Hello!

• Matthew Allen [030607 08:55] wrote:

I may have access to a thinkpad 770 (233?300?mhz) with 128mb ram. Its painfully slow with windows (as witnessed by posts on this list), but there is a pretty large linux community for these things. Is anone using one (or have used one) running linux and PD? If so how is the native sound card? How was performance? etc etc. I can get it super cheap, I just dont know if I should waste my time and effort trying to get a stable linux build running on it.

Well, I had one -- untill it's been stolen in south france a couple of years ago (so I'm using a t21 now). Despite of it's age, it's been a great machine under linux. Nearly every hardware feature was working perfectly. The only thing that didn't was the built-in mpeg2-accelerator for dvd playback. Of course, it's slow as hell compared to recent P4 models, but -- duh, what did you expect? Another drawback is a very stupid designer decision to build the 770 with only one USB connector. The native soundcard is, as usual, rather crappy. Can't remember which chip it used, but it had low snr and terrible latency. So, if you're up for something serious you'd rather use an external pcmcia or usb device. Also, don't expect it to be able to produce usable audio with complex, cpu-intensive pd-patches. It's just a pentium MMX 233 up to pentium II 366 (coreect me if I'm wrong) in the 770Z model. The performance is just as good/bad as you would expect from such an old platform. But still it's a lovely low-cost portable machine -- very robust, very stable and well-supported under linux, great power source (it ran over 3,5 hours without an external power supply, as far as I remember -- longer than my new t21), fantastic keyboard, great display... very nice.

m.

i.