Late coming thread, but I just had to post about this (school. I've been busy as Hell trying to get my grades up to transfer).
I got a new ThinkPad R51 as a VERY late graduation present beginning of the month, and so far I love the thing. It was around $1100 after shipping on Newegg along with a few network essentials. I've only got one port for me in my dorm room and I want to share files between my rig and the new baby :p
What I love about it the best is the clean and simple design behind it. It's not plastic-y like almost every other laptop out there and I swear this thing is built completely out of metal. At least I know the monitor hinges are (has IBM changed their design whatsoever from years before?). There's also the insane reliability that IBM crammed into it - everything from the hundreds of backup methods to the hardware protection built into it. Outside of Apple is there any other laptop manufacturer that has active hard drive protection?
It's not much inside it though - 1.6GHz, 256MB, 20GB. It's still damn thin and not bad for what's under the hood, but it could really use some more RAM. After a small bunch of windows are open the hard drive starts swapping.
I was originally contemplating an iBook instead of this, but I don't think I would have been too happy with it compared to this. I'm too used to WinXP and I'm sure I couldn't do half of what I'd want with this than I could on that - I'm an IT Student. I've still got the capability to F around in OSX, I've got an old iMac DV that needs its monitor fixed.
