I’ve been an IBM Thinkpad laptop user for a number of years. A model 760 (?) was my first real laptop. All the ones I had before that were hand-me-downs from nice people in the church I served in at the time. But that laptop made me a committed Thinkpad customer.
I’ve also been tracking the Tablet PC phenomena for almost a year. TPC’s were first released several years ago but have finally begun to win over a growing audience. TPCs give you the ability to “ink” directly on the screen with a special pen. That ink can be searched, converted to text, converted to shapes, etc., by Windows.
Anyway, when Lenovo (who recently bought the personal computer division from IBM) released a Thinkpad in a tablet form factor, I decided to take the plunge. My Thinkpad T23 was three and a half years old at that point and in need of upgrade. Fortunately for me I ordered one early because unexplained delays pushed the ship date back by almost two months. Not a good first product ship for Lenovo. It was probably only a month after I ordered my Thinkpad X41 that my Thinkpad died. It was a slow, painful, gradual death, one from which I recovered all my data before something critical on the motherboard inexorably burned away.
I took it to the IBM service center in Skopje, Macedonia (yes, there is a reason I’m sold on Thinkpads) and they said a new mobo would be $1300. Since I can buy a used T23 on ebay for about $250, and since my new X41 was in route (sort of) I decided to pass.
My new TPC will make it’s way back to Kosovo in about a week when my wife comes back from the US from some doctors appointments. While she’s been gone I’ve been using HER T23 to copy all my installation CD’s to an external hard drive to make sure I have everything I need to recommence operations on the new PC.
