** Reply to message from "Lewis G Rosenthal"
<os2-wireless_users@2rosenthals.com> on Mon, 09 Oct 2006 20:36:58 -0400

Considering IBM's involvement with Lenovo (IBM owns 18.9% of Lenovo),  the statement that IBM has ditched its ThinkPad is a tad premature. All the new ThinkPads I've seen (and I've moved about a half dozen this past week) still say IBM on them, and these were models which came out after the handoff to Lenovo.

IBM hasn't removed support information for older ThinkPads, either, and AFAIK, neither IBM nor Lenovo purposely breaks the BIOS so as to make it unusable with other OSes. The fact that the T43 BIOS update seems to disrupt GenMAC's ability to detect the PCI ID string is more than likely something within GenMAC, and not a deliberate attempt on the part of IBM or Lenovo to make the T43 "Windows-only."

I have to go along with you on this.  I've had the "pleasure" of refurbing
several 3-4 year old Thinkpads in the last couple of months and the Lenovov
site is, if anything, easier to use than the IBM pages.  Even the support for
the older 600's and such is intact and there have been several recent BIOS
updates for older machines.  Warranty service transitioned over seamlessly
(they actually seemed to be even more accomodating than the IBM crew, in fact).