I was looking around for a computer that would be good to install Vista on and get into some WinFX programming, specifically the WPF part of it. My current desktop system is pretty nice to work with, but I’ve also had a higher priority for large desktop real estate and so I never got into those really fast graphics cards that are needed to do Aero Glass.
My desktop system is no slouch, but it’s one of these systems that have been extended manually over years, and it really doesn’t work all that fast compared to machines I see other people use — anyway, Vista will of course have a number of new versions released over the next months, so I couldn’t install it on my main working machine for now anyway. So, up to this point I had the impression that the only way to currently get into that kind of stuff would be to get a pretty fast desktop machine with a modern GPU.
I found I was wrong — apparently there’s pretty good support from ATI and NVIDIA, and this also covers a number of the notebook graphics adapters, like the Mobility Radeon series from ATI and the GeForce Go series from NVIDIA. I had pushed the topic of a notebook away for the time being because I found the Vista thing more important, and I thought buying a notebook now would be a waste of money or at least the notebook would leave a lot to be desired when Vista actually comes along. My idea is now to use a notebook to install Vista pre-releases on it, also Office stuff of course, do a number of presentations with it, all these things that one normally does with a notebook. And when Vista releases finalize, I can migrate the work I’m currently doing on my oldish desktop system over to the notebook. Good plan, I hope.
Now, I was looking around for a notebook I’d like and I found the Lenovo (was IBM) ThinkPad T60. That looks like a great machine to me, it’s got the fantastic keyboard that ThinkPads are famous for, it can take 3GB of RAM and it has a GPU that’ll be compatible with Vista right now. The drawback seems to be: it’s apparently impossible to get one in the UK! I wasn’t even able to get a quote so far — Lenovo links to a number of resellers, but none of these seems to have a T60 to sell. Hm… wait and see, I guess. Anyone have convincing suggestions for alternatives?