I don't have the kind of exceptional ThinkPad true story that is depicted in some of your other Web site stories. I am a system consultant and software developer. I used a ThinkPad^® 770 for several years, and now I have a ThinkPad A20p that I am just thrilled to bits with.

The principle advantage of these machines is a large screen, high performance and lots of disk space. This is what I need to develop software on site and that is core to my business. These machines, despite their arguably high cost, pay for themselves in a few months. They do this by being available, on site, reliable and very high performance.

Your machines are used by me to compile very large C, C++, Visual Basic and Java programs. The performance is side by side with desktops. In some cases these machines are exceeding the performance of desktop machines in the same office.

The machines don't get abused, but they certainly do not get molly coddled either. They ride in a case on the floor of my car, get carried on public transportation every single day. Then I periodically use air transport as well. There they get all that carry on luggage bins have to offer. They get used during the in-flight meal, bumped and jostled and all that air travel has to offer. They get plugged in over seas, carried through customs, inspected, probed. In short they get used as you designed them to be used, but not one bit more gently. I might add that they get used beside Dells, Compacs, Twin Heads and other brands purchased by my peers. In these side by side battlefield conditions, your products never fail me. The others have all fallen short in some way and ultimately failed to function. I can not tell you how many times something happened and I did not really expect it to function and ... it did.

They also are subjected to all manner of software upgrades, experimental device drivers and other evils of system programming. Again, things go very smoothly and the exceptions your machines have are always beautifully documented.

Again, with the addition of all this transport and modification, they have been more trouble free than the machines I keep at home or in the office. No disk crash, no display failure... A genuinely reliable tool.

No camels, no altitudes beyond pressurized cabins, just the working world. They work great there as well as the exotic locales you describe.

Geoffrey
United States