Sorry to hear about your troubles. When I was a consultant (and used Thinkpads heavily at work) they worked pretty reliably with a lot of abuse, although I agree that Windows is something that (for me personally) is hard to tolerate as an OS.

What's interesting about OpenBSD/Thinkpad combo is that hardware support is miles better vs. Linux on the same hardware (WiFi, snooze, etc.), from what I can tell, as many of the OpenBSD developers use them as personal machines.