Buying a T60p?

So I am reasonably decided that I want to go for a Thinkpad for my new college laptop. Unfortunately, all I can say for certain that I want are stats-- I have no idea how to go about looking for a good price. I am in the US and planning to buy online, preferably out of state so as to avoid sales tax in Washington (state). Unfortunately, my school (University of Washington) does offer a discount on Thinkpads-- but only on certain models. I do not know what and if it's possible to upgrade most of the components later. What can and cannot be upgraded in a T60?

Ideally I would have:
T2600
2 gb DDR667
100 gb 7200 HDD
15" UXGA
DVDRW
9 Cell battery
Fingerprint reader
Bluetooth
And ~$2000

Understanding that my pricerange is somewhat lower than what I need, I am trying to not only find the best price available, but also to figure out if there would be a cheaper alternative by instead adding memory/hard drive/whatever else I can on my own later and manually.

Being that not only are my preferred stats thusly fluid based on what price I can find but also that my entire price is fluid, I do not know where to start. Does anyone have any sort of starting-point suggestion? Could I get some kind of discount for being a student through any sort of program, despite not wanting to buy one of the "educational models" stocked by my school?

 

Re: What can and cannot be upgraded in a T60?
Easiest to upgrade would be the RAM and HDD.

I'm not sure but for the specs you specified, it should be more than $2500.
Configuring your specs in Lenovo site gave me this:
ThinkPad T60p
Mode;- 2613ETU
Configured price- $2,578.00

 

Okay so perhaps instead I'll buy a third party hard drive and memory. Would my best bet be to buy the notebook itself directly from pc.ibm.com?

 

I think it's cheaper to buy from resellers.. try euclidcomputers.com

 

I don't think you are going to get the UXGA screen at $2k or under. If you have never seen one I would recommend doing so as some of the text will be very small. The 15" SXGA screen is still a very good screen. If you are going to be carrying this around quite a bit, you might want to go smaller. CostCentral is usually amongst the lowest in price, but they do not allow returns.

 

Have you thought of ebay? That's where I just got mine...It's almost the same specs too except only 1GB RAM and it's a 14" screen. and I got it for about 1800. It's new.

 

BTW, what would you use it for? I think it's too powerful for a college notebook. Besides, it's hard to squeeze it at $2K..