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1. Introduction My desktop machine at home started to take up too much space lately,
so I
decided to replace it with an affordable notebook computer, offering at
least the same performance as my 1GHz Athlon desktop. Besides price and
performance, the only other real important requirement was of course
that it
needed to run OS/2 or eComStation reasonably well. As I already have an
older Thinkpad 390E running OS/2, I am well familiar with the
brand. Although I took a close look at some machines of another brand
(Acer
Travelmate 600 series, ASUS, Dell), I quickly decided to go for the
Thinkpad R40. At the time of my decision, I found out that
IBM Belgium was offering a €100.00 discount on this machine in a
promotional December Xmas sale. Combined with the machine's
specifications and the attractiveness of the "Thinkpad" brand name,
this made
my decision to buy an easy one. 1.1. Versions The latest model in the Thinkpad R-series is the R50(p), so it is uncertain how long the R40 will remain available. All the R-series models share the following common features : lightweight (starting at 2.4kg), Microsoft Windows XP preloaded, 14" or 15" TFT screen, Wi-Fi wireless support, "IBM UltraConnect" antenna, "Thinkpad ultraNav" multi-pointing device, Rapid Restore software for data backup and recovery. Other features, such as the processor type, memory size, storage devices, screen size/resolution, etc. will vary depending on the exact model type. The model being discussed in this review is the Thinkpad R40-2722CDG (IBM partnr. TR4CDBE), which is a high performance model in the R40 range of Thinkpads. 1.2. To buy or not to buy? On the IBM web site, OS/2 is not listed as a supported platform for
this machine. I'm aware that most people using OS/2 on a Thinkpad will
recommend a T-series model for compatibility reasons, but these are
much more expensive and, considering my budget, no option. On the
other hand, I found quite a few articles on the web discussing the
installation of various flavors of Linux on the Thinkpad R40. Most of
the reviewers are very favorable in their conclusion, showing few
problems to run and configure Linux on this machine. This finally
assured me that I wouldn't have to expect too much trouble
getting OS/2 or eComStation to run as well. 2. The Ordering Experience
The machine and the router were delivered very early the next day,
and I still had to go to the bank to get the cheque. Luckily, the
delivery guy agreed to wait until I got the money. Everything was well
packed, and the IBM box included a Targus mini USB scroll mouse and a
nylon Targus carrying bag for the Thinkpad. Documentation was a little
more condensed than I had expected (with my old Thinkpad 390E I got a
generous pile of books), and I was somewhat disappointed to find out
that the pre-installed software did not come on a CD, but instead was
placed on a pre-configured hidden partition, taking up
5GB of my hard disk space. I got on the phone with IBM Support to
request recovery CD's, but
they refused to send them because the software recovery
system on my disk was still intact and untouched. Bummer! Maybe when
I decide to wipe that partition in the future, I will still be able to
get those CD's. Generally, I'm very satisfied with how things went ordering this
machine, because I think I got a very good deal and I certainly didn't
have to
wait a long time to get my hands on my new toy. 3. Specifications Click here to download pci.exe's output
while running on IBM ThinkPad R40 model 2722CDG.
4. System Set-Up and Installing eComStation 1.1 4.1. General The system comes with Windows XP Professional pre-installed in one
single large partition. A separate and hidden part of the disk contains
an
image of the pre-installed software, which makes it easy to
restore the system to factory pre-sets using the blue "Access IBM"
button on the keyboard, without the need for a CD or any other
media. A recovery CD can be obtained by request, but IBM Belgium
refused to do so in my case, because the recovery data on my system was
still intact and fully functional. The downside of this type of
recovery system is that a relatively large part of the 40GB hard disk
is completely unavailable for your own use. My initial plan was to keep the pre-installed Windows XP partition,
but to
shrink it's size to make room for eComStation 1.1. The setup I had
in mind had a 15GB primary NTFS partition for Windows XP,
a
small partition for IBM's boot manager, and several logical partitions
for eComStation, one formated with HPFS and bootable, and the others
formatted with JFS for my applications and data. I was able to shrink
the primary partition from within Windows using
Partition Magic 8.0. eComStation booted from it's installation CD
without any problem, but I soon encountered a first and critical
problem as MiniLVM reported that boot manager could not be installed in
the desired location on my disk because of
BIOS limitations (1024 cylinder limit). Even after upgrading the BIOS
to the latest available level, this problem persisted. The only
workable solution for me was to shrink the Windows partition even more,
well below the 1024 cylinder limit. After that, eComStation and boot
manager installed and ran without any problem. I have yet to find out
if it is indeed the BIOS on my machine that imposes the 1024 cylinder
limit, if
the eComStation installer is causing the problem, or if the hidden
pre-desktop area on the disk is causing the problem. I've seen several
reports
from other users who did not encounter this problem when installing
Linux or OS/2 on the same machine. 4.2. Installing Device Drivers I didn't collect any additional drivers prior to installing
eComStation 1.1, as I expected the included drivers on the
installation CD to be enough to get the base system working. Except for
the sound card and the PC Card, this is
indeed the case, so after the initial install I started adding
a number of special drivers to my system to enhance functionality :
4.3. Sound The Thinkpad R40's sound card is based on the Analog Devices'
SoundMAX
AD1981B AC'97 codec. I found two drivers for this chip on the web : one
is discontinued from Analog Devices and can be downloaded from Hobbes.
The other is still in development by Kiev Elephant's UniAud
Team, a motivated group of OS/2 developers. I didn't bother to try the
AD driver, and
instead immediately chose to install the UniAud driver. I haven't
stress tested it yet, but it seems to perform
very well on WAV files. Unfortunately this driver still lacks MIDI
support, but
until that
functionality becomes available, I'm sure that Timidity/2
will
meet all my requirements in this area. 4.4. Video I selected the Scitech SDD
driver and a 800 x 600 resolution during the first phase of the
eComStation installation, which worked well. Afterwards I
installed Scitech SNAP
Graphics for OS/2 version 2.3.0 (currently still in beta),
which
perfectly recognizes and drives the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 video
card. With a 1400 x 1050 resolution and 16M colors, the 15" TFT panel
is a real joy to look at. I haven't tested the video card yet with an
external monitor attached to it, but I really don't expect any negative
surprises here. 4.5. Modem Before I even decided to buy this machine, I was already aware that
the built-in
Agere Systems AC'97 modem probably won't work in OS/2, so I can't say
I'm very dissapointed by
this. As I have a
broadband DSL internet connection, I don't have an urgent need for a
modem anyway, so I haven't spent time yet trying to make it work. (If
anyone does, he or she is very welcome to report on this.) 4.6. Pointing Devices The TrackPoint pointing device and UltraNav touch pad both seem to
work
fine with the standard trackpoint driver included with eComStation 1.1.
and provide basic two-button functionality. The eComStation Mouse
object reports the driver as "IBM 10.087 - Oct 23 2002". This
driver does not support the special third button features of the
pointing device, so this is something that I will have to investigate
later on. The eComStation 1.1. installer correctly recognized the USB
ports on
this machine, and the Targus USB mini scroller mouse works fine
out-of-the-box with the eComstation supplied USB drivers; even the
scroller wheel works nicely. With the USB mouse plugged in, you
can still use the Trackpoint and touch pad for mouse navigation. 4.7. Networking IBM's device
driver matrix for the R40 includes an OS/2 driver for the built-in
Intel PRO/100/1000 LAN Adapter, which works perfectly well for me. The
only
caveath here is that the driver is distributed as a self-extracting
Windows
binary, so you'll have to extract it on a Windows
system or use Odin. On the other hand, there is no driver
available yet for the Intel PRO/Wireless LAN adapter, part of Intel
Centrino compliant models. 4.8. PCMCIA Socket Services This turned out to be the most difficult part to get working under
eComStation, because it took me quite some time and help from a few
friends to find a working combination of a socket services driver and a
driver for my Wi-Fi card. I absolutely need wireless LAN on this
machine, and as the built-in wireless Intel adapter is still
unsupported, I decided to buy a relatively cheap LinkSys
Instant Wireless WPC11 PC Card. My decision to get this particular
card was based on information I found on this site, and the fact that
the PRISM chip in this card seems to be well supported by several
drivers, although the card itself comes with Windows-based drivers
only. The Thinkpad R40 has a Texas
Instruments PCI1510 Cardbus Controller. Unfortunately, this chip is not
yet supported by IBM's Cardbus support, however there is a patched
driver available from Daniela Engert on Hobbes that accepts this
chip and works very well. Make sure you get the driver dated Sep 7,
2003 as Hobbes possibly lists an older version that still lacks support
for the TI1510 chip. I first installed IBM's Cardbus Support 8.0
(extract the archive with the '-di -ov' parameters) and afterward
replaced the 'IBM2SS14.SYS' base device driver in config.sys with the
'SS2TICB.SYS' driver that I obtained from Dani. If neither IBM's
Cardbus support nor Dani's patch work for you, there is still the
commercial Socket Services for OS/2 product from APSoft, which support the TI1510 chip
as well. 5. Advanced Power Management 5.1. System Battery Monitoring Most functions of the eComStation Power object work, and the system
correctly changes state when changing from battery to outlet power or
vice versa. However, I
have noticed that the information in the window under 'Power
Optimization' and 'Battery State' doesn't get refreshed. The
Battery Power widget in the eCenter works fine and correctly reports
the selected power
source
and battery state, except when the battery runs completely empty, the
widget reports an incorrect percentage. I've been working with this
machine on battery power for over 7 hours, which completely satisfies
my expectations. 5.2. Standby and Suspend Issues Turning off the TFT panel works very well by using the Fn+F3 key
combination. Fn+F4 puts the system in Suspend state. On occasion the
system has completely locked up when awakening from Suspend. I have not
found the cause of this problem yet, but I think it might be related to
the use of the USB mouse. Without the mouse plugged in, I haven't
experienced any lockups yet. As I had expected, the Hibernate feature
(Fn+F12) just
doesn't seem to do anything under OS/2. 6. Installing Applications This machine comes with pre-installed software, including Windows XP
Professional, Norton Anti-virus, IBM Backup and Recovery tools and more
useful and not-so-useful IBM software. One of the
first applications I installed under eComStation was Virtual PC 5.1 for
OS/2. An
FTP-installation of SuSE Linux 9.0 in a guest machine worked very well
and completed within an hour. Performance of the Linux guest, using
Sun's Java 1.4 and Mozilla for an on line banking application that
won't
run
under OS/2, is completely adequate for my needs. I'm running the
same Mozilla browser suite on eComStation without any performance
problems. Even the loading time of the browser is quite acceptable to
me now.
I have installed Golden Code's native Java 1.4.x implementation. I
don't have any benchmark numbers, but except
for the loading time of applications, programs like XNap run on this
system as if they were native
programs. I'm using the CD/RW device on this machine with Audio/Data
CD-Creator, which
is a free and excellent WPS-enabled front end to cdrecord to write
CD's. I have
installed WarpVision for DVD playback, which works reasonably well. To
summarize, this machine completely meets my
first requirement of replacing my desktop machine in terms of
performance. 7. The Bottom Line The poor way
the Suspend and Hibernate features seem to work under OS/2 is about the
only thing on this machine that I'm really not impressed with. I
don't care too much about the missing MIDI support in the UniAud driver
and the lack of IBM support for the integrated modem and the PC Card
socket. Nevertheless,
I would recommend the Thinkpad R40 to anyone who needs an affordable
machine that will run OS/2 or eComStation. As far as I'm concerned,
it's
nearly impossible to find another modern notebook today that will run
OS/2
better than this one, except of course for the Thinkpad T40-series. The
R40 is a relatively light weight machine, but
still has that magnificent 15" TFT panel and it has a fantastic
keyboard. With the Intel 1.4MHz Pentium
M
processor and 512MB RAM, it has enough horse power for the most
demanding of my applications.
8. References |
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Last modified: 2004/08/30, 14:30 | This site is sponsored by Mensys B.V. |
PCMCIA Installation Guide
I checked with
two local IBM dealers to see if they were aware of the Xmas promotional
discount, as advertised on the IBM Belgium web site. Both dealers knew
about the sale, but there still was a small difference in
pricing between the two of them, so I decided to order the machine with
the cheapest one. Instead of ordering by e-mail from their on line
catalog 
