“You are making my point!”

I just received my new toy yesterday, a brand new ThinkPad 300. I have not been so excited by a new laptop for a long time. The last time I was so anxious getting a new laptop was the Acer Travelmate 100, one the earliest beta Tablet PCs. And let me tell you, a beta it was…

Anyways, in case you didn’t know, ThinkPad X300 is one of the very few laptops in the market today with SSD (Solid State Drive). If you are tired of waiting for the spinning disks or watching the hour glasses, you’d know why I am so happy about this technology finally making its way to the consumer laptop market. I have loaded Vista 64 bit Enterprise on this new baby and it was flying. No more heat wave generated by the fans, no more cluttering noised made by the magnetic disks drives. And most importantly, Vista feels like running on turbo drive. This is how computing experience is supposed to be. I have never experienced such a boost in hardware performance.

The only downside? The drive is only 64 GB and it costs a fortune. I just noticed today that Lenovo starts to offer the 128 GB options on the new X301 model. If the pricing movement of the storage devices in the past 18 months is any indication, larger and more affordable SSD drives will appear in the near future, and become standard configuration on laptops.

LINQ to SQL and ADO.NET are both powerful data access mechanism now available in Visual Studio 2008. If you are confused by the these two methodologies and want to choose one over the other for the project you are working on, here is an excellent blog post to clarify the differences and similarities.