After much deliberation, I got myself a new laptop. Took me quite a while to decide what to get; I was looking at several models, but in the end decided to go for a refurbished model, as you can pickup half decent models from IBM for like £300. And I’d rather do that than pay £400 for a new laptop, sure it’s new, and probably faster, but I’ve seen those things in PC World and such, they suck, they’re huge, have like half an hour of battery life, and wiegh a tonne, and they just generally feel like they’re gonna fall apart after a couple of months of use.

So I scooted on over to ebay and pulled up all the Thinkpads on buy it now from around £200, and found that I had a choice of several models:

The T2x Series
The T3x Series
The T4x Series
The R4x Series

Now, the T3x and T4x series are undoubtedly very powerful machines, how ever the specs I could get would be poor for my buget (£250 inc. VAT and Delivery), I was looking at like 256MB of ram, or in some cases 128 😐 Fuck that.

The Rx Series of laptops were cheap, and quite powerful. but from the pictures they looked thick. Very thick. And the battery life looked pretty awful.

In the end I went for a T23, top of the line back in it’s day. I managed to pick up the top model (1.2GHz PIII-M, 512MB RAM and 40GB HDD) for *dirt* cheap.

Surprisingly, it’s in very good nick, there are no marks or scratches on the case like I’d expect on second hand thinkpads (Since 99% of them are ex corporate), no pressure marks on the screen or anything. The biggest Surprise was the battery. 2 and a half hour life :O. Thats fucking insane for a 5ish year old laptop, and that’s with the wireless card being used and me watching DVDs and such.

Good luck trying to get that kind of life outta the cheap Acer models down at your local PC store 🙂

Also, it comes with loads of nifty little details that cheaper models just wouldn’t think of, such as the tiny light on the top of the screen so I can see what I’m typing at night 😀

All I need now is to buy the little extras I’m gonna need, such as the second battery, inbuilt wireless card, and a DVD-RW Drive.

Thinkpads > *