tecra CT. The system preload of Win3.1 and OS/2 feels sluggish with the normal 8MB. The system is useless when running Warp Connect w/ 8MB :-( 6) Add PCI and Cardbus support and a PCI dock. I almost could do without my desktop if I didn't want a 3D accelerator PCI card. This should happen later this year...anyone want to buy a 9month old 760CD this Fall when the new Thinkpads come out? ;-) 7) Add dual processor support. Have a desktop/dock with a Pentium and when the thinkpad is docked, you have a dual processor with twice as much processing power and FAST Wide SCSI drives...uh..maybe I'm dreaming too much ;-} FINAL COMMENTS -------------- The 760CD is a nice system. The disk size and display size are very usable for development. Base memory is lacking at only 8MB. If you don't need the extra features, consider the 760C instead; there are less features, but less IRQ's, ports, etc. are used, so you have less chances for conflicts with PCMCIA cards. If you are using it for development, get the 1.2GB hard drive; I used half of it for tools and operating systems already and I may consider using 2nd hard drives for each client's tools. The 760CD is not quite perfect, but it is probably the closest of the laptops available with solid support from IBM if anything goes wrong. Ken KEY Enterprise Solutions Windows, OS/2, Notes, networking development and integration