Well I received a brand new IBM/Lenovo R61p laptop the other day and it is just great.
2 Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor with 2 GB of RAM (upgradable to 4GB), 100 GB, 15.4 Inch wide screen etc etc. All up it is a very nice machine. The out of the box experience has been very smooth. Rather than clutter the machine with software that isn't required IBM/Lenovo are really good at keeping it to a limited number of useful applications within the ThinkVantage range of tools. As a result there was no need to reformat the machine and rebuild it without the rubbish. The only item that isn't really essential that came installed is Google Desktop. I havn't used it before but I am going to leave it and see if it is useful. The other item that seems handy is DiskKeeper lite which seems to work well for defragging the machine however to be really useful I may purchase the upgrade to the Pro version so it can run on a schedule in the background.
I spent a day or so migrating across all of my applications which I have listed here:
| Applications | Utilities | Others |
| IBM Lotus Notes 7.0.2 | mNotes | Snood (For my additive gaming) |
| MindJet MindManager | Tivoli CDP (for backup) | Bejewelled (for more addictive gaming) |
| IBM Sametime 7.5.1 | 5 Clicks (neat screen capture tool) | |
| Firefox | Cisco VPN | |
| MS Office 2003 | Ultimate Zip | |
| MS Project | Telstra NextG PCMCIA Card Software (for mobile internet) | |
| MS Visio | Logitech Media Centre | |
| Quickbooks Premier | PDF Creator | |
| VMWare Server Console | UltraEdit | |
| Google Earth | UltraVNC | |
| Workplace Forms Viewer 2.6 | Citrix Client | |
| Workplace Forms Designer 2.6 | Ultramon (used to manage multiple screens) | |
| Microsoft Groove Virtual Office | ||
| iTunes | ||
| Adobe CS2 | ||
| Skype | ||
| Address-IT | ||
| IVR-Xpress Visual Builder | ||
| Microsoft IE 7 |
I think that is about it. All up the new machine is great and I am very pleased with the performance etc. The main application that I noticed a difference with was Groove. I had all but given up on Groove because it seemed to hog a lot of resources however I thought I would try again. I was pleased to see that i hardly noticed when it started and it happily runs in the background. So I guess the extra processing power makes all the difference!