Advice on buying new T60

[milan7]

I would like to buy T60 as my work computer. Do you think that getting this model now (2007-63G) seems as a good idea as opposed to waiting say 3 monts (at most) and spending the same budget then on possible future model? The configuration is 2007-63G, which is the most powerful version of 14' T60 I could get in my home country given my research budget.

Thanks for any reply.

[thinktank]

Hello Milan,

I was asking myself similar questions a few weeks ago. It is the old dilemma in the ever moving hardware market. As soon as you buy it it becomes essentially worthless and basically toxic waste.

I looked at it more from a utilization standpoint: I needed the best value/most useful laptop for the money now and not later. Three months from now you could ask yourself the same question, even more so if you are not limited to ThinkPads or even PC laptops in general. There will always be a new model/processor/operating system etc coming out soon that may (or may not) be useful.

It depends on what you need to do with it. The T60 you're looking at is certainly plenty powerful and should be good enough for a while. The other thing I found out: even at the premium price of ThinkPads, MacBooks, Sonys etc, you are always looking at some sort of compromise. There is always something missing/not quite the way we would like to see it/not fully functional/ something that needs a workaround and so forth.

I needed a workhorse that can be used on a daily basis for grad school/work/basic multimedia applications while being portable and sturdy. So far I am more than impressed with my machine and some of the compromises/workarounds turned out to be much easier than I thought. Other than needing the machine now, I was glad to still get it with XP and Office 2003 instead of Microsoft's latest version of their consumer research/resilliance project - and with a standard format non-glossy screen which seems to be an increasing problem and ruled out most of the other brands for me.

The T60 to me as a first time ThinkPad buyer seems to be still in the spirit of the old IBM workhorses. If that is going to stay like this in the longrun under Lenovo's ownership remains to be seen. If the quality decreases it should be interesting to see if any of the other brands could step in and cater to the specific type of buyer. At the moment, I do not really see anything. The closest I saw were some of the Sony machines and the MacBook pro but those had their own issues that made me turn to the ThinkPad.

[milan7]

Thank you very much for your helpful response, I very appreciate that. In a way, deciding which computer to get was very easy for me, as I had T42 and used it quite intensively / computing demanding applications in graduate school and later. At home, I had it in dusty environment / variable temperature, humidity during house reconstruction and it has worked smoothly. The support just excellent, hard disk replaced for free without a question despite that I bought this notebook in the US. I would get this computer just for the excellent keyboard, which feels exactly right for my typing. Now I will buy T60 and will not wait what else comes, it will be an excellent machine anyway. Thanks for your post, you helped me to sort this out.

[Kyocera]

milan7, you won't be disappointed the T60 is more solid than my t42, good luck with your purchase.

[irfan]

I have a T60 with almost the same configuration. In my opinion it is a quite adequate machine for research purposes

[spiike]

I am having the same dilemna as you are right now.

Two things to consider however is that the CPU in a T60 is upgradeable physically to core duo 2, it's just a matter if Lenovo releases a bios for it or if you can use the t61 bios on the t60 (like how you can interchange the dell d800 and 8600 bios's).

Videocard wise you can always get an advanced dock and real high end video card for playing games (after we sort out which models work) and then you will have essentially a top of the line gaming computer with your thinkpad.