T42 vs T61 Which should I get

[systemBuilder]

At our house, we have 6x of these machines : 3x of the T42's, and 3x of the T42p's. I think it's the best T4x machine that IBM ever made. It's a great deal cooler and quieter than the T43's, and the ATI 9600 chip benchmarked at the highest 3-D performance of ANY T42 machine, ever, faster than the T42p and all of the T43's. The downside is, PATA hard drives, DDR RAM (and only 2 GB). The upside is the Thailand 8K5044 keyboard is the finest keyboard made for laptops EVER, and the 1400x1050 display is brilliant and bright.

We have not played a great deal of games on the T42's, just a little bit of portal and far cry, and recently, half-life, and our original T42 still has a fine motherboard, but it was manufactured in 2006, probably AFTER ibm fixed its soldering process. I think that some members of this forum have histrionics about problems that do not affect all members of this forum.

The great thing about your T61 is that it *should* support shader model 3. A lot of MMORPG's, such as Eve online, are starting to require Shader Model 3 = DirectX 9.0c. The MMORPG's (such as WoW) usually don't tax the 3D cards very much (why would they turn away potential customers?) and you can clear the other bars for these games quite easily with T4x thinkpads with enhanced graphics chips, but the Shader Model 3 bar is hard to clear without a much later (2007+) graphics adapter.

Your Mileage may Vary ...