It’s about time for another little anniversary party. About a year ago, I finally broke down, waded through my indecisiveness and plopped down less than US$400 or so for a humdinger of a laptop.
To be perfectly, completely and absolutely honest, I haven’t ever regretted it. This machine has been a happy addition to the family, and given the chance I would not pick any other over this one.
It’s petite, light, speedy and flexible, and does so much work around the house it’s a wonder how I ever got on without it.
I would be hard-pressed to find something to complain about, unless I include battery life (which is not a huge concern for me) or a rather weak video card (which is also not a huge concern for me).
I’ve never had a stitch of trouble from it — either in terms of hardware reliability or Linux compatibility — and I would gladly endorse or recommend this machine to anyone else looking for a computer in the same bracket.
I admit freely that I picked a Thinkpad because I know and enjoy working with them, and that has not failed me. If I’m ever in the market for another computer, I’d definitely go with this brand.
But considering my propensity for milking hardware for every last second of its life … I might not need a new computer for about 15 years or so. … 😯
Cheers and happy anniversary, X60s. 🙂
Motho ke motho ka botho 
I’m writing this on another member of that class (an X41), and have an older X20 as well. Make no mistake, these are wonderful machines.
I also bought an used X30 three/four years ago when there were no netbooks and 12in laptops were very expensive. First thing was to rip windows out from it and to install Linux. Like you, that will be my laptop for the next (long) years to come. Cheers!
I have a T60, the 14 inch big brother of the X60 (no S) and I’ve had to install thinkfan and fiddle a bit to get the fan control set to a sensible level. Otherwise, it sounds like a 60s hovercraft with the fan operating all the time.
How is thermal control on your X60s’s people?
Going to get a new laptop for university. What would you recommend? It would have to be new. I known IBM Thindpads don’t exist anymore. I would like something light, with a good battery life, and great Linux compatibility. I’m a CS major.
While IBM no longer makes the Thinkpad brand, Lenovo is still producing top-quality machines using that name. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the quality of the ThinkPad name hasn’t changed AT ALL.
I can also recommend just about anything by Asus, though stay away from the intel poulsbo chipset, as it’s nothing but problems.
Someone once told me that in fact IBM are still manufacturing the ThinkPads, they’re just putting the name Lenovo on them. That could be out of date by now though.
Lenovo is a separate company from IBM, IBM sold the computing division to Lenovo some time ago but stayed on to assist in some capacity.
I’m writing this on an X200 running Slackware. I used to have an X60 tablet, it was a brilliant laptop, but the tablet part made the screen appear a bit dull.
The Lenovo X Series laptops are amazing and the keyboards are second to none.
Brilliant blog!
Your post has inspired me to fix my old R60 which most would throw out or in my case leave gathering dust. Nothing too much wrong with it, just needed a new fan (a ThinkPad will not boot up if it feels the fan isn’t functioning as well as it should). All told it was only $20 to bring back my old friend, which like your X60s has outstanding Linux support. Wonder why I didn’t bother fixing it sooner… I guess laptops are generally marketed as “consumer” devices. ThinkPads especially have outstanding documentation and sources for spare parts.
Great Blog!
I recently picked up a x60 from ebay and it has turned into travel laptop. One thing that has not worked in its favor has been battery management, I suppose I need to build the right modules for it.
So far I have tried building tp_smapi for it without much success. Any ideas? Btw, I am running crunchbang on my machine. Here is a link to the question I created on stackexchange [1]
Thanks!
[1]http://superuser.com/questions/855300/cannot-load-tp-smapi-module-on-thinkpad-x60