T60 or T42

Hi everybody. Hope it's ok for this to go here-pretty specific.

I ordered a T60 back in Feb, ship date is 3/14. Then I saw IBM had dropped its prices by about $200 on the used certified equipment. I jumped on that. I just called to cancel the T60, citing long ship times, and they said it's packing right now, even thought the site doesn't show it! I'm sure the guy wasn't BSing me to keep the sale because he said he could send the request through, but it might ship anyways (yay.) I will have the two of them side by side before the return dates come around (7 days to make a decision), but I am torn between the two. Here are the specs:

T60: 20074EU (3 year warranty) $1500
14.1" SXGA, 80GB 7200RPM, 512DDR2, dual core 1.83 etc etc

T42: 2378FVU (6 Mo warranty) $1000
14.1" SXGA, 40GB 5400RPM, 256DDR, Pentium M 1.7 etc etc

I will be popping in a GB or so of memory into the one I keep.

So, other than the other standard differences, the biggest thing for me is the warranty. I am a graduating college student, and after this june I will be bumping around the country for about a year going to various training sites(+1 T60). On the other hand, I am still just a starving college student, and once I get my salary, I plan on bumping up to Memron Santa Rosa (+1 T42). I assuming that, because the T42 has already depreciated, and the T60 is new, the T42 will depreciate less in the span of a year or so until Santa Rosa comes out. Kind of like a car.

I use my comp primarily for web crawling, but I tend to pop in COD2, WOW, or other such pastimes once or twice a month, and i do like to watch movies ala divx. This will be replacing my desktop. I am fairly tech savvy, but not a solder soldier. This machine might follow me to a dusty climate. Your thoughts are welcome, however please keep any "Lenovo sucks!" commentary to yourself.

 

I think a lot of it has to do with $$.

Is there anything really stopping you from getting a T60 now then merom next year? All you have to do is sell the T60 at that point which will be worth more than the T42. Spend a little more now get a little more back later.

Now $500 might not be "little" to you (I know that was a lot when I was in college) which means get the T42. Your biggest worry will be gaming. You might want to find out more from the people w/T42s and T60s to see if they are adequate enough to game with.

 

If you want to save now you might want to look at some of the older "p" series, I have a T41p which handles modern games quite well thanks to the firegl graphics chipset with 128mb of ram, it handles Vampire: Bloodlines and Fable really well, haven't played COD2 on it yet, but it would probably do alright.

 

I suspect you won't see a huge benefit in the Core Duo cause the tasks you listed aren't all that CPU intensive. The 9600 on my T42 runs HL2 decently. Thinkpads hold their value well if you did go with the new one.

 

Whatever you do, don't get 14" screen. Get 15" SXGA.