From personal experience, either of them will work fine without using Access Connections. Being that the company I work for has used Thinkpads for many years, the first thing we always did (we being the IT department) was remove the Access Connections crap. I swear by the Intel wifi hardware because I run Linux and the Realtek wireless has caused some issues for two of my coworkers under 64-bit Linux. All that being said, if you're only going to run Windows, there's functionally very little difference between the two.