IBM R51 Thinkpad Review

I recently bought an IBM Thinkpad R51 laptop off of Ebay for about $130. The R51 came with a 1.7 GHZ processor and a 40 GB hard drive with 512 MB of RAM. These aren't great specifications, but good enough to do almost anything you want to in today's computing world. The IBM R51 was introduced in 2005. IBM Thinkpads are one of the longest running and best brands of laptop out there today, as they have been made sense 1992.

The first thing I noticed about this laptop is that it has an old school design. It looks much older then it actually is, several of my family and friends commented on the computer saying "Is that computer from the 1980's?" or "That's old.". But when I powered on the IBM Thinkpad R51, there minds changed when I was able to play streaming video and do everything a brand new laptop could do today. For the average user, this is all you really need to surf the web, watch video, download and listen to music. You don't need to spend over $1,000 dollars on a computer, when you can have a perfectly reliable and working R51, or some other brand that will do everything that brand new computer will do. You may never ever use the features that makes your brand new computer so expensive.

The IBM R51 Thinkpad sold for around $1299 back in 2005, thats an almost 90% drop in value to today, when I was able to recently purchase one for $130 dollars off of ebay. The IBM R51, seems like it was made for Windows XP, a much better operating system then Windows Vista in my opinion. This Thinkpad is thin, and does feel a little flimsy, however it is very easy to remove the hard drive and optical drives and replace them. It also has a PC slot and a built in microphone. No built in web cam though.

Working on the IBM R51 Thinkpad is also pretty hard, as there are a lot of screws underneath of the laptop that you have to take out. Just to take the keyboard off is about four screws, then to take off the actual bottom of the laptop it is ten screws. They are marked with little symbols to tell you which screws to take out for what you want to take off, which I found nice and convenient. The battery I got was used and held about an hour charge, I believe a new battery would probably hold a three hour charge.