[PLUG] Docking Station! was: Right angle cat6

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Thu Oct 25 18:13:00 UTC 2007


On Wed, Oct 24, 2007 at 10:47:39PM -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On my old computer the RJ45 jack was toward the back of the computer.
> On my new, beautiful Thinkpad T61 (love it!) it is in the middle of the
> left side. This gets in the way of things I want to put there, e.g.,
> books. It would be nice if I could find a cat6 cable that has a right
> angle connector, or a right-angle adapter. Does anyone know if such can
> be obtained, preferably from someone in Stumptown?

Answer:  Docking station.  First, it bypasses the "side connections"
issues, second, it is much quicker to disengage, third, it saves wear
and tear on the laptop connectors (and the ethernet socket is much
more fragile than it should be, and damned hard to repair), fourth, it
props up the unit so the keyboard is easier to use and the fan is less
obstructed.  They seem dorky, but they've become essential for me.

Issue to watch out for:  When you undock a laptop, a whole bunch of
interfaces go inactive at once, which seems to keep the Hardware
Abstraction Layer software busy.  If you undock and then close the
lid to suspend, the HAL software may miss the lid close event because
it is still busy with the other stuff.  So close the lid first, wait
for the unit to suspend, then pull it from the docking station.  A few
times I've pulled my laptop out of my bag an hour after undocking, to
learn that I've used half the battery charge and heated up my bag :-(

Full Disclosure:  I have a T30 Thinkpad, and cheap used docking
stations show up all the time.  I bought 10 of them for $10 plus
$20 shipping (10 docking stations are heavy!) and have them littered
all over the house.  It is a pity one of them won't fit your T61,
because you will probably end up spending $100 on a new one.  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         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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