I bought a new IBM Thinkpad x31 earlier this month and am really enjoying it. It replaces an IBM Thinkpad x21 from 2001 so I picked up two+ years of updates with the new system.

Oddly, it has a slightly smaller footprint than the x21. For the most part this isn't noticeable, except that it means the x31 is not compatible with the ultrabase I bought for the x21. It does work with the dock I have (which still has a fan just a little louder than a turbine engine). I have not decided whether or not to get a new ultrabase. It's handy for travel, but I don't travel much.

Font legibility and ClearType

One thing that has bothered me with the new system is that all of the fonts looked bad. Skinny, unaliased. I remembered something about Cleartype on Windows XP and so I went off hunting for this option.

I couldn't find it in any of the control panels, at least not in the obvious ones (Display and Fonts).

Eventually I found a web page at microsoft.com, ClearType information. This page has information about Cleartype as well as an ActiveX control which you can use to activate and configure ClearType.

I find it odd that Microsoft would not include this in the base operating system (perhaps it's there, but I really did look).

Back to the x31: It's nice to have a keyboard with play again. The x21 has lost a lot of the play in the keys, and the mouse buttons are dead.

Firewire

A minor quibble: the x31 comes with a Firewire interface, but nothing on the descriptions (at CDW, and I believe ibm.com) indicates it's four-wire, not six-wire. This is a ok as long as you have a four-to-six wire adapter and the device you're plugging in is self-powered.

Migration

I managed to move most of my documents over without any problems, and I think I've managed to reinstall the applications I need (eliminating the cruft that builds up from applications you install and use once or twice). Had to scramble to find various license keys for things I bought over two years ago. I see no reason to buy a new license, especially since I'm trashing the image on the x21 and replacing it with a Linux or FreeBSD build.

Userid configuration

The only other gotcha I've had is that I initially configured my userid as my business email address (eg: userid@example.com instead of just userid. Thought this made some sense, until I installed cygwin and realized that there was nothing to separate the userid bit from the domain bit in the email address, so I ended up with userid@example.com in places where it didn't make sense (eg: my prompt became userid@example.com@lancaster).

Java

Another problem I had: I couldn't get Java to work in either MSIE or Firefox. There was an IBM JVM loaded but neither browser could use it to run applets. I ended up removing it and installing the Sun 1.4 SDK and JRE. Applets worked in MSIE but still not in Firefox. I learned that I had to copy several DLLs over to the Firefox plugin directory and then voila, applets worked.