Think WHY! (IBM Thinkpad 390X)

Member Name: Little Miss

Product:	IBM Thinkpad 390X
Date:	28/09/00 (1100 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: I'll have to think about this!

Disadvantages: The Docking station is a real pain

At first this looks like quite a good invention, you get a docking station with a cdrom drive and a disk drive in it which is detachable. At first I also thought I could plug all my cables into it therefore I could just detach my laptop and go very easily without removing, external mouse, keyboard, palm pilot hot sync cable, external disk drvies etc. but no only the power cable can be plugged into the docking station and left connected. Hence I don't really see the point of having it.

The docking station makes the whole thing rather heavy which means when travelling I still take my external disk drive and leave the docking station behind. Also if the laptop is turned on when you attach it to the docking station, mine always recongises it as new hardware and insists on being rebooted to finish the setup of the new hardware. You can ignore this but it just keeps reappearing. Also sometimes when attached to the docking station it flips from power supply to battery, this can be solved by pressing the laptop harder into the docking station provided you notice otherwise your battery runs low. So after thinking about this for a while I can't help asking WHY? Why is there this docking station, I see a potential there but more has to be done with it before I'd recommend it.

Moving away from the dreaded docking station I could rant about it for hours. The laptop itself is fine, the screen is a reasonable size, the keyboard has quite a large section at the front to rest your wrists on when typing which is definitely needed especially when the docking station is attached as the keys are then quite high from the desk.

My only other real problem is my hate of the trackpoint cover, this red slightly prickly, slightly fury, dirt attracting thing!

Summary: