Choose Your Weapon

Last week while pouring through the laundry list of things that need to be accomplished before I start Graduate School, I found that a laptop is now a required utensil for grad students. With today's growing reliability on information technology, it seems we need to have a computer at our disposal at all times, which as an aspiring Techno-Entrepreneur is at least reassuring to my career aspersions. Therefore, the last couple of weeks I have started the process of researching my grad school "weapon of choice."

Now with my career start at IBM and blood continuing to flow blue, I feel the IBM Thinkpad line - dissipate the recent take over by Lenovo - is still the cadillac of notebook computing. Over the years I have owned several Thinkpads and have not found any other brand that compares. Therefore, a Thinkpad it will be... now, I just need to decide on the right model.

With careful consideration and plenty of laptop review reading, I have finally decided on the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T43. When pouring through reviews I found www.notebookreview.com to be the most informative website for information on all the latest laptop offerings as well as instrumental to my decision on the T43.

I also considered the Thinkpad X41 but decided a little more weight was worth the extra horse power and onboard optical drive. The X41 is Thinkpad's new ultraportable offering and while coming in at less that 3 lbs with heavy horsepower it lacks some of the swiss army features that the T43 offers.

As for purchasing, I am going to hold off for a few months to pull the trigger (in hopes prices may lower), but will purchase through the ibm.com website. I still have ties at IBM and through the employee purchase program should be able to get a 25% discount.