Hey, jpd -- despite the appearance of the Windoze Key (which is
basically a second Alt key), the keyboard is much improved in
solidity and feel from my 3+ year old T41p. The widescreen 15.4
aspect ration of 16:10 is still a little strange, but gives a
decent 1680x1050. The physical package is a little better
engineered that the old IBM.

All Thinkpad models come with the trackpoint, but some have only
a trackpoint. First thing to do with the Synaptics touchpad is
disable it, of course.

The processor/motherboard doesn't support VT, but Xen seems to
work well for those OSes that are paravirtualized. I have
installed a FreeBSD 7.0 instance under VMware, and look forward
to not having to do it that way.

I ordered a SATA holder that fits in the DVD drive tray, so
when it arrives I'll see what level of effort is involved
in getting a decent Gnome or KDE3 desktop working with
FreeBSD running natively

On Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:45:08 -0700,
Michael Sierchio tenebras.com> wrote:

I still don't want yet more keys there. The way I use those keys I need
them a bit larger than the rest. I do not need more fumbling or needing
to look at my keyboard to figure out where that control/alt/meta key
snuck off to now.

I did notice they made the bezel edges a bit wider. Thinkpads use to
break there. On my T23 both sides of the keyboard bezel broke, as did
the lid right below the camera attachment, and the back corner of the
case. I filled the latter with epoxy in the hopes of stopping further
damage. They must've gotten so many back with those defects it'd be
silly to not come up with a fix. :-)

jpd wrote:

I lied. Well, I misspoke. Actually, I didn't know what I was
talking about. VT is not enabled by default in the BIOS, but
I was poking around in the BIOS settings (I don't know why, I'm
curious) and found a switch for it. It is now enabled, and when
I bring up the Xen tool for creating a virtual machine, it no
longer barfs when I try to create a Windows XP guest. (It
seems I've introduced a new bug -- heh-heh).

On Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:51:52 -0700,
Michael Sierchio tenebras.com> wrote:

Or umpteen firefox help windows. Which is why I patched that out on
1.5, but 2.0 was sufficiently changed that I couldn't find it again
with the time and effort alloted.

Over in comp.sys.laptops.thinkpad people used to gripe about various
thinkpad keyboards, mostly wishing the tp600 keyboard back. Haven't kept
up lately, though.