Full Review

IBM ThinkPad 600X
By Stephen Smith

The IBM ThinkPad 600X is a laptop that I bought about a year and a half ago, and I really like it. It has a 600 Mh-z processor and 192 megabytes of RAM. The laptop has a 14-inch LCD screen that is very bright and visible in most light conditions. The customer support is great as well as the software that comes bundled with it. The laptop is very thin and very sleek.

This laptop was top of the line when I got it, and still very fast now. With 600 megahertz, it’s very fast and can handle most applications. The 600-megahertz is in an Intel Pentium III processor, not with the cheaper and slower Intel Celeron chip. In addition to the 600-megahertz processor, it comes with 192 megabytes of RAM, which was a huge deal then, and still very good now. I don’t know of any applications (except high-end video editing software, but if your doing that high-end stuff, you shouldn’t be using a fourteen inch screen anyway) that require more than 128 megabytes of RAM.

One thing about laptops that you have to keep in mind is that the screen you chose is going to be the one you stick too as long as you own the laptop, so you better get a good one. This computer has a very good one and I’m glad I put in the extra money for a laptop with a good screen. It’s 14 inches, which is about equivalent to a 15-inch monitor CRT monitor. It’s super flat and super sharp. It’s got an LCD display, which makes it much better than the cheaper and low-end TFT display, which is more common on laptops.

This laptop is very sleek and small. The base (with the keyboard and the processor and drives) is very thin yet the keys on the keyboard are excellent, full sized, and easier to type with than other laptops I’ve used. One other thing I like about the design is that they don’t include one of those touch pads, and instead include a track ball-like thing in the middle of the keyboard between the G, H, and B keys. With the touch pad, you’re constantly hitting it when your trying to type and it’s just difficult to use.

Inside the CPU there is a lot of stuff. It includes an 11 gigabyte hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, an expansion slot, one USB port, a parallel port, a serial port, one PS/2 port, a phone jack for using a dial-up modem, a 56K modem, and a couple of ports that I’m not quite sure what they do (although I know one of them connects to a floppy drive made by IBM).

Bundled with the laptop is the OS (Windows 98 SE, but they’ve probably updated it to include Windows ME by now), Microsoft Word 2000, Internet Explorer 5.0, and Netscape Communicator 4.6. Internet Explorer and Netscape can be updated to the current versions over the Internet for free, though.

Overall I think that this laptop is great and a very good companion when traveling. The battery life is fairly good, it’s fast, it’s got a great display screen, and comes with some great software. I would recommend this to anybody who travels a lot or for the home user traveling from work to home with the optional docking station that can turn this laptop into a fully functional desktop computer.