I have been happy with my standard screen Thinkpad T30, and use it
for thousands of hours a year.  But it is getting worn out, and
repair parts are vanishing.  Most particularly hard drives - it
uses PATA drives, and those are getting rare.   

But I may have waited too long to replace it.  I want a 4x3 screen,
and they don't make laptops with those anymore, just W.GA displays. 
Wrong direction.  I write 8.5x11 text documents.  I would love a 3x5
tall screen, deploy and rotate, full page, but nobody ever made those
for laptops.  Okay, you love widescreens, and you think I am an
idiot, and I think you are an idiot, but let's move past that. 

There is a hack.  See:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_a_QXGA_display_in_a_R/T60_or_61

Extreme laptop modders are adding QXGA ( 2048x1536 ) displays to
late R series or T series Thinkpads.   I can buy a 15 inch T61
(perhaps used, with a busted screen), buy one of the QXGA screens
for about $200, modify the EDID codes on the panel, and I will have
the laptop of my dreams.  Although the pixels are too small for my
normal xterms ( 2 wide, 80 characters each, 5x7 fonts ) they will
be great with double-sized 10x14 fonts, and I imagine I can easily
scale images to drive my 1024x768 projector.

I will be taking this on as a project in December or January,
hopefully, collecting parts beforehand.  Is anyone else interested?

Keith

P.S.  I suppose an alternative is to start designing all my documents
in two-column landscape format.  Then W.GA displays might be usable. 
But people already think I'm weird, that would get me institutionalized. 
Code display would still suck, unless there is a multiple-column xterm
client out there.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [email protected]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
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