Full Review

I was given a Thinkpad 600X by my company to use for work. It came with a docking station, two batteries, a CD-ROM, a PCMCIA LAN card, and a 3.5" floppy disk drive. Everything except the docking station came in a Targus bag. This was a substantial downgrade from the laptop my previous employer provided, but it worked.

This computer is a basic, no bells and whistles laptop. There is no built in USB port, but one is available on the docking station. This proved to be a problem when I was trying to download digital images while on travel. Why would anyone bring a docking station while they are away from the office? Well, if you have a 600X and a USB device, you're going to have to.

The no frills also includes the CD-ROM. Don't expect blazing speed, the ability to write to CD, or a DVD player. You will have none of them. If you use the CD-ROM to load software, you'll have that, and you can play audio, but if you actually want to hear anything, get external speakers to replace the factory provided.

Also, a PCMCIA card will be required to connect to an Ethernet port. Later versions of the Thinkpad have integrated LAN ports, and the external card will slow down the access speed to a network. This wonderful feature required me to carry three laptops to Argentina to test network access speeds for my company, because we would get erroneous results through the PCMCIA card.

On the positive side, the laptop allows you to install either the floppy drive or CD-ROM into the computer, or you can keep the CD-ROM installed in the computer, and mount the floppy drive in a holder that can be connected to the docking station for running both at the same time.

If you can find one cheap and are only going to use the computer for light work, the 600X might be an option, but I would recommend shopping around for something with more features.