I've had this IBM / Lenovo Thinkpad Z61m since January 2007, I've had it for 2 & 3/4 years. I just cleaned the screen on it and it looks brand new again, this got me thinking. I've had this computer for so long but it has been a reliable work horse for quite a while now, and while it would be out classed by pretty much any new computer in terms of raw performance (the only game that I can play on it is Live For Speed) I still would not trade it in for the world. It's been with me a though many countless nights of midnight programming, never had a problem with it, never put a foot wrong. Had this been a dell computer it would of died after the first drop, but this has endured more then it's fair share. I just wanted to post this as a testament to the to the build quality of the IBM / Lenovo brand, and encourage you all the post the computers / laptops in your life that has made your world easier to manage.

Here's to many more years with this Laptop, and to many more years with yours.

My Macbook Pro! It's basically been my main PC for the last 1.5 years of me owning it and basically everything I could replace I have (New Screen due to it taking a dive, new HD because I needed 500 GB in a laptop, upgrade to 4 GB of RAM) but basically I've had it with me constantly for the last 1.5 years. It's even still decent enough to play modern games on highish quality relatively well. Even that pig of GTA4 runs adequately on high.

I once had Fujitsu-Siemens laptop and i cant say anything bad to it tho. Seemed like it had good building quality and stuff. No pieces came off and the plastic was pretty strong. Didnt get hot and stuff. Laptops are pretty nice, but not for me. I realised it when i got my first lol

My Dell XPS 420. I've had it for 2 years. I don't bother cleaning it. I was happy and carefree with it... for a few weeks. Then Vista got slow and annoying and my video card struggled to play games at high quality. On hot days, the graphics card would quit on me and BSOD me out of Windows. Thanks alot Nvidia 8600GTS. I though I could upgrade it somehow but there was only room for 2 hard drives and the power supply was for the BTX form factor so I couldn't do anything about the graphics card. Oh and there was only one 16X Pci-E slot and the CPU cooler was humongous so I couldn't fit a decent video card in there, not that it would work in the first place. Thanks crappy Dell PSU. And the case door vibrates when it's on a hardwood floor. Whenever I do homework with this computer I go insane in 15 minutes.
Now I overclocked the 8600GTS and switched to Windows 7 to make up for the losses. Sadly, only Windows 7 made up for Vista, and my card still struggles. I wish this "divorce" happened sooner. My brother will have no idea how bad this XPS 420 is.

Here's to 3 more months with this PC, and to many more years with my soon-to-be custom built PC.

Pleeeeease make these 3 months fly quickly. I beg of you.

Aw group hug!

I think my Old Faithul award for workhorse laptop goes to a Toshiba Tecra 510CDT (I actually had to look at the bottom of the laptop to see the model), it's a 133MHz Pentium which I acquired around 1996. In the early 2000s I installed FreeBSD on it to use as a workstation for network troubleshooting but due to it working so smoothly despite it's meagre (for today) 140mb ram and the 6gb HD which replaced the original 2gb I end up using it pretty often for general use.

It's no secret that IBM notebooks are some of the best on the market (regarding build quality). Some of the cheaper lenovo models are not great, but well, when was something cheap ever really good?

A well priced IBM notebook is hard to kill. Fact.

What kind of surprised me was a HP pavillion notebook i bought back in 2005. I used it for all kind of things, at home, on the road, etc. I was traveling with that notebook in thailand for about four months. It was stored in my backpack most of the time, no notebook bag. There were various other things in the backpack usually, and sometimes it was pretty packed. I even dropped it from about a meter height on a concrete floor once. To this day, it's still running perfect.

Quote from Dygear :

snip

i have a ibm thinkpad that is 9 to 10 years old and it still works pretty good. the battery is dead but thats because it was in a shelf for about 1 to 3 years. but ibm's are really good pc's

I've wanted a laptop since I was like 10 and have never had my own.

Quote from Dygear :

Soapy love story

ive a toshiba and comp-faq from 95, both run as good as they did back then, but with pokemon installed

I own ASUS F3Sr since december '07, didn't have any problems. Accidentaly dropped from hands few times, still working fine, cleaned cooler few times from dust. Yeah, it isn't fast enough to run games on hi-res, but enough to run LFS for me.

Quote from theirishnoob :

ive a toshiba and comp-faq from 95, both run as good as they did back then, but with pokemon installed

Oh, so your preferred games match your mental maturity as well.

Good to know

Quote from mcintyrej :

I've wanted a laptop since I was like 10 and have never had my own.

I hadn't ever even seen a computer when I was 10.

A portable back then would have been about the size of a house. The mounted on wheels would have been the "portable" part

I worked at IBM for the past year, and everyone uses a Thinkpad there. You have no idea the kind of torture those poor old T43s go through every day, and yet, they all worked, and rarely broke down. I'm talking about physical torture, but also just the torture of constantly loading stuff, like RSA (the fully featured version of Eclipse), and Websphere servers, and DB2, and Lotus Notes, all running on those old Thinkpads at the same time lol. They are quite amazing notebooks, after working there I wouldn't even consider buying anything other than a Thinkpad.

Quote from mrodgers :

A portable back then would have been about the size of a house. The mounted on wheels would have been the "portable" part

Nonsense, we've all seen quite small abaci in museums.

My first 'portable' was actually the only one I'd ever had, the old Commodore SX 64. I knew people who had computers- mostly C64s, but I didn't know anyone who owned an SX.

Just looking at the photograph here brings a surge of nostalgia... the tiny yet sharp screen, the clunky and springy drive latch and the funny little door you opened on the right to adjust brightness and volume levels, the way the hole in the top used to get really dusty down the back, clipping the keyboard onto the top when you needed to transport it (summer holidays in Paynesville).

:lovies3d:

I dislike laptops with passion. The late '07 Macbook Pro has been grinding my nuts from the start with strange graphics artifacts and corruption, battery dying after a year and various performance crawls.

The netbooks are worthless, Airs and Adamos are too slow and most of the PC laptops are built like crap. Lose-lose situation so far.

Strange, as my Early 2008 one works beautifully... Your's has the X1600 or 8600GT in it, as if it's the latter it could be a faulty GPU which Apple will replace even if it's out of warranty (as it's nVidia's ****up).

Quote from shiny_red_cobra :

after working there I wouldn't even consider buying anything other than a Thinkpad.

too bad they dont make them anymore

Quote from spankmeyer :

The netbooks are worthless

not really
ive had one for about a year and thus far its been brilliant and does everything you need on the go just fine (browsing, icq, irc, mails, spotify, data transport (the only problem there is that i still havent found any software that emulates a usb hdd) simple matlab calculations, several measurment equipment control softwares, java)
and for real work you can always ssh/rdp onto some quadcore workstation or server and offload your processes there