ThinkPad T61 Notebook

A friend bought me a T61 over 3 years ago as a belated birthday present. Mine came directly from the manufacturer though. Mine also has Windows Vista Home Premium. This laptop is my every day laptop. I use it pretty much all day for work, games, music creation, video creation, graphics, etc. It handles everything I throw at it, including virtual machines in VMWare and VirtualBox, and runs the Visual Studio 2008 development system just fine. Despite what many say about Vista, I haven't really had any device driver problems or too many problems in general. It's very stable. And I even develop for a robot which needed a special LibUSB driver on the laptop to recognize the robot when plugged in to get to the robot's linux console.

I've also been able to use wireless keyboard and mice as well.

In the 3+ years I've had the laptop, I've upgraded to a larger (Western Digital) hard drive only because I needed more space. I also had to replace the keyboard last month but that is because my old one was shot. I use it every day for extended periods so naturally the keyboard went on me (some keys didn't work and the matrix was starting to wear off). Found a good used keyboard like new on eBay and it was easy to replace.

The WiFi is a bit weird in that even with latest drivers, it will still go off and on after coming out of sleep mode. I have a ton of things to start up with so it does take awhile to boot. But it's not too bad.

I give this computer 5 stars as I have used it for so long and it just lasts and lasts. It's a great computer and with the way I've used it a lot as my main home computer, I can say it's very sturdy and holds up very well. I highly recommend the ThinkPad line (I have a T23 I got used that also works great as my backup computer).

The laptop isn't overly large but not small either. Mine has a 14" widescreen monitor and it handles watching streaming videos (hulu, iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo, and here on amazon.com) very well and very smoothly. I can even create my own videos, and while I'm waiting for it to process, I can be doing other things without really noticing a slow down.

The laptop does get rather warm when in use so it's not really a great "lap" top. Don't wear shorts if you been using it awhile and want to place it in your lap!

For the small annoyances which are trivial, this is one very good quality, long lasting machine. I highly recommend it.

Best laptops Iv'e owned...I have been a thinkPad junkie for a while now...after a couple cheaper "home" model laptops kicked the bucket, I bought a T31 It lasted through years of constant use. when it was time to buy another one, I chose a different brand to save money, what a mistake! A year later I purchased a T42 from IBM and again, had YEARS of constant use with virtually no problems. I now have a T61p that is still live and kicking, it was "designed" for XP, but were prepping for vista (glad vista was NOT an OEM install) I have now installed 64bit Win7 and threw 4gig of ram in it. Wow, all drivers set right up with NO problems...NONE. I wouldn't look at for this laptop for just "gaming" purposes but, if you have the dock (which I also have) you can install a PCIe graphics card in the dock...now it's a whole different animal I have ALWAYS had great respect for these ThinkPads and the Lenovo transition seems to be right on. No issues, love it!

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This is probably the worst computer I've ever owned. I've had it less than two years, and it's already close to kicking the bucket. The battery life is horrible, and to top it off, the power cord isn't working. I literally need to hold it in my computer to keep it charging (if I let go of the cord, it goes into battery mode). It takes ages to start up and has started to go into standby randomly without warning. I've owned many kinds of computers in my life, and I promise you that I will never own a Lenovo again.

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