Thinkpad 420 6-month review

There’s actually not a whole lot to report here, other than: I’m still very happy with my Thinkpad purchase.

The grippy matte finish on the cover has definitely contributed to me not dropping it. It’s acquired some weird smears on the cover that I can’t remove though.

It functions better as a “laptop” than the HP 2510p did; it doesn’t get quite as hot when it’s actually on my lap. Pleasantly warm, not hot.

And I love, love, love the keyboard light.

Two glitches:
It doesn’t play nicely with my HP L1706 monitor. The aspect ratios never turn out right. I could probably dink with it and fix it, or I could just replace the monitor with something that takes up less space (since it’s 5 years old anyway).

The card reader only works about 1 out of 10 times. I am not sure if this is a hardware issue or an OS issue (I’m mainly on Ubuntu); I can just connect my camera straight to my computer to download photos, so I haven’t bothered to boot into Windows to check it out yet.

Wonder of wonders, I haven’t spilled anything on the keyboard yet (this has to be the longest stretch *ever* of not spilling something on the laptop) so I haven’t had to test the drains.

CVOICE+QoS

When I first started diving into QoS, I really hated it. There are a lot of moving parts, and whenever I poked at it I felt like I was sticking my hand in a moving engine. I had the opportunity to take some Cisco training this year, but found out that Cisco got rid of their 5-day QOS class. (At the time, I was relieved, because 5 days solid of QoS sounded like something only a masochist would do.) The only QOS training Cisco offers now comes as part of the CVOICE. I signed up for that, figuring I’d take what I could get, with the added bonus that I’d be able to communicate better with my voice team [1].