I researched for 6 months before choosing this IBM. Great value, solid notebook. Love the keyboard and the access IBM help. I have called tech support for information and help with software installations and driver updates and they were very good and patient with all my detailed questions. This is important to me... to have good tech support available. This T41 comes with a 3 year warranty.IBM's website has excellent support. I love the automated stuff where it analyzes your computer and tells you what updates you need. Sometimes their driver upgrades are more for the IT person. But, just download their software installer and it works great. However, you must focus...if you want to understand what you have downloaded. Not totally for the novice. Tech support walked me thru it once and I was on my way.
So far so good after only a month, the T41 rocks! Particularly the higher-end graphics card, glad I went for that. I can tell the difference when comparing with my desktop LCD.
The CD burner works well and I use Nero 6. I had been using a 4x burner on my desktop and this one writes at 24x...what a difference.
If you are contemplating a notebook, consider this one. Pay the extra bucks and go with IBM...very glad I did!
I've had several Thinkpads and love their functionality. IBM's service people are friendly and helpful. The problem is that I'm getting to know the guys in Atlanta way too well.
I asked IBM to replace this T-41 as a lemon. They responded by giving me an extra year of warranty. That was nice, but every time this thing goes down, it costs me lost time, and for someone who is self employed that is a bad thing.Back in 2004 I did quite a bit of research before settling on a T41 (from newegg.com). I got more RAM for 768M total. Over four years later it is still going very strong.
Great keyboard, light (even today), thin (even today), fairly fast, well-built screen tilting mechanism. Quiet, doesn't heat up too much.
If you're a vi user, you probably won't like the position of the Escape key (you can remap it to F1).
It took about three years for the battery to become unusable (I recently got a new one for about).
The built-in wireless antenna stopped working and I got a new one from Lenovo support (for free, it was still under the 3-year warranty), but the old one fixed itself as soon as the replacement arrived and has been working now for a few years since.
The left 25% of the space bar don't produce a space when pressed --started happening after around three years.
The left button on the lower mouse controls stopped working --started happening after four years.
I've been using a Macbook Pro for work, and every time I open the T41 now, it's such a relief to be able to tilt the screen as far back as I want.(a) Best keyboard ever made for laptops, (b) Decent speed, runs Office 2007 O.k., (c) Acceptable graphics (ATI 7500) or good graphics (ATI 9000 / 9600 / FireGL, the latter 2 can play Far Cry 1.0), (d) Thinklight is very useful on overseas plane flights, (e) fits perfectly on all airplane tray tables, (f) Outstanding battery life with CD-battery + 9-cell (5-6 hrs if you dim the screen), (g) It actually sleeps and wakes up properly unlike 50% of all laptops, and (h) You can just grab it and run to a conference room, yanking it out of the minidock, and it will sleep properly, unlike newer (T60, T400) machines where you have to hit a key first !!
DONT buy anything with less than 1.8 Ghz processor as the 1.7 Ghz and lower have a smaller cache(2MB vs 3MB) and are about 33% slower.
I have used about 4x of these machines at work over the past 6 years. I just got my 4th machine so each machine lasts about 2 years. The typical failure is a really bad/sticky key (1st), a failure of some buttons on the synaptics track pad (2nd), a hard drive failure (3rd), or a failure of the power-port male plug, making it difficult (but not impossible) to charge the unit. With the exception of the hard drive failure, NONE of the failures were catastrophic "I cannot do any work right now" type of failures, so the system is robust.
The IBM repair manual is fantastic so I buy new parts on ebay and repair it myself. I've replaced hinges(very hard), screens(very hard), keyboard(easy), touchpad(easy), fans(medium you need CPU paste). The keyboard in particular takes 120 seconds to replace as it's just 5 screws and it pops out.nice laptop for the money, clean works well. They upgraded it with a new 160 GB hard drive, and 2 GB of memory for the same price. Fast delivery.
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