Cristian Gafton laments the demise of the 4:3 aspect ratio laptop screen on Lenovo thinkpads, and says that he is now looking at other brands of laptops as a result. I wish him luck; I suspect that other brands are doing the same thing as a result of concentration of production on 16:9 due to widespread consumer demand. For example, all the HP laptops I could see on the HP website were widescreen. I had to cruise the Dell site for a while before I found the Latitude D530 ("entry level") with a 4:3 aspect ratio. The Gateway site buries this so deep that I lost interest before finding any 4:3 screens (if they carry any). Most Fujitsu laptops are widescreen; the only 4:3 I found on their website are the LifeBook S2210 and Stylistic tablets (all 13" XGA). At this point, I got tired of investigating.

I like pixels. So much so that I've paid extra to get laptops with 1600x1200 screens. One of my main problems with the 1600x1200 screen was that four 80x24 terminal sessions using the huge classic 10x20 X font (now represented as MiscFixed 18) that I love so much do not quite fit on it. In particular, they don't quite fit side-by-side, even if you disable scrollbars. My 1680x1050 widescreen laptop, however, can do that (even with scrollbars on the terminal windows if I choose to use them) with room to spare, and without covering the GNOME toolbar. This makes me happy.

Somewhat as a sidenote, but equally easier to read on the wide screen, I've also changed my coding window arrangement. Two terminal sessions, each with multiple tabs, full-height, 80 characters wide, side by side. I generally write code in tabs in the left-hand terminal session and write/run tests in the right-hand terminal session. In vim, of course.

Oh, and with regard to the various batteries, the 9-cell batteries are still available as of this blog post... Update: It appears that different T61 laptops use completely different batteries, with different voltages, physical interfaces, and capacities. Not what I would have expected for the Thinkpad line, at any rate.