On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 7:14 PM, inforequest <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On the (excellent) advice of the PHP community almost 4 years ago, I bought > a Thinkpad t42p. I still love it but it's time to plan retirement. > > Can anyone recommend the Lenovo t61p as a replacement, or is there something > clearly better? No, I'm not going to switch to a mac. Thanks.
I recently got a T61 15" widescreen 1600x1050, Intel video and Intel AGN wireless (model 6465-CTO). I let it "age" a while before installing Fedora 9 which ran on it with very little help. IIRC Fedora didn't install the wireless firmware out-of-the-box but I think that was about it. Originally I got the lower resolution screen, hated it, had to send it back and Lenovo charged me a 15% restocking fee. So pay close attention to the screen resolutions. If you like smaller text, make sure you upgrade the screen. On a related note, note that the T61p (which has the highest resolution) requires the Nvidia chip last I checked which non-Windows systems do not support as well (Linux uses that driver wrapper business). I was a little disappointed with the screen. If you move your head back and forth it looks like there are shadows behind it. It's fine but it's definitely not as *consistently* bright as my now quite old T30. The lid is somewhat hard to open and now it seems I can rock the hinges a little in the open position. It's not a problem. It just makes me wonder if there's an engineering flaw that might become a problem later. I think the machine is a little big. I don't know if Lenovo designed the IBM Thinkpads but it seems to me they could do a little better job squeezing things into smaller spaces (note that I'm talking about the widescreen version). Finally, I'm a little worried about Lenovo. I could be wrong, but for some reason I don't think IBM would have charged me a restocking fee for a "I don't like the screen" kind of problem. But then again, the prices have really come down over the past year so I guess we end up paying for things either way. Despite the above mentioned minor issues, I looked closely at alternatives and there simply were none. I don't understand how anyone could buy anything other then a Thinkpad. ALL the other offerings out there are more expensive, have fewer features, and are bigger / heavier. The only contender is Apple because OSX gives you a UNIX based OS, a really nice desktop and very sleek looking hardware. But Apples are much more expensive and have fewer features so if you can't really use OSX (e.g. you want to dual boot w/ Windows) or you don't care about weight and sleek design, it's not compelling enough to usurp a Thinkpad. Mike -- Michael B Allen PHP Active Directory SPNEGO SSO http://www.ioplex.com/ _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
