Of late, my electronic devices have been letting me down more than usual. They are either failing or falling apart. It's probably only a phase, but stopping for a minute and taking a long look at all the devices I use everyday has put me in a contemplative mood. Of all the devices I own, there are only a handful I can call a ‘worthy investment’ and maybe only one I can call ‘precious.’
So let's see, my Android-powered ASUS tablet has had this disease for some time now where it suddenly decides it doesn't want to work anymore and shuts right off, even if the battery is full, and the only way to revive it is to plug in the charger again and pray fervently while holding down the power button.
My ten year old Sony Hi-Fi stereo system is plagued by a different sort of disease. It is incapable of playing CDs or cassettes, but that’s completely fine; no one really does that these days anyway. But I should still be able to use it for its banging amplifier and speakers, right? Wrong. The entire control panel on the face of this system is crotchety; press the power switch to turn it off and it will display the time; try to switch the function mode to aux-in and it will play the radio at max volume. I am not joking about this one. It is barking mad!
It was my father’s birthday a while ago, and I had bought him a ‘Kinivo Bluetooth receiver’ for his car. I had done my due research prior to buying it and most online buyers before me seemed happy with it. I was wrong again. It turned out that, while the Kinivo could handle calls and music playback quite decently, getting it connected first to do all those things was hard. Did I say hard? I meant nigh impossible. Every time you turn the car on, it will attempt to connect to already paired devices as if it were for the first time. And once you've got your phone(s) connected to the thing, don't ever turn the car off, because if you do, you'll have had it. You see, to start the engine, the starter-motor kills power to all ancillaries for just a few seconds, till the engine is cranked up and running, and those few seconds of black-out are enough to wipe the Kinivo's memory clean. What a total pile of garbage.
But in comparison, that really is nothing, trust me. You need to know about this other contraption I have called the ‘Belkin Network USB Hub’. This dreadful piece of work, quietly ensconced under my WiFi router for the last several years, is supposed to connect USB devices like printers and flash-drives over LAN so I can access them from any of my computers wirelessly. In all its miserable life, it has managed to do no such thing; and if it all did, it had done it for no longer than a few minutes. Plagued by driver issues, the Belkin Network USB Hub could never hold a steady connection with a USB device for more than a few minutes. File transfers were abysmally slow, and print jobs rarely ever finished. To make matters worse, Belkin has never updated the driver for it, which means that since the days of Windows XP (for which it was designed), it has been becoming increasingly more useless; not to mention its incompatibility with today’s Android and iOS mobile devices.
My first world problems are seemingly endless. I could prattle on all day long about my HP all-in-one that simply cannot print a single document without mucking things up, or about my Philips home theatre that switches on loudly to an untuned radio station every time I change channels on my TV. But tech woes; we’ve all got them. Even if it looks like the simplest device in the world, like a remote control, it simply won't just work the way it should. It will drive you mad. Actually, a remote control is a terrible example; that is the first thing to die with any remote controlled device. Damn those little plastic boxes of evil!
It's times like these that I look down at the computer I’m typing on and think to myself, “Everything in the universe ought to be built like a ThinkPad.”
One of the two ThinkPad computers I own is an IBM T60 that’s nearly ten years old now. It served half its life as my father’s official computer at work, and the rest with me as my personal. In all its life, I have seen that machine fade away slowly, but only in appearance. Functionally, the T60 is still as steady as a rock. It has comfortably run OSes as old as Windows 2000 and as new as Windows 10, with a few Ubuntus in between. It started out life with less than a gigabyte of memory and now has around two and a half of it. Storage was a sixty gigabyte hard drive for the longest time, until I replaced it with a solid state drive of the same capacity some years ago for faster boot speeds.
Sure, some of the letters on the keys have faded away, the battery only lasts an hour these days, and the surface of the lid is so heavily scratched it resembles a well-worn airstrip, but on the whole, the T60 has survived the test of time a lot better than any other machine I have owned.
I will need a whole new blog-post just to explain the brilliance of this machine’s design. So let me, instead, just say that everything about it is extremely well thought-out, intuitive, and more importantly, tough and built to last. It’s no surprise then that a ThinkPad is the only kind of computer allowed on the International Space Station.
At this point, it may look like I’m being unfair in comparing the ThinkPad to a Kinivo Bluetooth receiver, which is a lot like comparing a legend like the Boeing 747 to a cheap radio clock, but no; I’m not being the least bit unfair. I have a fan on my desk that is as old as I am and to this day, works like a charm. All I’m saying is, we shouldn’t have to put up with rubbish gadgets.
Oh well, I can never have them all, I guess. Then again, if my existing electronic devices didn't actually suffer from sudden memory-loss, heart-attacks, or hysteria every now and then, I’d never get to realise how magnificent my ThinkPad is.
Until next time...
Vignesh
So let's see, my Android-powered ASUS tablet has had this disease for some time now where it suddenly decides it doesn't want to work anymore and shuts right off, even if the battery is full, and the only way to revive it is to plug in the charger again and pray fervently while holding down the power button.
My ten year old Sony Hi-Fi stereo system is plagued by a different sort of disease. It is incapable of playing CDs or cassettes, but that’s completely fine; no one really does that these days anyway. But I should still be able to use it for its banging amplifier and speakers, right? Wrong. The entire control panel on the face of this system is crotchety; press the power switch to turn it off and it will display the time; try to switch the function mode to aux-in and it will play the radio at max volume. I am not joking about this one. It is barking mad!
It was my father’s birthday a while ago, and I had bought him a ‘Kinivo Bluetooth receiver’ for his car. I had done my due research prior to buying it and most online buyers before me seemed happy with it. I was wrong again. It turned out that, while the Kinivo could handle calls and music playback quite decently, getting it connected first to do all those things was hard. Did I say hard? I meant nigh impossible. Every time you turn the car on, it will attempt to connect to already paired devices as if it were for the first time. And once you've got your phone(s) connected to the thing, don't ever turn the car off, because if you do, you'll have had it. You see, to start the engine, the starter-motor kills power to all ancillaries for just a few seconds, till the engine is cranked up and running, and those few seconds of black-out are enough to wipe the Kinivo's memory clean. What a total pile of garbage.
But in comparison, that really is nothing, trust me. You need to know about this other contraption I have called the ‘Belkin Network USB Hub’. This dreadful piece of work, quietly ensconced under my WiFi router for the last several years, is supposed to connect USB devices like printers and flash-drives over LAN so I can access them from any of my computers wirelessly. In all its miserable life, it has managed to do no such thing; and if it all did, it had done it for no longer than a few minutes. Plagued by driver issues, the Belkin Network USB Hub could never hold a steady connection with a USB device for more than a few minutes. File transfers were abysmally slow, and print jobs rarely ever finished. To make matters worse, Belkin has never updated the driver for it, which means that since the days of Windows XP (for which it was designed), it has been becoming increasingly more useless; not to mention its incompatibility with today’s Android and iOS mobile devices.
My first world problems are seemingly endless. I could prattle on all day long about my HP all-in-one that simply cannot print a single document without mucking things up, or about my Philips home theatre that switches on loudly to an untuned radio station every time I change channels on my TV. But tech woes; we’ve all got them. Even if it looks like the simplest device in the world, like a remote control, it simply won't just work the way it should. It will drive you mad. Actually, a remote control is a terrible example; that is the first thing to die with any remote controlled device. Damn those little plastic boxes of evil!
It's times like these that I look down at the computer I’m typing on and think to myself, “Everything in the universe ought to be built like a ThinkPad.”
 |
| Good ol' T60 |
One of the two ThinkPad computers I own is an IBM T60 that’s nearly ten years old now. It served half its life as my father’s official computer at work, and the rest with me as my personal. In all its life, I have seen that machine fade away slowly, but only in appearance. Functionally, the T60 is still as steady as a rock. It has comfortably run OSes as old as Windows 2000 and as new as Windows 10, with a few Ubuntus in between. It started out life with less than a gigabyte of memory and now has around two and a half of it. Storage was a sixty gigabyte hard drive for the longest time, until I replaced it with a solid state drive of the same capacity some years ago for faster boot speeds.
Sure, some of the letters on the keys have faded away, the battery only lasts an hour these days, and the surface of the lid is so heavily scratched it resembles a well-worn airstrip, but on the whole, the T60 has survived the test of time a lot better than any other machine I have owned.
I will need a whole new blog-post just to explain the brilliance of this machine’s design. So let me, instead, just say that everything about it is extremely well thought-out, intuitive, and more importantly, tough and built to last. It’s no surprise then that a ThinkPad is the only kind of computer allowed on the International Space Station.
At this point, it may look like I’m being unfair in comparing the ThinkPad to a Kinivo Bluetooth receiver, which is a lot like comparing a legend like the Boeing 747 to a cheap radio clock, but no; I’m not being the least bit unfair. I have a fan on my desk that is as old as I am and to this day, works like a charm. All I’m saying is, we shouldn’t have to put up with rubbish gadgets.
Oh well, I can never have them all, I guess. Then again, if my existing electronic devices didn't actually suffer from sudden memory-loss, heart-attacks, or hysteria every now and then, I’d never get to realise how magnificent my ThinkPad is.
Until next time...
Vignesh
