Retro Reveiw: Thinkpad R60

The Thinkpad R60 at first glance is a rugged and capable machine with few luxurys. Being the flagship of IBM’s R-series of Thinkpads it is a good value for the performance and quality.

The laptop is fairly beefy, weighing in at 6.6 lbs and measuring in at 16 inches diagonally. The build quality is excellent using high quality plastics and featuring a magnesium chassis in the lower half of the machine.

The 15in display isn’t anything extraordinary at a resolution of 1024 x 768, but is decently bright and the colours look good. The speakers are not anything to write home about, sounding a little bit tinny and being quite, but for a machine designed for office and field use the speakers are adequate. The keyboard on the other hand is the best I have ever typed on, feeling solid with a good amount of key travel. The Trackpad is very nice to use, but may be on the small side for some, and the venerable track-point is still situated between the G, H, and B keys with it being very nice to use as well.

The Thinkpad R60 comes with a built-in microphone, which is functional, but isn’t of very high quality. A fingerprint reader is an option on these devices but our test unit does not have one. The R60 also features built-in wifi, with a physical switch to turn the wifi card on and off.

The port selection on this Thinkpad is very good, featuring three usb 2.0 ports, a 1394 firewire port, vga, modem and ethernet, 3.5mm microphone jack, 3.5mm audio jack, cardbus slot, expresscard/54 slot, and a kensington lock. It is a veritable arsenal of ports, and makes this laptop very versatile.

The CPU that came in our test machine is the Intel Core Duo t2400, it is a capable dual core CPU running at a clock speed of 1.83 GHz and featuring a 2mb L2 cache. The GPU in this laptop is the underwhelming Intel 945GM express. This machine has 1.5gb of Ram, which is a decent amount for Windows XP and is adaquate for Windows Vista. Our test device has a 180gb ssd which isn’t factory, but is at a close capacity to original.

This machine is very upgradable with the CPU, and Ram being upgradable, and pretty much every other part being replaceable.

The Thinkpad R60 is a very capable business machine, with good build quality and comfortable keyboard and trackpad. It will offer you many years of service if you take advantage of its upgradablity and repairablity.