There is only one brand of laptops used aboard the space shuttles — IBM ThinkPad. In my opinion, they are the best laptops one can ever buy, mainly because of their unspoken hardware and famous red trackpoint mouse.
Several weeks ago the screen inverter of my Dell Latitude D820 laptop (which also has a trackpoint) failed and turned it into a desktop that can only be used with an external monitor. So I found a used IBM ThinkPad A31p (released in 2002), which is now running Ubuntu that supports every piece of hardware inside it. Although I won’t be carrying it around very often because it weights 3.45 kg (7.6 lb), I might make a sticker that says “Used Aboard the Shuttle Spacecraft” and look cool even with a laptop that old.
Once you get used to the trackpoint, everything else seems so clumsy and frustrating. There is even a handy little application for configuring the trackpoint settings, called ‘Configure TrackPoint‘:
