new member

[John Joowon Lee <jjl9@msc.cornell.edu>]

Hello,

I've owned my ThinkPad 755C for about half a year now, but I've only
recently discovered this mailing list.  

As suggested by the welcome-email from the mailing list, I introduce
my machine.  It has a DX4 processor, 20MB of RAM (Kensington) and a
340MB hard-drive.  Most of the drive is dedicated for use with Linux
1.2.8 and portions of Slackware 2.3.  The remainder of the drive is
partitioned for DOS 6.x and Windows 3.11.  

I'm primarily a user of flavors of UNIX and I've been quite happy with
Linux.  I've noticed that about every 50 hours of uptime, however,
that Linux continuously accesses the hard-drive for several minutes;
except for olvwm and xterm, there is no correlation with running
applications.  I haven't yet figured out what processes are involved.
I am naive with UNIX system administration; if someone should have an
idea about what Linux is doing, I would like to be educated.

I recently considered purchasing another hard-drive.  I provide some
brief commentary for the possible benefit of others of the mailing
list who have been mentioning hard-drive issues.  An article in PC
Magazine, in August of 1995, noted that IBM substantially raises
prices on peripheral components for machines sometime shortly after
production of the machines ceases.  I've verified the after-effects on
prices for hard-drives for pre-755 ThinkPads in vendors'
advertisements (about a %50 premium per MB of disk).  The supply of
new 755 ThinkPads has recently been discontinued, so I considered
getting an extra drive for my future storage needs.  Others looking
for reasonable prices on hard-drives may wish to confer the FAQ for
this mailing list for information on a third-party vendor (an IBM
supplier) which has arranged a discount for members of this mailing
list (cf. ftp://swiss-ftp.ai.mit.edu/archive/thinkpad/faq/ and search
for 'third-party').  I've also noticed another company advertise the
installation of Toshiba 2.5" hard-drives into ThinkPad-compatible
caddies (http://warrior.com/lock/tl750.html) at prices which are
competitive.  Finally, the archives for this mailing list from the
last year contain some discussions about other experiences in
installing third-party 2.5" hard-drives, including one person who
couldn't get his third-party drive to spin-down in suspend-mode (cf.
the welcome-email to this mailing list for a URL).  Ultimately, I
decided that as the need arises, I will just purchase a
removable-medium device like Iomega's JAZ drive (an external box),
which for about $725 provides 1GB of storage with disk access speeds
which are faster than my ThinkPad's hard-drive (about 5MBps).  This
month's BYTE magazine discusses the JAZ drive.

John Lee
jjl9@cornell.edu