kopsis
Group: Members
Posts: 65
Joined: July 2005 |
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Posted: Aug. 09 2005,16:14 |
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You have to get pretty ancient to get standard "hayes compatible" built-in modems. You'll probably lose USB (and I'll be surprised if you can get a PCMCIA to USB card to plug-and-play with DSL) and you'll likely be stuck with old 16-bit PCMCIA (no CardBus which eliminates many wired and wireless ethernet cards). You'll also be severly limiting you max RAM which (contrary to popular belief) is far more important to performance than CPU speed.
As for the 600e, DSL actually *does* include a driver (originally open sourced by IBM) for the built-in MWave modem in the 600e. I've loaded the driver without errors but I've never been able to test it (no landline -- just broadband and cell phones) so I have no idea if it really works or how much manual configuration is necessary. Perhaps someone else has tried it?
Another plus of the 600e is that power management actually works! If you first eject any PCMCIA cards, the sleep, suspend, and hibernate to disk functions work flawlessly with DSL. I even have a thinkpad.dsl extension that lets you control many of the power management settings in the BIOS without the need to boot Windows or DOS (however it doesn't have a nice graphical interface). Batteries (I just replaced mine) can be had on EBay for under $30 (retail they're around $100) and running "toram" with a wifi card and surfing the net I can easily get three hours of battery life.
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