Laptop systems

If you travel a lot, then you will most likely want a laptop. Now you have a decision to make: is this laptop just for travel or is it your "primary" home system? It makes a big difference as if it is to be your primary system you will want the best available. If it's just for travel you can probably survive with less.

Good primary systems

IBM Thinkpad 770 Series

I love this laptop. It's rugged, durable and long-lasting. The support is great. The downside: heavy and expensive. A good choice if you need a workhorse which will get a lot of throwing around.

IBM Thinkpad 600E Series

This machine is the best ever! It is expensive, but it's worth it. A real workhorse which can take a lot of thrashing. 

Review Of IBM 770

I loved the IBM 770 series laptop, but I was getting some complaints from my staff and users that it was just too heavy. When it came time to replace some 10 systems and purchase 10 more, I decided it was time for a change. Since the 700 series had been incredibly successful with us, I started with IBM's newer 600 E series.

I was impressed and ordered one to try out. What a wonderful system. It runs NT (which we needed) and runs it well. We had no problems installing anything, even with all of our customizations. It has lots of memory, and is very expandable. Quite a bit of disk space, although not has much as the 770 series.

Everyone liked the crisp, large screen and the lightness of the machine. It's very fast (we have the 400 MHz models) and so far has been very reliable.

Out of 16 machines so far, we've had one dead-on-arrival (which, since we purchased extended warranties IBM came out next day to fix) and two component failures so far (memory and screen). About normal.

As with the 770 model, we found that non-IBM memory just did not work.