IBM think pad

[chrisgee]

Anyone using one of these with Sea Pro or other chart sys --thinking of getting a second hand one just for this --looks quite rugged but Ive heard battery life is not the best.

 

[Phoenix of Hamble]

Good machines... robust and reliable.

Batteries aren't usually brilliant on any laptop. I can't say I find our thinkpads any worse or better than most other popular brands in that respect. But we do have less trouble overall with them.

 

[atelford]

Chris, I work for a company that leases these from a supplier and wouldnt be surprised at all if the second hand one you are thinking of was once used by the same company. All I can say of my experience of them is that they are reliable and robust but fully agree with battery problems. If its 3 years old we found the batteries tend to die out on them. Help is at hand mind you because you can get extended life (twice the size) new for around £20 ish. If it is ex-my company then its been well looked after !

 

[alan]

Yeah, bought one around three months ago and use it with SOB. I paid around £300 including the docking station. The batteries on this one are not too bad but I use it with a 12v converter. This is in excellent condition and was just as described on the web site.

www.sterlingXS.co.uk

Alan.

 

[shmoo]

I am on my third in about 10 years. Great kit. I use on on board and set very aggressive power saving settings. Broadly the CPU takes an amp, the disk takes an amp and the display backlight takes an amp. So kill the backlight after 30s or 1m, disk after a couple of mins. Max out the RAM. Don't use "tracking" on the charting software becuase it will keep going to disk and nullify the disk time out setting. Turn the backlight intensity down: saves power.

 

[Jonny_H]

Just bought a T23 from Sterling XS (link as above post) - was £50 and I got a new battery off ebay for £20.

Runs SeaPro, C-Map and Tsunami fine (Pentium III, Windows 2000)

For the money you can't go wrong!

I use Thinkpads at work - very robust - nothing wrong with the batteries - after 2 years of solid use my current X60 battery still lasts over 3 hours.

Jonny

 

[chrisgee]

photo is 340199 ---thanks for the info

 

[Relax]

I have 2 Thinkpads - one for work which was new and after two years is still perfect with excellent battery life - but I do look after it, and another I bought second-hand on ebay for about £250 delivered. They are excellent and better than any other laptop I have used in evry respect.

I have just bought Seapro lite and the Nasa Navtex Pro but as I hav'nt launched yet (tomorrow in the snow! /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif) hav'nt really used them in anger and can't comment. Only problem I had was connecting the lappy and that was down to the serial/USB cable not working properly.

 

[affinite]

Thinkpads were std kit in the Space Shuttle so it should be good enough for your plotting needs. Agree with advice re power saving settings. I suggest a DC-DC converted to power it rather than running the std mains PSU from an inverter.

 

[chrisgee]

thanks everyone --- getting a T Pad from Sterling next week.

 

[Danny]

It should serve you well. I have a bottom-of-the-range Iseries ThinkPad (2001 vintage) which I used to use on the boat. Never let me down. Very robust piece of kit. I still occasionally use it as a test platform running various navigation packages under WinMe and WinXp. Although it's slow (600MHz Celeron) and weeny (192MB RAM) that seems to be adequate for a lot of navigation s/w.

When using it on board the power management was set up in a manner similar to that suggested by shmoo. The battery was iffy but I used it mainly with a 56w car adapter.

 

[ShipsWoofy]

I had one and had to write it off due to spares (the screen ribbon cable cracked). I bought it 2nd hand and for a time it was a great machine, as you say robust too.

I ended up throwing completely good components away, a look on ebay showed very many boxes of bits all failed for the same ribbon breakage. It is a serious weak point, most modern lappies use a loom to take the bend, a ribbon was never going to last the course of time.

 

[joe17]

I have been using them daily for almost 10 years and they are good. I have the 1st one still running as a desktop for various "internet tasks". The LCD broke, but I still use it with a monitor.

However, I just got my latest thinkpad (a T61) and now its a Lenovo thinkpad not an IBM thinkpad and my first impression is that it wont be as good or robust as the ones I have been using earlier.

 

[Jonny_H]

My 'Thinkpad' says IBM by the keyboard and Lenovo on the screen ... ?