| IBM ThinkPad 755CS | |
Remember, this is a 486DX4-100 with 24MB of RAM; so the critical question is how well it will perform with a potentially demanding OS.
Disk Space: With a minimal install and after deleting the "online services" (AOL, etc), the OS footprint was just over 70 MB. After installing diskspace 3, the compression ratio was 1.5 to 1 on a fairly full hard disk; though it was not possible to find out how well it compressed individual folders. The disk had a good number of .wav and .avi files, so the compression ratio could probably go higher.
Screen: 640 x 480 is too small for modern apps, but it the screen is physically large, so I experimented with using Arial and small fonts at 7 or 6 points; this helped a lot; the start menu can hold more items, the title bars can show more info, and not take up as much horizontal space. Plus, shrinking the menu settings (be sure to adjust both active and inactive settings) makes the start menu fit lots of items on the screen. It's not as good as having a 800x600 screen, but it's a lot more useable.
Boot: before I compressed the drive, it took just under 45 seconds to boot to the windows desktop. After compressing the entire drive (including the win95 folder) it took just under 10 seconds longer to boot.
Speed: Just doing normal windows things (managing files, opening the built in apps) felt very snappy at 8bit color; and only slightly sluggish at 16bit color (so slight it may have been imagined). For more demanding tasks, it also held up well (see next two paragraphs).
Web browsing: Well, Win95B comes with IE 3.0, so I tried surfing the web that way for a while on a 14.4 modem. Wow, 14.4 modems suck. But we can't hold that against the IBM, since it would be easy and cheap to upgrade to a 56k modem. But what of the browsing speed once the page is downloaded? It's not bad, in that pages redraw relatively quickly, and scroll smooth enough. It's not nearly what a modern desktop can do, but it's certainly useable, even if you have two or three windows open (this was even true when I had a copy of Word95 in the background). More of an issue is that web pages are no longer designed for 640x480, and IE 3.0 can't handle many modern web sites (including google!). So it would be worth upgrading, though I'd be careful to find another browser with low resource requirements (perhaps opera?). Also, running in small font size made a lot of improvement for some web sites, though images were still too big for my tastes. Perhaps this is where the small screen resolution really comes to the head. Summary: useable, but not nearly good enough to make it a replacement for a real computer.
Office 95: Office 95 works great on this machine. Word loads in a mater of seconds, and runs perfectly once loaded. I'd say it's easily competitive with Office 2k on my 433 MHZ desktop Celeron. Plus, Office 95 is so much more spartan and refined than 2k; aside from the file interop issues, I'd almost call Office 95 an upgrade over Office 2k. Call me crazy, but that's how I feel.
Sound and Modem: The 755CE has an "mwave" DSP, which can support both MIDI, WAV, and 28.8k functionality, though not all at once. Supposedly you can connect to the internet and play some "wave" content at the same time. I was unable to test this, since installing MWAVE drivers for Win95 required a new bios update, and I couldn't get it to flash the bios. This stems from IBM deciding that you are only allowed to perform a flash if you have a fully charged battery; mine is long past dead. I suspect you could hack it to get around this issue, but it wasn't worth it to me.
"Mouse": the built in track point control worked great, when windows booted. Sometimes, though, it would freeze before loading all the way; eventually I decided it was a problem interfacing to the track point gizmo, and tried loading a real mode DOS mouse driver before windows; this seemed to fix the problem every time; though I suppose it could just be luck too. As a mouse, the trackpoint takes a bit of getting used to, but is clearly much better than the alternative of having no mouse. With time you might even enjoy using it, though I never got to that point. Certainly it's fine for moving windows around and managing your files, but I wouldn't want to game, or draw with it.
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