R61e CEL550

[ekdya]

Hi
I have a chance to buy an R61e CEL550, is this as good as A31 which I have had for 10 years with no problems at all?

thx

[RealBlackStuff]

These are the details for that R61e: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-68201
the e stands for educational, a slightly castrated form of the regular R61.
The most obvious missing part is Firewire
It has WXGA (1280x800) widescreen XGA, which is not everybody's choice. You'll need to do a lot of scrolling!
They are solid machines otherwise.
It can easily be upgraded to a Core Duo CPU for more performance, although the 550 (2.00GHz) is not a bad CPU.

[Tony Chan]

Thought the "e" stands for "economy" or "entry model".

The main differences that I can think of are :
- No firewire
- Fixed ultrabay drive ( although you can still swap out the drive by unscrew 1 screw ).
- No Ultra Nav pad ( I actually prefer this as I only use eraser head mouse ).
- No docking capability ( not 100% sure on this one and I have no need for docking ).

I have one and I love it. The laptop feels solid and well built. That Celeron cpu runs cool and is very a capable laptop with up to date hardware standard and hd controller. It "feels" faster than my P M 1.6 T40p. I did upgraded to a T5450 dual core cpu only because there was a forum member selling it for cheap and I have some spare ram to trade with him. Upgrade was easy and straight forward. It took less than half an hr.

There are lots of upgrade options for ram ( up to 8Gb ), wireless ( 3 antena built-in for future wireless N ), hd ( sata, ssd, etc ). Go for it, you couldn't go wrong with this.

[ZaZ]

I have to say my R60 feels more sturdy after the same amount of time as my T41 or T42, though being lucky never hurts either.

[ekdya]

it has a vista OS, I am thinking to change it to XP since it takes less resources. what do you think?

[Tony Chan]

Really depends on what you plan on running, but since you have celeron instead of a duo core cpu, I would probably stay with XP. I'm running XP on my R61e now but just upgraded to 4Gb ram so I am planning to move to Vista 64 to use all 4Gb. I already run Vista on my T400 and my destop. I found that as long as you have enough resources ( duo core + 2Gb+ ram ), Vista actually "feels" faster.