A few days ago I bought a used ThinkPad T60 and I'm really happy with my decision. My old Sony Vaio PCG-GRT915M was my first and worst experience with laptops also it was very expensive... but it wasn't worth all the money. :/

It had an Intel Pentium 4 (NOT mobile!) which will be very hot if you compile something or play games. After several months even through usual use, the Fan became louder and louder, like a Jet.

I noticed later that the default clocksource didn't work as expected, esp. in 2.6(iirc) versions of the kernel it hung during boot until I pressed some random keys, it was even unuseable. The boot progress took sometimes up to several minutes.

A workaround was to force jiffies as clocksource which is the fallback clocksource. Everything else didn't work.

Another big problem (at least to me) was that just p4-clockmod was "working" so proper CPU Frequency scaling wasn't possible at all. ondemand and other useful governors didn't work, powersave and performance were the only working governors. As side-effect usability and battery life-time was bad. Battery time was between 1 hour and 30 minutes.

There were even more things, sonypi was buggy so Fn functions were b0rked and so on. Several months later I was also pissed of due to the max. resolution of 1024x768...

Anyway... everything works fine now, with my T60.

lspci:

loki ~ # lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)
15:00.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1510 PC card Cardbus Controller

The battery (a used one as well) time is now ca. 3 hours +/- 1hour, depending on the usage.

The Fn functions are great! I use tp_smapi and thinkpad_acpi.

clocksource=jiffies isn't necessary anymore, pit will now be used by default.

acpi-cpufreq is working fine as well as ondemand and other governors.

I believe WLAN (Intel 3945ABG) works better than the Atheros (don't rember which one) in my old Sony. Might be driver related...

I'm glad about the Intel Graphics card, I can now use a resolution of 1400x1050 in X and console/framebuffer. I start loving KMS, its very fast when switching from/to console.

Bluetooth and everything else works as expected so I'm really happy and I'll never buy something else than a ThinkPad.

So as hint I recommend you: Go and get a grml or other livecd and check all important things first before you buy a new or used laptop.