[jyl]

Had two Thinkpads this year, T60 and now X60s. Happy to report Lenovo (bought from IBM) has maintained the quality of the machines. Really excellent - from a hardware perspective, even better than my MacBook.

Wayne, I suggest you spend the $ for a T60. Mine was very powerful, ran huge spreadsheets, drove dual LCD monitors (w/ docking station), never hiccupped. An excellent product.

Edit: Three, actually. Also X41 Tablet, that one I bought w/ own $, others were/are work machines.

Edit2: I've only ever owned the "corporate" Thinkpads. These are 100% work machines, no effort to provide consumer features like SD card slots or convenient MP3/DVD buttons. But I think there are consumer-oriented Thinkpads too.

Edit 3: Some new laptops are coming w/ just ExpressCard slots instead of PCMCIA slots, beware. The best ones have a slot that accepts both.