When I heard a few months ago that " Lenovo will not install or support the Linux operating system on any of its PCs ... Lenovo is positioning itself as an exclusive partner of Microsoft..." (), I was very dismayed at the thought that my third laptop would have to be something else, although maybe in a few years wearables will be cheap and standard. Happily, Lenovo later disavowed that marketing position.

Anyway, the subject of this post is the docking station. I used to think that laptops and docking stations were silly, until I got more nomadic a few years ago. I still do most of my work in the productivity pod, but I take the laptop on trains and to client sites and to coffee shops and up to the top floor lounge in my apartment building. The laptop came with Windows, and I decided to leave it on (after installing Linux and a dual-boot setup) for games. When I want to play Civ IV on the big monitors, I have to unplug and replug the keyboard and laptop, plug in the external DVD drive, unpack the power cable and plug it in (both ends), etc. I'll readily admit that it's less onerous than walking miles every day to collect drinking water, but after a year of this I finally got a USB KVM switch and, after a month of hunting, a used docking station that included the power adapter.

And they work (the Belkin KVM switch is, astonishingly, working as advertised, making it far and away the least defective piece of Belkin equipment I have ever used). But I do want to complain about one detail of the docking station, which is the docking. (And undocking). To undock it, you tug a lever, which feels both stiff and flimsy, as if it might break off at any moment, and this causes the laptop to disengage and hop up a few millimeters. It also makes a loud beep.

To put the laptop into the docking station, you line it up and push down. It has a very mushy feel, so you push down some more. It never actually clicks or in any other way provides tactile feedback that the electronics are engages, but the screen does brighten when it goes back on AC. Of course, you can't see that because you've closed the lid in order to push. Even after it's fully seated, there is still some wiggle and wobble room between the Thinkpad and the dock.

So obviously an ergonomic improvement would be the best fix - a nice smooth push into place with gradually increasing but still mild resistance, terminated with a solid click. But failing that, it would be nice if the beep was used to tell you that the machine is now seated, rather than telling you the machine that was seated is now unseated. I can generally tell that it's unseated by the fact that it's in my hands and I'm walking away from the dock, thank you very much.