After nearly five years of intensive use, the time has finally come to replace my trusty S270 laptop, Xanthe. Overall, I'm surprised that she held out as long as she did. There has been some defects along the way, but in the end I've managed to keep things pretty much working (where the most recent and most serious fix was to remove the laptop speakers and soldering the inverter cable, which got partly severed in the screen hinge).

However, since a few months, there is one issue that I can't seem to fix: The AC adapter plug doesn't seem to properly connect to the socket, making the battery switch between charging and not charging all the time (once per second or so). This had a great number of side effects, like keys on my keyboard getting stuck or making the keyboard stop working completely, making my network connection break, making my screen brightness change eratically and other stuff that makes me utterly and completely annoyed. I've made a detailed post on the s270-linux mailing list about that, if you're interested.

So, after a few months of on-and-off annoyance, I've finally decided to get a new laptop. It's sucky, since apart from this issue, Xanthe is still serving me well. On the other hand, it's utterly cool, since I just ordered myself a Thinkpad X201. It's a very durable and efficient 12" notebook (over 10 hours of battery life, according to Lenovo!). More details when I get the package (should be somewhere this week!).