For the last year and a half I've been working on a solid Fujitsu N Series Lifebook (3010). It's a P4 2.66 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. The machine is a bit heavy and I suspect it's part of the reason I'm in physical therapy for an impingement in my right shoulder, but it's been a workhorse and I've been lucky to not have experienced the problems that Myk and chofmann have with their Lifebooks.
The key feature of this laptop for me has been the perfect resolution screen with amazing contrast and visibility. It's a 15 inch screen with 1400 by 1050 resolution. The 1050 lines in a 15 in form factor gives me just the right font size. After spending a couple of years on 1600 by 1200 in 15 inches and 1024 by 768 in both 14 and 15 inch form factors, I've decided that fonts are just too small in the UXGA displays and too large in the XGA screens. (Now, if they put those same UXGA pixels in a standard aspect ratio 17 inch screen, that might work a lot better for me :-)
Well, the time has come to replace the old Fujitsu and Myk (who still has the same Fujitsu as me) found an awesome deal, saving nearly $2,000, has just put in orders for our two new machines.
This time around we're going with IBM laptops. The model is the ThinkPad T42 and it comes with the 15 inch screen at 1400 by 1050, a Pentium M 1.8 GHz processor and Centrino wireless jazz, 2 GB of RAM, a 7200 RPM 60 GB hard drive, and a nice CD-RW/DVD-RW optical drive. It's also got that nifty nipple pointer thing that I miss from my Dell Latitude days.
This will bring me and Myk up to speed with brendan, bryner, dbaron, darin, and maybe some others at our office who have nice ThinkPads. I'll finally be able to run multiple VMWare virtual machines without having to pause one when I need to start up another.
