I just went through this a couple of weeks ago, looking for a personal laptop to do some independent work on. I'm a huge Thinkpad fan, and both of my desktop ke

I just went through this a couple of weeks ago, looking for a personal laptop to do some independent work on. I'm a huge Thinkpad fan, and both of my desktop keyboards are Thinkpad USB trackpoint-only keyboards, so that should tell you something about my biases... Anyhow, I wasn't looking for something particularly portable, my work laptop is an X200 (pre-trackpad) which is the perfect travel companion. Unfortunately as others have noted the X-series is plagued by minimal resolution, so I wanted something with a much larger screen. We issue X230's and T430's at work, so I am very familiar with them. I'm not a huge fan of the 430s, it's size I want, but they don't offer it with a FHD IPS screen. So I ended up buying a T61P with the 1920x1200 screen off ebay for $230, and put 8G RAM in it (unofficially supported by the 965 chipset, check thinkwiki.org for more information). It's in near perfect shape except for loose hinges! Installed Xubuntu 12 on it and everything works wonderfully. All the secondary channels are lousy with T6x's, spare parts are plentiful and Thinkpads have the BEST factory repair manuals bar none. So pretty damn happy for <$400 invested. If you wanted to run dual/triple monitors, take a look at the Advanced Dock, you can install a PCI-e? card in it. Right now my ghetto "triple" head setup is my x200, t61p, and t60 ($50 with the 1400x1050 IPS!) all running synergy, so I can at least have multiple reference sources open on the x200/t60 while working on the t61p and copy/paste between them. If you do get a Thinkpad, seriously consider looking at the used market, they're usually crazy cheap used.