any experience with www.thinkpadworld.com?

[austerlitz]

Hello, I am about to be a new laptop owner and have pretty much decided on a t43p. I am an architecture student and need something portable yet powerful enough to do 3d work and illustrator/photoshop stuff as well and the t43p looked perfect. I've noticed that www.thinkpadworld.com has some amazing deals compared to lenovo's own site and was wondering if anyone has had any experience with them? I am in canada and it doesn't look like I can take advantage of any educational discounts and thinkpadworld looks like the best bet. Any suggestions? I have also noticed that their 3 year warranty is with IBM for the first 6 months and then with someone else for the rest of it. Does anyone know what this means? Can I expect to get something that is just like new if I get it from there? Is the warranty service the same or equivalent?

thanks,
a

[dsvochak]

I don't have any direct experience, but this has been discussed before. Search for "thinkpadworld" and read the posts.

You also might want to consider Bill Morrow (thinkpads.com)

http://www.thinkpads.com/start.htm

[smugiri]

Check out this thead, this threadand this thread.

[bibendum]

My X41 is from thinkpadworld. I live in NYC and actually stopped by their offices one afternoon to pick up my Thinkpad. They seem to have a legitimate operation, but I was only there 20 minutes. A couple of random items:

They were very good at answering questions about my purchase, both before and after the ebay auction, both by email and phone.

My thinkpad came from IBM Financing, so I'm assuming it was a computer that was repossessed (?) from a reseller. The thinkpad was unused.

My IBM warranty was expired, so they replaced it with a 3-year warranty from Mack Computer with no questions.

Thinkpadworld services thinkpads for IBM at their NYC offices.

[jeffcrilly]

What's up with that "Mack" warranty?

Is it any good?

Who services the machines?

(One time I got an "extended" warranty on laptop - non-IBM, Non-Mack, etc. Then the CDRom drive needed replacing. It took about 4 months to get the replacement part. And it was like a $30 part. The "replacement" was a refurbed CDRom drive.)

I just wonder about these non-mfr warranties. Their in the biz to make money after all, which means they are not keen on paying for repairs, right? Not much different than the mfr, but the mfr has a bit more visibility, and higher risk of not performing warranty service.

jeff

[cj3209]

Here is a link:
http://www.mackcam.com/warranties/3yearintcomputer.html

There's a $35 fee and no indication of when the repair will be done. I've heard that sometimes, repairs take some time. This is definitely not a warranty to use for mission critical computers.