Have ThinkPad will travel?

The adventures of an IT Editor traveling with his ThinkPad Z60m

Its been over a week since you have heard from us and that’s because we have been on our travels. As an Englishman living in Tennessee in the US, we are back in the UK for 3 weeks, for some business mixed in with catching up with the relatives in Europe and of course enjoying some of the things that as Brit’s, we just cannot buy in the US.

Things like English Sausage, HP Sauce and of course, warm British Beer!

I think of all the things we do in the UK, the fact that we drink our beer warm and almost flat, is a great mystery to our American and Canadian friends.

Just catching the tail end of Gustave on the flight from Nashville to Chicago, we had plenty of delays and of course, I was able to do what I love to do in an airport and that is observe all the notebook users and look at what they were using.

Now before any of our more vociferous readers accuse us of being biased towards ThinkPad’s, (which we unashamedly are) we were delighted to see that ThinkPad’s out numbered all the other brands in use.

Well, at least they did in Nashville and we can assume that this was a fair cross section of travelers.

Wandering round, we had an IBM badged T61 and a T60, a couple of X series, a ThinkPad X300, a couple of Lenovo T61′s, a ThinkPad SL500 owner of 3 weeks, who said he was delighted with his purchase.

And last but not least a venerable T20 that was doing sterling services and connected to the net with a Wireless Card.

All in all, I counted 9 ThinkPad’s. Second was the HP brand with 7 notebooks, Dell with 5 and then two Apples.

I think the most interesting thing to me was the diversity of the people using the ThinkPad’s. Far from all being the corporate type, most seemed to be either travelers like myself, academics or silver surfers. Maybe we were all IT types in disguise?

As a contrast, almost all the suits had HP’s on their laps! The more that I do travel, the more that I am finding that the ThinkPad brand has a much wider appeal than the corporate staffer who has had his Thinkpad issued by his IT department.

Let us know what you think, why you own your ThinkPad, which model you’re using, and why you chose it.

As a footnote, the whole ThinkPadToday.com site has been designed, administered and written on a ThinkPad Z60m. Its the ‘Special Edition’ with the Titanium lid, Intel Pentium M 1.8 GHz Processore, 80 gig Harddrive and 2 gig Ram.

Not only has it been the most reliable laptop I have ever owned, it is ranks as my favorite ThinkPad in our current stable. However, on this trip to Europe, I have finally come to the conclusion that I should have left this beautifully built, solid chunky monster at home. So what should I have brought? More about this later!