I recently bought a very low use Lenovo Thinkpad T60 off a buddy, and this post contains my opinions of the unit. As a preface, I will note that I am not mad at the guy who sold it to me, nothing personal (since he is an inactive member here).
Honestly, given all the awards and hype thinkpads tend to have, I was honestly disappointed.
I'll start with what I did like. That being the thinklight (LED light in the lid, standard equipment for thinkpads since the dinosaurs) and the durable construction. Otherwise, I was not impressed anyplace else.
I will compare it to the Dell Latitude D620/D630, which was a comparable offering from dell that I also happen to be very familiar with.
The majority of my complaints is the way the lenovo treats hardware options. This unit is clearly not a top of the line unit; the only things above the base options is a slightly better GPU (a rinky dink Radeon X1300, better ones had X1400) and a C2D T7200 (which is nice, yay x64). Stock, it had an oddball 60GB 7200RPM SATA drive; being 7200RPM is nice but only 60GB? Sure, it was the early days of SATA but I would have expected a minimum of 80GB. No Bluetooth (optional apparently). No fingerprint reader (not a deal breaker). The LCD is the biggest letdown; while it is a fullscreen unit, I was expecting a 5:4 display of at least 1280x1024 (I have a Dell Latitude D610 with the same size panel at an even higher resolution yet)... what did they put in? A puny 1024x768! 4:3! What is this, 2003? It's a 2006/2007 model, seriously. I thought that by then they'd have gone up in resolution like everything else I've seen of the era... Nope.
But now for the complaints that weren't really due to the particular options of the laptop. It mainly is the way that they seem to "red marker" things that don't happen to be used on the particular unit. In this case, they left room for a 3G card. But unlike dell, who always leaves the antennae (usually), slot, and sim socket present whether you get the card or not (at least on latitudes and their derivatives), lenovo left all of them off. No PCIe slot or anything. They left the location on the mainboard unpopulated. While I don't use 3G cards on these things, I like using internal USB holders for said slots so I can make my logitech unifying adapters internal.
Speaking of USB, here's something else they did that pisses me off: They nuked the USB part of the wifi's PCIe slot. I am running an SLIC'd and whitelist removed BIOS, so I should be able to run a decent wifi card (in my case, an extra Intel 7260AC), right? Right... but the internal USB on the slot, nope, dead. No bueno. On all of my dell latitudes with PCIe, the USB is live on all the slots. No whitelist either. Oh, by the way, Dell always gives one 3 antenna's for wifi (even if one isn't used for the card installed). Lenovo only gave me two. Why???
Still on the topic of USB, lenovo is lacking in the ports department. Only 3 USB ports. Dell's 14" offerings have had 4 since the D610, which was a good year or two before the T60 came out. Also, no serial port or parallel port. Most 14" business laptops of that vintage had one or the other. I know, usually not an issue, but if you need it, what are ya gonna do? Burn one of the 3 measly USB ports? Yes, you can use a Hub, but that's a band aid fix IMHO.
The thing is also dicky with drivers... while it's not as bad as a couple sony vaio's I have of that chipset (those are paperweights thanks to that), it's still bad enough that I couldn't get arch linux to run on it well. I was able to get it to a CLI with some kernel parameter trickery, but for some stupid reason, despite all my tries, the farking backlight stays off. the actual pixels do thier job, but the backlight stays off and adjusting the brightness does nothing (although the OSD for brightness in GNOME does pop up). I've rarely had stupid crap like that with my dell latitudes, and when I did, it wasn't anything dell did (usually nvidia driver pains).
Other than the think light and the fact it can do both PCMCIA and expresscard, I don't see anything of it has over the Dell Latitude D620/D630. Build quality is solid on both of them, both have decent keyboards.... or not. The T60's felt a hair better, but the up arrow key is finicky if you press it from the bottom. it depresses but the key doesn't register. Did they even test the prototype?
So, I really don't see how The T60 got editor's choice back then. It was just a faster thinkpad. Nothing new. The Latitude line, on the other hand, had a bevy of new features (ALS, wifi signal meter, lots of expansion potential, etc.). To me, it's no comparison.
Yeah, I know I probably pissed off a few thinkpad fanboys, but if I did, well, you can have em. I don't care for them (at least the ones made after 2003, that's when Dell D series began).
Honestly, given all the awards and hype thinkpads tend to have, I was honestly disappointed.
I'll start with what I did like. That being the thinklight (LED light in the lid, standard equipment for thinkpads since the dinosaurs) and the durable construction. Otherwise, I was not impressed anyplace else.
I will compare it to the Dell Latitude D620/D630, which was a comparable offering from dell that I also happen to be very familiar with.
The majority of my complaints is the way the lenovo treats hardware options. This unit is clearly not a top of the line unit; the only things above the base options is a slightly better GPU (a rinky dink Radeon X1300, better ones had X1400) and a C2D T7200 (which is nice, yay x64). Stock, it had an oddball 60GB 7200RPM SATA drive; being 7200RPM is nice but only 60GB? Sure, it was the early days of SATA but I would have expected a minimum of 80GB. No Bluetooth (optional apparently). No fingerprint reader (not a deal breaker). The LCD is the biggest letdown; while it is a fullscreen unit, I was expecting a 5:4 display of at least 1280x1024 (I have a Dell Latitude D610 with the same size panel at an even higher resolution yet)... what did they put in? A puny 1024x768! 4:3! What is this, 2003? It's a 2006/2007 model, seriously. I thought that by then they'd have gone up in resolution like everything else I've seen of the era... Nope.
But now for the complaints that weren't really due to the particular options of the laptop. It mainly is the way that they seem to "red marker" things that don't happen to be used on the particular unit. In this case, they left room for a 3G card. But unlike dell, who always leaves the antennae (usually), slot, and sim socket present whether you get the card or not (at least on latitudes and their derivatives), lenovo left all of them off. No PCIe slot or anything. They left the location on the mainboard unpopulated. While I don't use 3G cards on these things, I like using internal USB holders for said slots so I can make my logitech unifying adapters internal.
Speaking of USB, here's something else they did that pisses me off: They nuked the USB part of the wifi's PCIe slot. I am running an SLIC'd and whitelist removed BIOS, so I should be able to run a decent wifi card (in my case, an extra Intel 7260AC), right? Right... but the internal USB on the slot, nope, dead. No bueno. On all of my dell latitudes with PCIe, the USB is live on all the slots. No whitelist either. Oh, by the way, Dell always gives one 3 antenna's for wifi (even if one isn't used for the card installed). Lenovo only gave me two. Why???
Still on the topic of USB, lenovo is lacking in the ports department. Only 3 USB ports. Dell's 14" offerings have had 4 since the D610, which was a good year or two before the T60 came out. Also, no serial port or parallel port. Most 14" business laptops of that vintage had one or the other. I know, usually not an issue, but if you need it, what are ya gonna do? Burn one of the 3 measly USB ports? Yes, you can use a Hub, but that's a band aid fix IMHO.
The thing is also dicky with drivers... while it's not as bad as a couple sony vaio's I have of that chipset (those are paperweights thanks to that), it's still bad enough that I couldn't get arch linux to run on it well. I was able to get it to a CLI with some kernel parameter trickery, but for some stupid reason, despite all my tries, the farking backlight stays off. the actual pixels do thier job, but the backlight stays off and adjusting the brightness does nothing (although the OSD for brightness in GNOME does pop up). I've rarely had stupid crap like that with my dell latitudes, and when I did, it wasn't anything dell did (usually nvidia driver pains).
Other than the think light and the fact it can do both PCMCIA and expresscard, I don't see anything of it has over the Dell Latitude D620/D630. Build quality is solid on both of them, both have decent keyboards.... or not. The T60's felt a hair better, but the up arrow key is finicky if you press it from the bottom. it depresses but the key doesn't register. Did they even test the prototype?
So, I really don't see how The T60 got editor's choice back then. It was just a faster thinkpad. Nothing new. The Latitude line, on the other hand, had a bevy of new features (ALS, wifi signal meter, lots of expansion potential, etc.). To me, it's no comparison.
Yeah, I know I probably pissed off a few thinkpad fanboys, but if I did, well, you can have em. I don't care for them (at least the ones made after 2003, that's when Dell D series began).
). 
The magnesium belly pan (the first model to have it, the D600/D800 used plastic with a Magnesium internal frame) scuffed a bit, no other damage. Had the battery charge circuit not fried (and I still had a good reason to troubleshoot it) it would still be ticking (albeit on a 2nd mobo, that happened before the fall).
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