The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Check with your school. IBM's educational discounts aren't across the board - they're individually negotiated contracts.
If not, check out IBM's Express series of notebooks. They're preconfigured lappys that (at least my school's) educational discounts won't reduce the prices of, but that's ok because they're much cheaper than configurables.
Just get into the home/home office portion, click on ThinkPad notebooks, and in the blue navigation area on the left is an option called Think Express.
You can select education on the main menu, select the state you are in, go to the store, and select different contracts to see the cheapest price. In TN the discount is 5% off the express price. You can also find out the discount on any particular model by calling the 1-800 number. They will ask you what state you are in. You will save alot of money if you can find all the features you want in an express model and do not configure one. Adding memory isn't that expensive so go ahead and bump it up so the warranty covers it. You can also search in the search box for accident protection and get the part number to upgrade your warranty to 3 or 4 yrs with accident protection, or you can call the 1-800 number. In some states, accident protection might not be available. Compare your final price with your school computer store or book store. One advantage in ordering directly from IBM is that you can send it back within 30 days and just pay the shipping. If you know someone who works for IBM or has in the past, and their IBM serial number still works on the employee purchase program, then you can save 10%. They can get to that screen by searching the site with "employee purchase program".
There are also discounts for IBM stockholders with special codes that come in the quarterly mailings. The express offerings with the additional education discount is a good price.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
