[Discussion] can you recommend a laptop?

[Carl Gehr]

On Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:29:16 -0700 (PDT), Jon wrote:

<<Snip>
>
>Another consideration is will you be traveling with it?  If so the
>battery life of the T61 under eCS is perhaps 1/2 of what it is
>under XP.  This seems to be because of throttling down of the
>CPU's and there are tools for this under eCS but in my experience
>they are not too easy to work with.  I don't know anything about
>the earlier versions of the Thinkpad but from what I read the T43
>(??)  might be a better bet if you can live with the older
>hardware.

Jon is correct.  I should have elaborated more.  Battery management is,
I believe, all part of the lack of a good ACPI support that AFAIK, is
what provides the battery saving and CPU controls.  OTOH, I usually get
at least 2+ hours of battery use from my T60.  Most of the time, this
is adequate.

I have an XP partition that came with the system, but I don't think
I've booted to it more than 3 or 4 times in three years; can't recall
the last time I booted to XP.  I use my system almost entirely for
business, and OO has worked quite well for me to be able to view all
the Win-Junk that is sent to me.  The one exception was an Office
2007/Vista/XML [*.DOCX] file that I just received a couple of days ago.
 Supposedly OO 3.? Beta will handle these, but I don't have that level
and won't likely have it until it gets to GA.

Re:  Follow on to T60
I believe the Lenovo replacements are the T400 and T500, depending on
the features and functions you need.  ISTR that there have been some
people who have tried these systems, but I don't know the results. 
Maybe someone else will step up with some news on those models.