Hello! Joachim. I think that the problem you had with your Thinkpad happened to the son of a friend I have at Illinois too (on a slightly different variant). On his laptop (a T20) the display CCF lamp did not turn on.
Indeed, buying at least two similar laptops is a smart idea. That is the reason I am looking for two units of the same -or similar- Thinkpads. Thanks a lot for your feedback. I will get at least two units of the same laptop. OpenBSD fan. Sure! I will certainly install the tpb and tphdisk packages on the Thinkpad. I like the ability to use the "Access IBM" button, changing/muting the volume and screen brightness. Hibernation is an excellent feature if it is supported (it hanged sometimes on my Latitude when running both NetBSD and OpenBSD). As Bob Beck says that it suspends and resumes very well, I certainly believe that hibernation will be a useful feature. On-screen messages provided by these tools will be valuable too. Thanks a lot! Greg. I certainly believe that the chassis on the Latitude CPi is much better than the chassis on the HP Omnibook 4100, but it can be certainly improved. I supposed that hinges on the Latitude were excellent ones until one broke. After opening the display, I found an annoying thin hinge. Nice to know that Thinkpads have better chassis and hinges. Well, I really care about my computers. But a laptop is just required for anything I do and after carrying a computer with me four years and opening/closing the computer at least four times each day I believe that good hinges are just a requirement. Thanks four your feedback, now I see that Thinkpads are the computers to buy. Darren. Nice to know that you confirm the construction quality of the Thinkpad laptops. Probably Greg was not very lucky with his laptop, but I know someone that had a similar problem too. In any case, I believe that weak hinges are the real challenge for me. I want a laptop that works for a lot of years. Hopefully, when someone buys high quality hardware OpenBSD does a nice job supporting that machine for years. I think that on the BSDs world the term "obsolete" is unknown when applied to hardware. I will certainly look for a good Thinkpad right now. Someone in a private email (I will not put his name here, as he wrote directly to me) said that IBM sells certified used equipments. I have looked at the excellent prices IBM has on these refurbished units. Even better, they sell these items with one year guarantee. Sadly, these computers are only available for U.S. citizens. I can ask a good friend I have in the United States to send the computer to me, but sadly payment must be done with a U.S. credit card too, my Visa card cannot be used to pay these items. So, it will be difficult buying these units from IBM right now. In any case, I will look for an american unit, as I do not like the Spanish keyboard layout a lot. Laptops have too few keys to waste them with special characters, and the right keyboard layout is not choosed until booting multi-user. Thanks to all the people on this thread for the excellent advices and feedback on this matter. I will buy a used Thinkpad and install the tpb and tphdisk packages. Cheers, Igor.
