Comment by kjs3

You hit on why I got my first used ThinkPad many years ago (a T42): it was so cheap as to be disposable. I was going on a trip that promised to be somewhat...ah...rough on my kit, and I picked up the T42 for dirt so I didn't take my new, very expensive laptop only to have it trashed (I don't remember what it was now...probably some Dell). The Dell(?) is loooong gone. The T42 made it through the trip fine, and over many years has gotten an SSD, a memory upgrade and a new screen (old one worked fine; wanted the pretty SXGA screen) and because it has a real, honest to gawd parallel port, it's still serving duty today controlling some stuff in my lab (PROM programmer, some finicky windows software, etc). It might not be a daily driver, but it gets fired up most every week to do real work.