T41p - extremely impressed - THANK YOU THINKPADS.com

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I purchased a T41p and after about 5 days - I have to say this laptop is awesome. I purchased it as a factory refurbished and with employee disocunt for $1420 + tax - it is worth every penny. I have noticed the left wrist rest creaking, but no big deal. No dead pixels and the battery life is superb - the battery however is loose (wobbly, but the locks keep it in place). I though I would find that the 1400x1050 resolution would be too small, but after using it, all other screen resolutions are too low. The clarity on the screen is also amazing - my work desktop and home desktops all look fuzzy compared to this screen. I fell in love with thinkpads when I purchased an old 390E laptop at a work as-is sale for $45 and had to purchase a good laptop.

After verifying everything was working properly I did the following:
copied the i386, drivers, ibmtools, and valueadd directories to a network share, removed the hidden partiition protection, formatted the harddrive removing the hidden partition and performed a clean install of retail windows XP, installed all of my applications (10GB total) and now everything is working perfectly. I especially like the access connections application as I frequent a few different networks (home, work, parents, sister, etc).

I plan to upgrade to 1GB ram, port replicator II, and 19" LCD to compliment my new IBM USB external keyboard with UltraNAV - as this is definately a desktop replacement laptop. I also acquired a nice Targus leather case from work. I also purchased a USB-Serial converter cable from ebay for about $12 which works perfectly for configuring routers, switches, firewalls, etc.

I just wanted to thank all of the people who posted in the forum who helped with this decision ----- THANK YOU -----

PS - I also have to say that the built-in (IBM A/B/G) wireless range is superb - picked up 4 different AP's at work (I was only able to see 1 with both the Linksys-G PCMCIA and Orinoco-B PCMCIA)

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Congratulations with your purchase....................

I agree that the T41p is a great buy indeed !