It’s been quiet around here the last weeks, as regular visitors may have noticed. This is partly due to the fact that I am mostly busy with work and family, and rarely take the time to actively work in this site. I also started to post links to interesting news and articles to my facebook page almost exclusively, except for those which I find very important.

The other reason for the more recent silence is that my trusted Dell Latitude E5400 laptop, which I have been using both for work and private for the past two years, has suffered a failure of harddisk and battery almost simultaneously. I was lucky that I was able to salvage almost all of my important data before the disk broke down entirely.

2009 Dell Latitude E5400 | My trusty companion for two years.

I have been lucky with the Dell, I must say, except for the fact that this is now the second harddisk that broke down. The first one said goodbye when I accidentally dropped the laptop from a substantial height — this was also when its body got some major cracks. The second one said goodbye a short while after the battery died, when the power adapter slipped from the connector while Windows was in the middle of performing various writing and reading operations.

Since I also need my laptop for work (I am writing my dissertation on it), I had to get a replacement as quickly as possible. Since my budget is limited, I decided on an entry-level ThinkPad, the Edge 15 from 2010. I had owned a ThinkPad before — when they were still IBM-made –, and was thus positive that you can’t go wrong with one. Little did I know …

2010 ThinkPad Edge 15 | It looks nice, it feels ok, but it is rubbish.

It seems that since Lenovo has taken over IBMs PC department, the quality has gone down substantially. Sure, if you’re willing to pay € 2k you can still get a top notch laptop (W series). But it seems that ThinkPad isn’t automatically ThinkPad these days. The Edge series is the best example. It’s Lenovo’s entry-level ThinkPad, meant for those that would otherwise have gone with one of the consumer models (Lenovo still consider the ThinkPad series professional, but not all of them qualify for that predication).

I read in reviews beforehand that build quality is far from what we are used to see in ThinkPads, but for me personally, it would’ve been sufficient. Okay, so the body is all plastic, but it’s solid. Not as solid as a MacBook with its magnesium body, but solid enough. The upside of the cheaper plastic body is that it’s very light. The keyboard is also cheap, but that’s okay, too. It’s good enough to work with — I’ve seen keyboards far inferior. The nice thing about the Edge is that it has a very large trackpad that supports multi-touch gestures, and a large and nice-to-use trackpoint located between the G, H and B keys. I love trackpoints, and this was one of the reaons to get a ThinkPad again. (My Dell had a trackpoint as well, but a smaller one — nowhere near as nice as this one!)

What’s funny about the Edge is that it lacks status lights of any kind. No indicator for power, for battery status, for caps lock, WiFi etc. Everything is displayed in Windows via on-screen pop-ups. This means extra background processes, which means extra CPU and memory use. Not the best solution. But this isn’t acually the worst part. I could’ve lived with its mediocre build quality and other quirks if it weren’t for that awful screen.

It seems this is where Lenovo have been cutting short the most. Reviews confirm that the screen is infact cheap, bad and plain useless. Not only does it have no colour accuracy to speak of, the pixel spacing is so large that you can make out single pixels (including separating black lines between them!) even from a viewing distance of 30 centimeters. Contrast is also practically non-existent. To sum it up: not only is it absolutely unsuited for any kind of work on photos, it is also unsuited for any kind of work. At least this is my personal assessment — the screen makes my eyes hurt and gives me headaches.

So I decided to send the ThinkPad back and look for something else. But all the laptops I tried — brands ranging from Acer to Sony –, those that cost less than a thousand Euros have bad screens. Compared to my old Dell, all of them are rubbish.

So what am I going to do? Well, here’s the plan. I have just ordered a new battery for my Dell in the hope that it really was just the battery that had died, and that there’s not a problem with the charging circuitry on the mainboard. If the new battery works, I will buy a new harddisk and new keyboard (the trackpoint stopped working properly when it was about a year old) and continue to work with it, despite the fact that the body is cracked and the card reader will only read, but not write on SD cards. At least I know I’ll have a good screen that I can use for both office work and photo editing.

If that fails there’s only one option: a MacBook. Why a MacBook? Well, quite simply, MacBooks have the best screens. Period. I tried one yesterday, and I was thrilled. Superb contrast, superb colour rendition. The only downside is that they’re glossy. But for photo work, they seem to be the non-plus-ultra. Also, since I’m officially still a student, I will get a discount of about 10% on any Apple product. Then, there’s the factor of build quality, which is simply superb as well. And finally, the 13″ MacBook is small and light and thus ideal for commuting and trave alike.

2011 MacBook Pro 13" | The "Leica of computers".

But there’s one thing … the price tag. Even with discount, a MacBook is still over a thousand Euros — money I do not have lying around my house anywhere. So I hope that I can get my Dell back running — otherwise I’ll have to come up with a good financial plan …