UPDATE
I have received the replacement T60p from Buy.com, it has the LG screen, NMB keyboard, and Intel wireless card. The LG screen is noticeably better than the samsung screen.. the colors are more vibrant, the horizontal lines that the showed up on the upper part of the screen on the samsung are not there on the LG, and there is less light leakage. While the LG screen is far better than the samsung it is still somewhat sparkly/grainy (oh, well I guess this is just the state of current widescreen technology).
Also it seems that even though the Atheros card, which was in the original laptop, is supposed to be better than the Intel ABG card, which is in the new one, my new machine does not have the wireless problems that the other one had. Hurray!
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ORIGINAL POST
Well my new T60p has arrived. It came last week and overall I am very pleased with it. It is very fast and responsive (there's a lot of people out there bashing windows vista but I happen to love it and find it kind of hard to use windows XP now). The keyboard is also VERY nice and the machine works very well in general.
Here's my complaints though:
1) The screen is noticeably grainy/ What I mean by this is there is something of a sparkle to the display, this is common on LCD's but it is driving me nuts. It feels worse than normal now, it's like I'm looking at the laptop through a screen door. I don't know maybe I am OCD because I never noticed it on my screen at work and now that one is bothering me too. I have sent the laptop back because I got the samsung screen which is supposed to suffer from this more than the LG so I am going to pay the extra $$$ and try and get the LG screen. I hope that the screen sparkle on the LG screens is less but I really like the Thinkpad T60's for the most part.
2) The wireless works well most of the time but occasionally it will drop out for no apparent reason and you will have to reboot the machine to get it back.
3) Windows Vista overall is very good but it's really annoying with all the things that it wants you to confirm... blegh, I just want it to do what I tell it too. I realize that they are trying to make it easier to notice if a virus or spyware is operating on your machine but it's really annoying and I think there might be better ways to accomplish the same thing (although I couldn't tell you any if you were to ask me.)
WARNING, WHAT FOLLOWS IS A DRM SOAP BOX --
It's also somewhat insulting that they have added all these tools to help you prevent viruses and spyware while adding a fairamount of DRM which in my opinion is just as bad as spyware. DRM stands for Digital Rights Managment and Microsoft insists that it is good for the end user because it allows them to make more content available on the PC; but, I don't really buy this. That content that they are so concerned about being stolen will be made available without the DRM if there is a big enough market. The companies are profit driven and therefore if consumers demand that the content be available on the PC then it will be, otherwise it is not valuable. Adding DRM is just a cop out because the providers want it. The end user was nowhere in the equation when Microsoft added this.
Just as an example of how DRM hurts the consumer, I purchased a small number of songs from Walmart's online download service. It was 88 cents a song plus tax (so about 94 cents total). The songs sounded fine quality wise and you had permission to burn them to CD up to 10 times. They also have a policy of not reissuing licenses. Well this is what bit me. I have the song files backed up but the licenses were not so now on my brand new computer I cannot play the music that I legally paid for only a few months ago. Walmart has a record of these purchases, I can see them on their website, however they will not reissue the licenses. DRM hurts consumers. In fact it punishes people for obeying the law (which is presumably what the record companies want). If I had illegally downloaded those songs I would have had no trouble transferring them to my new computer, but because I chose to legally download them and pay for them I am now stuck with unplayable songs and must purchase them again, a second time.
END RANT
