I have been an IBM Thinkpad user for I think around 10 years now.  I think the first one was a 760Z and I have been through around 4–5 of them now.

I like everyone else rely heavily upon my laptop.  When traveling around the world to present at conferences I can’t show up at a location with a dead laptop.  To that end I have had great experience with Thinkpads and clearly other speakers have also.  Go into any speaker lounge and in my experience 65–70% of the speakers will be carrying thinkpads for the exact same reason.  Makes it nice also if you forget a power supply, etc!

Tonight I had an issue with my 10 month old T60p.  I upgraded it to Vista Ultimate RTM in November shortly after it became available.  I have avoided putting any beta software on this machine.  See above about not showing up with a dead machine…

I plugged it into a projector the other day at a client site and it came up black and white!  That’s weird.  Thought it might be the projector.  Tried a different one.  Still black and white.

Thought it might be the hardware so I swapped hard drives to an XP image I have and tried it.  Color shows up just fine.

Got the latest ATI driver from the IBM support site.  Still had the problem.  Waited a couple weeks and got a newer driver off the IBM site released on 1/22/07.  Same problem.

Called IBM support and was told: “IBM will not support Vista unless it came from the factory pre-installed on the system.  Full packaged product purchased and later installed is not supported.” Renee Martin – IBM Support Atlanta

Whoa!  A laptop that I bought 10 months ago with a 3 year warranty is now no longer supported because Microsoft released an operating system upgrade.  One in fact that IBM/Lenovo will be shipping pre-installed on almost identical hardware very soon.

I was a bit worried about the Lenovo acquisition like many but figured they had one or two more designs left in them that were collaborations with IBM.  The 3000 series confirmed that machines designed solely by Lenovo were not going to suit my needs.

I think this is the turning point where they finally jumped the shark.  Time to start looking at other notebook vendors.  I am not thrilled by Dell quality/support.  HP notebooks are uninspiring to say the least.  It might be, I shudder to say it, MacBook Pro w/bootcamp time.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:55:31 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]