IBM ThinkPad's rock! I've got an A31. Had it little over a year now and I love it. Now the "A" series it not something you'll want if you're looking for portability or sleeknees. It's advertised by IBM as a "portable desktop" -- which is what I wanted. Battery life is only about 2 - 3 hours. But it's got a gorgeous 15" screen running at 1400x1050, a 40GB hard drive at weighs close to 8 lbs (kind of heavy!).
Our internal IT manager swears by IBMs. We even have one here that a salesman accidentally backed over with his SUV. Crushed one side of it and just about destroyed the LCD screen (all cracked) -- but the damn thing booted up!! Only about half of the screen was visible, but we were able to plug a PCMCIA card in and pull the data off (the side that got crunched destroyed the port on the internal network card).
Now he uses it as a prop. When a new employee is getting a laptop he walks in with this damaged one -- before they get a good look at it he stumbles and drops it on the floor (trying to get it to bounce off a desk or chair for maximum shock effect!). Goofy IT humor... :)
Patrick: huh, good one. I heard they were rock solid but I didn't know they were *that* solid!
I'm still thinking whether I want the T41p (portable) or the R50p (portable desktop) which is more like what you bought - 15" screen and all. I'm really in a dilemma.
I've got a T41/1.6GHz with SVGA+. I've been pretty happy with it - I upgraded from a Sony Z1A/1.3GHz - with a couple of issues. I bought a new HD for it (a 60GB version of the 40GB that it shipped with) and installed XP from scratch: some of the IBM drivers have issues, most noticibly the Batterymizer, WiFi stuff, and HD protection software. While I was getting crashes often when coming out of standby, once I tweak these or removed them, I've had no crashes.
On the flip side of that IBM has send me parts to try to trouble shoot this problem: I'd call them as late as 5pm and have the part shipped to me by 11am the next morning - 18 hour turn around time! On top of that, the design of the T40/41 is simple awsome - parts are easy to swap out and interchange and upgrade. Once the crashes were sorted out this has become one of the best notebooks I've ever had.
And of course, if you're used to having a Windows key on the keyboard, you can remap other keys to get back that fucntionality - IBM gives you a utility or you can use a remapper (like the one I wrote).