Good day to You all!
I'm new here, but I read the forum for some time. It proved to me really useful for some occasions related to Thinkpads.
In these days I own a fine T41P with a Dock II. In the past I had an A30 for a couple of months, but I sold it.
It was a mistake, I'm sure now

- 'cause I miss the flexibility (the two UB2K slots) and the excellent keyboard and the really beautiful and bright LCD of that machine (oh, I forgot, the con was the XGA resolution). The A30 could even attached to my Dock too. That means, for example, if I needed to, I could have (with UB2K HDD adaptors) four HDD running with this fine notebook.
Still I needed money, so I traded it away.
But I decided, in the future I want another one from the A3x-series.
The question is:
what kind of issues, failures can have these models?
AFAIK (and I did my homework here in the forum, before I ask

), the only really bad (but rare) issue is the GPU-failure,
is there another problem with these models I should aware when I buy one? What I really want is an A31p - could be a great backup/secondary laptop with the Flexview LCD, for tasks as hobby photo-editing, movie-watching, running apps such as Matlab (my girlfriend needs this for her studies) etc. Yes, I would go for reasonable upgrade, such as max. RAM, HDDs, DVD-burner, - for the fun and the enjoying of the good work, too...
Another question: I saw some time ago on EBay a
SATA
HDD-adaptor for UB2K
http://href.hu/x/7ouk (I shortened the original URL) - is this some kind of copy of an existing IBM-accessory, or this is a "chinese invention"? (I've seen for example slot-in and lightscribe UB2K DVD-burners on EBay... I don't think these manufactured for IBM, so I think I must be precautious with these...

) Has anybody experiences with these adaptors? I have a PATA UB2K HDD-adaptor, but in these days SATA 2.5 HDDs are getting
more cheaper than PATA...
Thank You in advance.
Sorry for my English, not my native language and I didn't use it for a while...