My laptop: Lenovo ThinkPad T510

The first laptop computer I ever used was one that I used occasionally for my first ever job, as a part-time as a computer technician for LSU Libraries (that's where I learned about PC hardware). It was an IBM ThinkPad. My boss didn't like it that much, for whatever reason (he called it a "StinkPad"), but I fell in love with the TrackPoint mouse pointer embedded in the keyboard. I loved the fact that I didn't have to lift my hands from the keyboard in order to use the mouse. That henceforth became my holy grail for keyboards.

The first laptop I bought was a used Compaq Presario. It was very nice, but it died after three months, and so I decided never again to buy a used laptop. I can fix desktop PCs, but there's very little I can do with a broken laptop, since the parts are so proprietary. I had to junk it on eBay at 67% or so loss.

My next laptop was a Toshiba that I had to buy very quickly; thus, I didn't spend enough time researching. I went purely for low price. It was heavy and lump, and I never liked it much.

Eventually, the first laptop I bought when I had the time to really investigate was an IBM/Lenovo (branded IBM, though already owned by Lenovo by then) ThinkPad T43. It was normally quite pricey and would have been beyond my budget, but I got a $1,000 discount through a friend who worked for IBM/Lenovo at the time. I loved it, and it got me hooked on ThinkPads. Thus, when it died in 2009 (after the 3-year warranty expired), I went for another ThinkPad, which I describe here.

I presently own a Lenovo ThinkPad T510. I run Ubuntu Linux on the primary partition, and the default Windows 7 that came with it on the secondary partition. I have separate pages describing the following aspects of my laptop:

• Hardware, including peripherals
• The Ubuntu partition
• The Windows 7 partition.