New laptop: ThinkPad R61

It’s been a while since my last post. The last few months have been really crazy. Hopefully it’ll get more interesting from now on.

My current laptop isn’t in bad shape, but it is quite outdated now. Last month was my birthday, and since I didn’t do anything fancy I decided it was time to give myself a late present.

I would have loved a Macbook Pro, but I’m not made of money and I really wanted a hires screen.
So I did some research and finally decided on a ThinkPad R61. It’s a lot cheaper than the rest of the ThinkPad models, every single review I’ve read is excellent and I’m quite impressed with the specs.

It’s one of the models shipped by Lenovo directly with SUSE Linux, and as I’m not fond of paying a Microsoft tax for something I won’t be using, I tried really hard to find a retailer that would sell it with Linux in Spain. Unluckily with no success.

The price is just slightly above the average laptop, and it’s got one of the new Penryn 45nm Core 2 Duo processors, 4 GB of RAM, 15.4″ 1680×1050 screen and a rock solid design. I’ll be using it with Linux and OpenSolaris, so the virtualization support will be something to be grateful for.

I’m told I can expect it for this Friday. Just a couple more days… I can barely wait :)

As I said before, it comes with some severe software limitations, but as soon as I can unbreak it by wiping out Windows I’ll be bragging about the new machine right here ;-)