[maerek]

Having used three generations of ThinkPads at work over the past five years (T60, T410, T440), I've been pleasantly surprised (with the notable exception of the trackpad on the T440 - dear god, what a terrible experience) with the build quality and reliability of each of them.

I recently snagged a used T420 on eBay for ~ $180. After selling the memory and screen that came with it and adding _more_ memory, a higher resolution screen and a SSD I had lying around, I've now got a fairly beefy box that runs Hyper-V like a champ and can chew through video encodes for ~$250. Oh, did I mention it runs for 5 hours on the 6-cell battery it came with?

Certainly doesn't hurt that you can't go more than 100 yards in my town (near Washington, DC) without running in to a closet stuffed full of them.

For a reliable workhorse, hard to go wrong with a used T410-430.