Sorry I'm late to the game...
The doctor's office I attended was a small, rural office who wasn't very technologically advanced (still used almost all manual machines for checking vital signs, if that is a sign) and, despite being "old-school", had made the decision to upgrade to computerized/digital charts. My doctor used a ThinkPad T420 for quite some time and it took a beating. He said he dropped it about a dozen times and the only damage was one of the corners of the case was missing. After a while the entire office got updated to Dell Latitudes.
Just the other day I saw a technician of some sort (engineer?) sitting inside their truck entering data on a ThinkPad.
Of course, I use my T420 practically every day for everything (including writing this post!) I use it to take notes, do homework assignments, complete projects, maintain my personal website, listen to music, etc. I practically lug it around with me everywhere I go in my ThinkPad carrying bag (circa late 1990s.)
While not ThinkPads, I've seen
a lot of ThinkCentre's at work.
Most recently, I transferred to another small medical office (moved) and every office has a M700 Tiny ThinkCentre in it. The Tiny never ceases to amaze me.
I've had a love-hate relationship in the workplace with IBM ThinkCentres. During an internship I got stuck without a computer... small newspaper office that was entirely Macs. The boss saw I didn't have a computer (and thus couldn't be productive) so she lugs in this huge IBM ThinkCentre. It was slow... took around 15 minutes to boot into Windows, another 10 to login, and could take anywhere from 1 minute to 30 minutes just to load Notepad. There was a lot of bloatware on that machine, and it wasn't very well maintained. It sounded like somewhat placed a busy airport across the street (the CPU fan kept ramping up/down to try to keep the Pentium IV cool.) That machine was very temperamental, as while it was slow and unreliable on most days - some days it actually cooperated and was somewhat snappy. After a while I gave up on it and upgraded to a Early-2005 MacMini they had lying around, which had a missing (external) power supply that I had randomly found.
Pictures of my ThinkCentre from the newspaper internship:
At my first job (college student here), we had a bunch of IBM ThinkCentres. They were nearly identical to the one from my internship, but much quicker. They were very dirty, and the management was dead set on keeping them going as soon as possible. These machines were used to input orders (pizza joint) and cash customers out. One day the hard drive failed on one of them, and my manager was frantically asking me to try to get it going again. The machines were dusty inside, they had been there and working continuously for 13 years (or so) at that point and the exterior was just covered in sauce and dust. I came in the next week to find that the original IBM ThinkCentre had been replaced with... yep, you guessed it... another identical (but clearly different) IBM ThinkCentre. A few months later we changed management and they replaced the ThinkCentres with a bunch of PAR point-of-sale systems. Besides the hard drive failure (which, lets face it, 13 years of continuous use [roughly 56,940 hours of use] will do that), the IBM ThinkCentres were extremely reliable and never skipped a beat. I can't say the same for the PAR systems, though. Almost all of them had issues at one point or another - with less than six months of use!
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