Which Thinkpad to look for? T vs W

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gjt86

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Oct 10, 2007
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I am considering pulling the trigger on a thinkpad, but have never owned one before. Currently, I am looking for something no more than 500 to get the job done (considering the laptop I currently use weighs 7 lbs and has 2gb of ram on a dual core).
My question is though, for photoshop, web development and vmware - which series would be the best bang for buck here?
I've looked over the w520, t410/420 and t520 series, but am starting to get lost. Is a newer i5 better than an older i7 (2720)? Any advice what to do or look for here?
If needed, I can post a few of the ones Ive been looking at if that is of any additional help.
 
Apparently the ThinkPad w520 that I've been shooting for is not 1920 x 1080 - is it really worth the extra money to get a 1080p screen? Most of the w520s I look at, with 1080, seem to be a bit higher in the cost department - and lacking RAM (leaving me to spend more to upgrade it).

Also, I'm really digging owning a thinkpad, but I keep seeing some ASUS models that seem to compare well with a w520? Thoughts?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASUS-N56VJ-DH71-i7-3630QM-8GB-RAM-1TB-HDD-NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-635M-15-6-Windows8-/131538250435?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1ea04a6ac3
 
Unless you plan to use a 1080p external monitor when you're not travelling with the laptop then I highly recommend 1080p as the extra horizontal pixels really do make a difference in usability.

As for the linked ASUS that is a better processor as its a generation newer. The consumer based nVidia graphics card is an improvement for games but in reality is still a very low end graphics card and probably would not be suitable for gaming on anything other then low settings.

Lenovo laptops are known for their quality especially the T and W series laptops. With that said though my sister owns an ASUS laptop which I brought for her 2 years ago and I must say the quality of the unit surpassed my expectations. The quality of the workmanship of the laptop exceeds that of my 4 year old toshiba laptop by far.
 
Gaming is a plus, but not a necessity over multitasking and vm or cs6 usage. Which would you go for?
 
The fastest processor you can find for doing things with cs6 so that would make the 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7-3630QM your best find so far. Depending on what client operating system(s) you use in your VM's you may want more RAM.