Laptops Arena

The ThinkPad T43 is an IBM laptop which has a few years of experience on the market. And I’m not saying that as a good thing. It has a 1.86 Intel Pentium M 750 processor, 512 MB of DDR2 RAM, 60 GB of hard disk space and the ATI X300 graphics card with 64 MB of video memory. Those are the quick specs. Let’s go over the big picture now.
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If there is one thing these ThinkPads are known for is the durability. They are solid built laptops with a matte black look. Their weak specs used to be quite good back in 2004 but today they are a thing of the past.  There is nothing very special or good looking about the design of this laptop. You can choose between a 15 inch or a 14.1 inch display for the T43. The advantages of having a smaller screen is that the battery life will last longer and the laptop will be lighter. The lid is made of magnesium alloy so there will be no flexing of the screen. The overall chassis made of titanium-reinforced plastic. The screen is connected to the main unit by good metal hinges that will make sure the screen does not wobble. The right side of this laptop hosts the optical drive and the D-SUB port. The optical drive is a CD-RW/DVD-RW drive. The majority of the ports are on the left side of the laptop. There are 2 USB ports here, an S-Video port, the Ethernet and modem jacks plus the headphones and microphone jacks. The front side holds the PC card slot plus the Express Card slot. As for the back of the laptop, we have the battery. Please note that is you are using an additional battery, it will be seen as an extension here at the back.

The 14.1 inch display has a 1280 x 1024 resolution.  The screen is ok and so is its brightness. Of course, they are nothing compared to the displays found on recent laptops. The horizontal viewing angles are ok which makes it easy to gather some friends around this IBM and watch a movie. You have a pointing stick is case the touchpad is not satisfying enough and you know we love laptops that give us lots of possibilities. It’s nice to use the pointing stick because it helps you move the cursor easily and it’s simpler to get it exactly where you want. If you combine the pointing stick with the scroll button it’s easier to read big documents and scroll through large web pages. The three buttons for the pointing stick are above the touchpad and in case you are wondering what the middle button does, that is the scroll button we were talking about earlier. The left and right mouse buttons are ok and they are easy to push because they are raised.



The keyboard is quite simple in my opinion and it offers nice feedback each time you type.  It has 7 rows rather that 6 like most laptops have. This means that there is more typing room and your fingers won’t feel so cramped. The keys have excellent travel. There is no flexing on the keyboard of this sturdy laptop. Above the keyboard you will find some functional buttons that are used to power up the laptop, to turn the volume up and down, a mute control button and a special “access IBM” button which launches special IBM applications that will help you configure and protect your laptop and recommend some downloads for update. It’s nice to see that IBM is so concerned with customer satisfaction even after they managed to sell a unit. In case you the name ThinkPad is familiar to you, know that Lenovo has bought the IBM PC division.



The processor is ok for working with basic applications and it will give you no trouble when you want to surf the internet. Speed is ok for basic computing needs but it’s so hard to get used to it if you had a better computer until now. The graphics are also plain and simple so no 3D applications or super new and demanding games for you with this laptop. We thought the speakers would be miserable on such an old IBM laptop. They are not that weak at all. It does not have the greatest speakers we saw in a 14.1 inch laptop but they are average and the sound quality is acceptable. There are no serious heating problems with the T43. The bottom will get a bit warm after long hours of use but it won’t be uncomfortable. Unlike today’s laptops, the right palm rest area gets hotter than the left one because that is where the hard drive is located. The fan makes a bit of noise under intense use but it is not disturbing.



The laptop comes with a standard 6-cell battery but if portability is your main interest that you may want to go with the 9-cell battery. With the 9-cell battery you can get about 5 hours and 40 minutes of laptop usage if you surf the internet and do some word processing. This laptop was meant for business usage (it even has an optional fingerprint reader) but if you are looking for good laptops with even better components and performance, the new Lenovo ThinkPad is a much better choice. However, the old IBM T43 does have one of the best and most firm keyboard we have ever seen and the TrackPoint navigation is very easy to use and may really come in handy.



The chassis is very durable due to the titanium reinforced plastic. We would have liked to see more than 2 USB ports on a 14.1 inch laptop and if you want to attach an external mouse that you will be left with only one port which can be disturbing. Unfortunately it does not have a media card reader which is a common feature in new laptops. The fingerprint reader is a nice feature that offers extra security for a business laptop.

IBM has announced its SAP performance on a POWER6-based server and the result of a study on its Power Systems that allows customers to save up to 33% on operating costs in an SAP solution-based environment. The IBM Power6-based Power 550 (a server with 4 processors/8 cores – 4 dual-core processor chips) has been proved to handle 3,752 users, a figure that eclipses the results of other vendors, HP, Sun, Hitachi, and Fujitsu, all of them using Intel’s chips. The IBM result displays a performance of SAP apps and DB2 V 9.5 database functioning on the AIX 6.1 OS in a Power 550 2-tier environment. The results also show IBM Power6 as the world’s fastest chip, beating the competition in this matter.
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The ITG report outlines that the costs for use of Power servers in a period of three years, are ranged from 25 to 33% less than the x86 servers. These costs include the acquisition and maintenance of hardware, the SS support and licenses, OSs and virtualization tools. These facts offer a perfect alternative for the clients that are currently on Solaris or HP/UX and face chips delays or cancellations. The Power Systems software displays capabilities like micro-partitioning and active memory sharing, provides higher utilization in the data center, that lead to reducing costs in energy, space, maintenance and software licenses.

The IBM Power Systems are globally consolidated offering lower training demands and shared knowledge that can be utilized across all the operations, reducing by 10% the annual costs. Power Systems hardware, software and services next to an aggressive sales and marketing activities enabled IBM to consolidate its number one position in the UNIX market. As to mid-sized database servers, the Power 550 offers great performance capacity and continuous application availability, enabling these servers to access data at a faster pace, keep apps running, and at the same time concentrate on the business.

The Power 550 Express provides an option to operate environments in a deskside or 4U rack-mount form factor. This platform is conceived to deliver noticeable business value to the businesses that are medium-sized; the number one performance of POWER6 processors, the choice of OSs, together with the virtualization capabilities already proved to exist in PowerVM, and support for energy management technologies bring the benefits of a conserved energy, hence costs reducing. It is all that one can ask for from Power 550 Express whether one needs a scalable complete business system with incorporated database and app server or high performing system for database or app serving.