I recently bought an IBM A21 Thinkpad straight from IBM off Ebay. I think it was $1500 but more like $1700 with tax, shipping etc.
So far I love it. 15" screen, 1600x1200, I can open 4 Bloomberg windows at once on it and read them just fine. Screen is very bright, sometimes too bright even turned down to it's lowest. One nice lil feature is it has a tiny built in light in it that will shine on the keyboard good enough to find your way around the keys in total darkness.
battery life is good, usually around 3 hours. Extra battery expensive, over $100. Gets warm in the lap, but not bad at all compared to other laptops i've had.
800mhz P3, plenty fast for everything I do, video card, can't remember what it is, but i've played networked Unreal Tourney, Quake 3, etc on it, no problem. If I was really hardcore into gaming I believe some Dell's can be ordered with a GEForce 2 video card in them.
32Gigabytes of space. Sounds nutty huge, but throw some mp3's on it, shoot some video on a DVCam and load over onto hard drive, and it goes pretty fast.
Windows 2000 operating system. I upgraded it to SP2, upgraded DirectX, added the av extensions, etc., it runs bullet proof, can't remember last time I rebooted. I just close the lid at office, pull out pcmcia card network card, take home, pop in 802.11 card, open up, and never miss a beat.
It has the trackpoint which I prefer to the touchpad of most machines.
Things I don't like:
The power adapter is buzzing, sounds like it's going to burn out any second.
No built in ethernet, had built in regular modem and an ethernet plug on back, but have to buy big dollar modem/ethernet upgrade, so I just bought pcmcia ethernet card instead.
No firewire port. Again had to spend $40 for a pcmcia firewire card.
Has DVD but no burner, but have burners on networked computer and with big hard drive have never run out of space and needed to burn something while travelling. |
