Geeks.com were once more very kind to send us one of their products for a review. Geeks sells cheap laptops –among others– and so we asked for a low-cost laptop without an operating system in it for the purpose of this review. They sent us the IBM T23, (currently selling for just $299) and an extra 256 MB stick of RAM ($30). We tested the laptop with three different OSes, read on for more.
The refurbished laptop came well-packed and in very good condition. We found no blemishes or cuts in the body of the laptop. In the box we found just a power charger. Installing the extra memory (SDRAM – non-ECC – 133 MHz) was exceptionally easy and so we overall then had 512 MBs of RAM. The laptop uses a PIII-M CPU at 1.13 Ghz, a 30 GB drive, a DVD-ROM, an S3 SuperSavage IX dual-head graphics card, 2 USB ports, ethernet, 56k modem, 2 PCMCIA ports, line in/out, mic-in, 14.1″ 1024×768 TFT screen, serial & parallel ports, S-Video out, PS/2 port. The laptop weighs 5.3 lbs overall: it’s pretty portable and it feels rigid.
The first thing you are going to like about this laptop is its keyboard. It gives you good tactile feedback and it’s soft, but without being “mushy”. This is definitely one of the best keyboards I have ever typed on. The first thing that you might dislike though, is the fact that this laptop does not feature a touchpad, but instead a “touch stick”. It will take a few hours to get used to it if you had never used an IBM laptop before.
The first operating system we tried on it was Ubuntu Feisty, the latest beta. Installation went perfectly fine. At first, it seems that the laptop works great with Feisty: ethernet, graphics, drive etc, but if you use it for a bit more time you will find a few bugs, mostly having to do with the Savage driver. I have made a number of bug reports at Ubuntu’s bugzilla since I tried the OS on this laptop. Most important bugs are the occasional crash of the ethernet after a suspend-to-RAM wake up (same bug happen on other laptops too), USB does not wake up at all after suspend-to-RAM (seems to be a recent 2.6.20 kernel bug) and 4-5 more S3 Savage driver bugs.
I have no doubt in my mind that the USB and ethernet bugs will be eventually fixed (there is a possibility that these are Ubuntu Feisty-specific bugs rather than generic Linux bugs), but I believe that the Savage bugs won’t get fixed because there is no active maintainer for the driver in the Xorg project anymore. Moreover, the Lucent winmodem in the laptop does not have a stable driver that I can trust (closed or open source) for the 2.6.x kernel. I also tried the VESA driver which actually worked flawlessly compared to the Savage driver (minus the lack of Xv and 3D support for course), but the real problem is that when using the VESA driver the laptop refuses to go to sleep (Gnome-power-manager will just blank the screen instead of going to sleep when closing the lid while VESA is used instead of a real accelerated driver).
Battery life with Ubuntu is clocked at 1:30 to 1:35 hours.
Overall, while I was unhappy with the kind of compatibility I got from Ubuntu Linux on this laptop (2 suspend bugs and 4 savage ones), I must say that the laptop performed really well: it booted Ubuntu in 55 seconds and the OS didn’t seem to consume more than 180 MBs of RAM most of the time. The laptop was spiffy and never once I felt that was lagging in CPU power. In fact, the laptop played back 480p HD video without dropping a single frame. It managed up to 510 fps in glxgears which is not too bad at all considering the state of the 3D savage driver. Games like the 3D game “Neverball” worked really fast.
The next OS I tried was a copy of BeOS MAX. Again, everything worked admirably well (BeOS was extremely fast on this laptop), but the Savage driver support was sub-par. I had to use VESA again.
Finally, I tried Windows XP. This is where the laptop really worked 100%, flawlessly, including the savage driver. There were no suspension problems with XP. My husband uses almost the same laptop daily in his workplace and he agrees that Windows XP for years now has performed admirably on the T23.
Geeks.com sell a lot more laptops at good prices, we highly suggest looking at getting one that comes with an Intel graphics card (we tried to get one of these for a review originally as we knew they were more compatible than a Savage-based one but the price was a bit over our limit). The Intel card is very well supported by Xorg, even better than Nvidia or ATi cards — albeit not as powerful. Have a look at Geeks’ catalog and find a refurbished laptop at a low price that suits your needs, especially something like this IBM R40.
UPDATE July 2008: Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 works perfectly with the laptop, all bugs are fixed. More over, the Lucent winmodem works easily with the “-full” “martian” driver: compile and install as per instructions the driver and then do a “modprobe martian_dev” and then a “martian_modem –daemon –mode 0666”. You can then put these two commands on your /etc/rc.local to get the modem started on each reboot. If you upgrade your kernel you will have to recompile the driver.
Pros:
* Full featured, no-frills laptop
* Great construction quality
* Affordable price
Cons:
* After Ubuntu fixing their bugs, not much
Overall: 8/10
I’ve been considering doing this for a while myself.
Good to see others have had some success – maybe I will get off my arse and actually do this. 🙂
ive been running my T23 dual boot windows xp and debian linux for about 2 years. it works great. though i dont think the laptop is that out of date. how fast a machine do you need for word processing and other work related tasks? mine also plays DVD’s and stuff just fine. and runs unreal tournamanet. this wasnt a gaming laptop even when new so dont expect anything newer then DX7 or DX8 games to work at all.
ive been running my T23 dual boot windows xp and debian linux for about 2 years. it works great. though i dont think the laptop is that out of date
Agreed, I have a 900MHz ThinkPad T22 that’s running just fine with XP Pro SP2
The T23 is known as perhaps the best succeeded Thinkpad model and it does feel great….damn that grahics card, though: otherwise it might have been my BeOS laptop.
Spare parts are easy to get and repairs are also easy -thanks to good Hardware Maintenance Manuals. Also, there’s a large and useful community of Thinkpad users, to be found at the forums of thinkpads.com.
Edited 2007-04-04 18:31
“The T23 is known as perhaps the best succeeded Thinkpad model and it does feel great….”
It even has a usable build in keyboard. Where are these useless “Windows” keys? Glad I can’t find them on the picture published in the article. 🙂
Furthermore, like his predecessors, the T23 has a trackpoint (this is how IBM calls the “touch stick” in the article) instead of these blurry touchpads with their habit of getting dirty and being imprecise.
It’s a nice little machine that is worth keeping it alive for a while. For programming, diagnostics, for watching CDs and DVDs and even for gaming it’s quite good. And it’s nice to see it works fine with Linux.
>It even has a usable build in keyboard. Where are these useless “Windows” keys?
Why do you call the Windows keys useless?
I use them quite often:
Win+D to show the desktop (iconifying all the windows)
Win+L to lock your PC
And more rarely:
Win+R to run a command
Too bad, Linux distribs, by default, doesn’t use the same shortcut keys..
On a desktop the windows keys are fine, however on a laptop they just get in the way.
“Why do you call the Windows keys useless?”
Because they are, at least to the average user.
“I use them quite often:
Win+D to show the desktop (iconifying all the windows)
Win+L to lock your PC
And more rarely:
Win+R to run a command “
You’re marking yourself as a quite professional “Windows” user because you know this. The L and D combination weren’t even known to me. Tje average user uses the mouse more than the keyboard, and he usually avoids these keys.
“Too bad, Linux distribs, by default, doesn’t use the same shortcut keys..”
Just have a look at the configuration dialog of your favourite desktop environment (KDE or Gnome) or the window manager of your choice, you can surely configure it this way. This should not be very hard to do. But I don’t think KDE’s or Gnome’s developers will implement these functions by default.
At work, I use an Apple USB keyboard and have set some useful functions (using xmodmap and the XFCE configuration), at home I use a Sun USB keyboard where the many extra keys (just have a look at its layout in xkeycaps: Sun Microsystems Type 5), along with Compose and Meta. “Windows” users surely don’t know what these are used for, so they usually call them useless. In my opinion, the “Windows” keys are useless because they don’t to something by default or in general, they just consume the rare space on the keyboard (space bar), which is often a problem on small laptop keyboards if you feel more comfortable with a real keyboard. 🙂
There are a couple Windows button shortcuts you missed:
Win+E to open a Windows Explorer window
and
Win+Break to open the System properties page.
I don’t know about the Win+L myself though.
I agree with someone else though that most users won’t know about this.
win+m minimize all, win+u utility man, not that i’d use them much
but i can’t really live without ctrl+shift+esc and win+l
It’s not that I missed them, it’s that I don’t use them: I have the explorer opened at startup, so I don’t need Win+E.
I don’t use ‘System properties’ often enough to remember Win+Break.
OTOH, I use ‘Win+D’ quite often.
I wish that more companies would focus on lower spec laptops. Something with a 1gig processor and enhanced battery life and reliability as a result.
I love my Thinkpad t42. Works fantastically well in Linux and BSD. I doubt I’ll ever buy anything other than Thinkpads. There is a great wiki for Linux on Thinkpads: http://www.thinkwiki.org.
I’ve worked three years in a place using Thinkpad laptops and I can say I had been pretty please by the performance those offered, even for old R31. The problem I’ve seen the more often were broken keyboard, dead back light and dead cd-rom drive. I’ve had hard drive failure only twice. Keep in mind that batteries on these old laptop wont hold charge for a long time due to their age. Buying a new one (9 cells) will let you have near 3 hours with everything disabled under Windows.
I could definitly recommand Thinkpad, even refurbished. I especialy like the R40, wich have both touchpad and clit. Somes also have integrated wireless network, but those are B adapters sucking up battery juice too fast. I would recommand getting rid of those and buying a good card bus know for energy efficiency.
old for me means: 300MHz P2, for which is not free and good operating system available.
I was thinking older as well. However, you might want to look into either older releases of current distro’s, which won’t have problems, or some of the particularly small flavours. I’ve got a PIII-700 or so with 128mb RAM in the bathroom, the CD drive barely works, hard drives no longer function. I boot DSL – ‘Damn Small Linux’ – the whole thing is 50mb, and it works admirably. Check it out.
I’ve got a PIII-700 or so with 128mb RAM in the bathroom
Why ?
missing rolleyes in your message?
try gettin’ out of that chair and google “masturb*”
Surprisingly common question. Tunes in the b-room for showers and parties, as well both my room mates are girls… they take baths’ and facebook…. Once most of the rooms in your house have an old and broken computer, you get used to the utility.
Do you have a sealed shower or something? I always thought that steam/condensation would kill a computer pretty quickly in that sort of environment.
Appearantly not. There’s not even a vent fan, and I’ve numerous times popped out of the water stream to change tracks, dripping water all over the place. Most laptops do have a metal plate behind the keyboard, so that’s not much of a concern, but condensation… not hurt anything yet.
Laptops: Tougher than you’d think! (??!)
“old for me means: 300MHz P2, for which is not free and good operating system available.”
I may disagree and explain:
First, you can always use a Linux which was new when the hardware was new. THis combination will work without any problem.
Second, you cannot assume a P2/300 to do everything a 5GHz quadrillioncore new Intel can do. Or, to be more precise, it almost can do everything, but not at the same speed.
I say this because we use a P2/333 at work with FreeBSD 5 and XFCE 3, usually running Opera, X-Chat, OpenOffice 1 and LaTeX. No real speed problems, can you imagine? Hey, it even runs a playable lsdldoom! 🙂
This leads me to this statement: Your claim is wrong as long as you can’t be more precise. For example, if you want to play up to date games, you won’t find a free and good OS for a P2/300. But for other realistic purposes, you surely will.
So “old” depends on what you’re planning to do. I would not consider the T23 to be an old computer, even though it may not be the newest one. A P2/300 is quite old, but an 8088 is really old, and here you’ll encounter the problem of not getting a usable OS, but not on the T23 or a P2/300.
And finally, remember: Old does not mean bad. Fine difference. And good depends on what you’re planning to do.
I disagree. I have an old Toshiba Satellite Pro 4270 with a PIII-400, 6GB Harddisk and 256MB Ram. I run Xubuntu 7.04 on it and it runs great. Even when using OpenOffice it is still responsive.
I had Win XP on it before and it also works well.
Edited 2007-04-05 09:29
Try <a href=”www.puppylinux.com”>Puppy Linux or a similar lightweight distribution. It runs rather nicely on my PPro/200 boxes at home. Needs 128MB, tho.
I really like Ubuntu, but, for me Slackware runs the best on older hardware. I’m not sure how the reviewer can rate the laptop lower on Linux support without trying more than one distro. Slackware runs very well on older IBM hardware:-)
Edited 2007-04-04 19:25
My work got T23 Thinkpads that have 1 GHz PIIIs and 256MB of RAM. I loaded them all with Kanotix (Debian based derivative of Knoppix.) They work like a champ, no noticable lag in any app, and boot up as fast as my HP/Compaq 2.4 GHz Hyperthreaded PIV with 512 MB of RAM workstation running Fedora Core 3 (updated.)
I wouldn’t really consider T23s old though. I have a Powerbook 3400 (180MHz PPC603e, 80MB RAM) running Yellow Dog 4.0. THAT is old and slow, let me tell ya.
For $100 more I like the R40 better. More everything plus an ATI graphics card.
Should be “Resurrecting” instead of “Ressurecting”
The author should have tried some other distribution(s) which are know for good hardware support (SuSE, Mandriva). Linux is about choice and Ubuntu is often not the best.
I won’t fall into your Linux trap, because each time I try another linux distro and find bugs, there will be ANOTHER user will say that I should have used HIS favorite distro. So, I decided to only use the most popular distro, and that’s Ubuntu at this point in time.
I am not a fan of Ubuntu but -damn it – you tested a BETA RELEASE (!) on the laptop!! No wonder you ran into grave bugs. Doh! If you want to write a fair article, then test the same lappy with the Windows XP Beta release and other OS’s that are still developmental versions.
Two thumbs down from me.
The final version of Ubuntu comes out in 10 days, they are in freeze mode. If you expect miracles and fixing of all these 6 major bugs in 10 days (especially because there is no living soul who maintains the savage driver), then you are living in your own world. When Ubuntu ships, these bugs I mentioned will STILL be there. Except myself and another guy who also owns a T23 laptop and was able to reproduce the bugs, no one else have responded in my T23-related bug reports at Ubuntu.
I beg you to email me after the release of Ubuntu Feisty and to ask me if the bugs were fixed (or simply check at the bugzilla’s url yourself and check my T23 bugs out to see if they will be fixed or not).
The final version of Ubuntu comes out in 10 days, they are in freeze mode.
The release is planned for 15 days from now.
I completely understand your decision to stick to one distribution, but you have to admit picking a beta (and recognizing some of the bugs you found are specific to it) is not the best way to make an evaluation. I beg you to try a stable release, maybe even 6.06 LTS instead of 6.10.
I keep updating Feisty daily. When Feisty is out in 15 days, send me an email and ask me if the bugs are still there. I mentioned this above. I bet that all bugs will still be there. That’s what matters to me, because for me, the laptop is unusable with these suspend and graphics bugs. The savage bugs is sure to happen on all distros for example.
To be honest, if the requirement was for sleep/hibernate to fully work, and for video (esp. 3D) to work as well as windows, I probably wouldn’t run Linux on any of my laptops. These are the kinds of issues I always assumed you had to live with if you wanted to walk on the Linux side.
To be honest, if the requirement was for sleep/hibernate to fully work, and for video (esp. 3D) to work as well as windows, I probably wouldn’t run Linux on any of my laptops.
I agree. Especially with the sleep/hibernate part. One other thing that Linux often fails behind of Windows is WiFi, as we all know. OTOH, 3D works very well in Linux with Intel chipsets, which are popular in laptops.
I would even say that, although Linux IS ready for the desktop (IMO), it’s not ready for laptops as long as these problems remain unresolved.
I must add though, that none of these problems are usually directly Linux’s fault but the fault of manufacturers who refuse to publish specs or provide Linux drivers for their hardware.
Edited 2007-04-05 09:49
I keep updating Feisty daily. When Feisty is out in 15 days, send me an email and ask me if the bugs are still there. I mentioned this above. I bet that all bugs will still be there.
I don’t doubt that the bug will still be there in 15 days; it may not be until after it’s released that they find a fix for it. (on an unrelated note, I’m very happy with 2.6.20-14. That version isn’t being pulled yet, maybe you’ll want to try to install it manually).
But keep in mind in 15 days you’ll be comparing a freshly released version of Ubuntu with a 5 year-old version of Windows on a 4 year-old laptop.
If you have the time, maybe you should compare Feisty with Windows Vista on that laptop (it does meet the minimum requirements, doesn’t it?). And if you can, try a more mature version of Ubuntu on it. From your comments, I get the impression that an older version of the kernel as well as Xorg 7.0 would be a better fit. You’ll find all that on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.
I have to agree with other users that your choice of Linux distribution could have been better. I recently tried Feisty. Since it was beta software, I wasn’t terribly surprised that I had to abandon it after a few days.
I appreciate the additional perspective of Feisty provided by your review, and I can understand your desire to use a recent copy of what you consider to be the most popular distro at the moment. I also commend you for submitting bug reports, but I would have liked to read about your experience with another distro. By definition different distributions have different strengths and weaknesses. Ubuntu hardly covers all of Linux.
I understand that there are always those who whine about how their distribution should have been used because “it would have worked.” Unfortunately, if you only try one distribution, readers have no way of knowing if a bug is specific to Ubuntu or if there might be a bug that would cause a problem with Linux in general. Anything that aims to be a good fit for the desktop would be good, but obviously it would help to try at least two distributions that don’t share repositories. The use of just one more distribution (I don’t care which one) would have made this review much better in my opinion.
Eugenia, could you do me a favour and try using the Scitech SNAP driver for Linux on the T23 and see if it fares any better?
My 3yr old Athlon64 laptop has broken and I was considering buying a second hand T23 as a stopgap measure until i can afford another decent laptop.
If it causes so many problems runing Linux then I will have look for another el-cheapo alternative.
Thanks, Nik.
Give me URL of the SNAP driver and I will try it for you.
http://www.scitechsoft.com/ftp/snap/linux/snap-linux-x86-3.1.2.tar….
Thank you. 🙂
ok, I tried the SNAP drivers. It does not work because the Scitech driver only supports xorg 7.0, not 7.2. It bails out when it comes modifying xorg.conf, and after I did it manually, it fails loading the actual driver saying that there was a mismatch.
You are better off with an Intel gfx laptop IMO.
Edited 2007-04-04 22:35
Bugger. 🙁
Thanks for trying anyway, much appreciated. Off to ebay for an intel chipset methinks.
@nicholas
Thanks for your request on this board. To ask for help instead of uselessy ranting how *nix y or z is better on x or y hardware.
And kudos to eugenia for helping him out with the request.
My laptop is a P3 1 gig (Toshiba), but with Nvidia graphics. It’s always worked a treat though I’ve never gone further than a rather crude “sudo hibernate” rather than lid-closing automation.
Imho, this is an ideal situation for Xfce rather than Gnome. Gnome is a little sluggish here (I’ve only tried up to 2.14) whereas Xfce really flies. Same is true for other stuff, like try Thunderbird or Sylpheed-Claws rather than Evolution, etc
Did you notice much of a difference in speed or responsiveness when running XP and Feisty? Or would you say they both performed about the same on that hardware?
About the same I would say.
That’s interesting. I was always under the impression that Ubuntu ran faster than XP on older hardware. I guess you only really get the performance boost with Linux on older hardware by using a lighter WM than Gnome or KDE.
Fluxbox flies on crap hardware. 🙂
Three hundred dollars for a used laptop computer that doesn’t even has an OS installed? Futhermore that model appears to be sold out; the cheapest laptop at the site now is $399. They must live in a different world…
I’d give fifty bucks for a used laptop…
The only laptop graphics that I’ve been satisfied with are the ATI Mobility Radeon models, like the Dell Inspiron 9100. That model is several years old and there may be better stuff now, but I doubt anything onboard could do as well.
Regarding the lack of touchpad, good riddence. I have to disable those anyway – I find it impossible to type without hitting the darn thing. Agree though that the touch stick is awkward and annoying – really a poor substitute for a mouse.
Best Wishes,
-Bob
I hope you like P2 processors
I have tried ubuntu as well, and it is getting better*
*(this is old history every,year we hear the same thing) but my main issue with linux now is wifi,speed, and
hardware compatibility. and please don’t over hype
the virtues of linux, I just hope before vista is forced
on all of us, linux, bsd beos and all the alternatives get their acts together!
Ps don’t forget win98 on old laptops, very fast and every thing works!!!
I can really vouch for reviving old laptops with Linux, if you can find the right hardware. I just recently put Ubuntu Edgy on my girlfriend’s laptop, an Averatec 3300. It replaced a two-years-old Windows XP setup which she was so fed up with, she was willing to pitch the thing. We’re both really happy with the results!
See, a cheap laptop will usually be doing the standard tasks that desktop Linux has down pretty well, and I figure keeping them out of a landfill and getting people happily using power-efficient computers is a reasonably green thing to do.
My 10 y/o Dell Inspiron PII/366Mhz/256MB (FC6/IceWM) is old… by comparison, a PIII/1.13Ghz is top of line!
– Gilboa
P.S. I even run vmware server on my poor laptop
An interesting article and I can’t help agree with your findings. For some time I’ve been trying to get a Linux distro working on my IBM T21. Since it is *older* hardware, I thought I could get a low-resource-but-still-nice-to-use distro working on it. I have favoured Xfce but to be honest I would use anything if I could get suspend to RAM to work, which I haven’t been able to. What is the point of having a laptop if you have to use it like a desktop?? I’ve tried (X)Ubuntu (Dapper, Eft), Slackware, SUSE, RedHat and others. I am currently using ZenWalk which is nice and nippy and very much recommended for this machine – except of course I don’t have suspend working.
At the end of the day this worked ok when the machine was running Windows XP and 2k. I’d love it to work with Linux but I suspect that is never going to happen and I am going to have to change the laptop.
I guess we are all going to have to wait for those new, spiffy Dell Linux laptops to come out.
I have to say that suspend/resume is not a real deal breaker for me. It doesn’t take that long to boot!! I have an older Compaq Duron laptop with a Savage video chip. It has Ubuntu Edgy on it, and I would not put Windows back on it for anything.
Far more important to me that the machine run stable, reliable, virus free and secure.
I maintain it. The problem is I also work, have a life, and maintain or co-maintain several other xorg drivers. I just recently fixed EXA support for svage and I’m currently working on non-bios dualhead modesetting and xrandr 1.2 support.
Great, expect an email of mine then with the bug report links.
savage driver is maintained. I maintain it.
this probably won’t mean much to you but… thanks!
folks like you help turn Linux from a kernel for academic study into a operating system people can use. again, thanks!
“Resurrecting older laptops with alternative operating systems… oh, wait, XP is just fine”. That’s kinda funny.
I would like to see what you can do with something like my Thinkpad 365XD: Pentium 133 MHz, 40 Mb RAM, 1 Mb video card, no network, no modem, no USB, still runs its original installation of Windows 95 (never formatted).
To “resurrect” a computer, the bare minimun it should be able to do is to surf the nowaday’s web.
I have a Pentium 90 with 48MB of ram that works fine as an internet-enabled machine. It runs debian, and I use a light-weight window-manager – Blackbox. I fire up “Links2 -g” and I can surf the web graphically (it renders pictures and sites very quickly). I can check my email (Yahoo), make my fantasy moves and read all my news (like OSNews).
Obviously you need a network. Doesn’t your laptop have a pcmcia slot? You should be able to put a network card in it.
I have a houseful of old laptops (P90, P233, Duron 1.1, etc) and I leave them all over the house, so the Net is always at my fingertips. My kids have desktops for gaming, but the each have wireless PII laptops for surfing the net, checking their gaming news, etc.
A realy lightweight choice for older machines is DSL linux. It has minimum requirements of a 486 with 16MB ram. I use it on some older laptops and it works great. Really, if you stay away from Gnome and KDE, most distro’s can be made to run on older hardware.
Another good “distro” for older laptops is OpenBSD (if you know what you are doing). It has broad wireless support.
http://www.laptoplibre.com
:))
How many computers/laptops do you actually have??!
Counting my kids’ computers, about 15!
I worked with an old latop today, 128MB PC66 RAM, 7GB hard drive, 366MHz PII-M. Windows 2000 barely runs that thing. The previous owner put Office 2003 on it!
The owners were trying to resurect it for the daughter’s use in college. I tried to boot Vector Linux 5.3, it never loaded X.org, it froxe loading SAMBA. This would have been a good time to show them the wonders of Linux on old hardware 🙁
Try several distros. Google the video card – that is usually the hardest thing to get working right. Sometimes you have to edit xorg.conf manually. If you hang in there, you can do it. Also, OpenBSD is a good choice for older laptops.