The good folks at Lenovo decided that the Thinkpad T60 didn't need an s-video out on the laptop as its predecessor (the T42) had. No instead they determined that the best place for the s-video out would be on the dock, What were they thinking?!?! It seems pretty obvious that they put all of 5 seconds of distracted thought into that decision, who actually uses the s-video out while docked? I can here you saying, "Yeah, yeah they suck but what does all this have to do with an xbox?"

I don't have cable so my laptop is my TV (you know, all those legally procured shows and such), but who wants to watch shows on a laptop. I used to hook my laptop up to my TV via s-video at watch the shows that way, but with the T60 I need to cart the dock around if I want to do that. This is where the X-Box comes in, a modded X-Box running X-Box Media Center can do a whole bunch of really cool things: it can interface with iTunes 6.X (iTunes 7 is in the works now), it can read samba shares, stream video off the internet, etc. It will plays avi's and mpg's without problems, it automatically mount and play ISO's when you click on them, it can play straight from the VIDEO_TS folder. And, of course, it has all the appropriate codecs built in so it will play any old video you find laying about in the dusty corners of your favourite torrent site.

I have only had a few days to play with the X-Box and XBMC but I am really impressed so far.