IBM T30 DVD/CDRW laptop - everything you could ever want or need in a laptop.
Written: Mar 22 '03 (Updated May 02 '03)
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Pros: light, durable, keyboard feels good under fingers
Cons: battery life, small screen
The Bottom Line: It's a good laptop, great for a network administrator who needs a durable, light and fast laptop.
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| grepcat's Full Review: Lenovo ThinkPad T30 (236645U) PC Notebook |
My company recently bought 12 of these laptops for my co-workers, (network engineers) to use as our consoles/desktops. After we'd put them through our own brand of use and abuse, (dropping them from ceilings, leaving them in freezing cold and sweltering hot server rooms, doing hourly presentations, one after the other, for days, flying across the country with them, and in one case even taking one along to reserve drill weekends.) I thought we could share our findings with others in the hopes that someone else may find this useful before they, (or their company) purchases one or many.
History: I'm a veteran of the Dell Inspirion and Latitude laptop models, (I use a Dell Inspirion 3800 at home as a linux box.) so I was a little hesitant to accept the lighter, more fragile looking Thinkpads as good administrative machines. After 4 months, I was almost completely turned around. My review is based on my three most important decisions in purchasing a laptop, weight, battery life and durability, so I stress these the most below.
- Weight/Mobility: I gave the T30 an "excellent" rating for this. Most of us could carry them for extended times, tucked under our wrist, or even hold them in one palm while doing something else without any adverse effects. Bottom line, they're very, very, light. Compared to most other laptops, I'd rate them in the top 80% of any "lightest laptop" category.
- Battery life: This is where I was a little disappointed. Most of us were unimpressed with the battery life in general, (after two weeks of standard use, some of the batteries had appeared to have stabilized to a little more than one hour of standard use, less than one hour of extended use and about one hour, thirty minutes of "sit" time. Due to the nature of our job, we'd have liked to see the batteries last longer, but unfortunately it wasn't the case. Some of us also tried "conditioning" the batteries in an attempt to lengthen the life, but pretty much got the same end-result we all did. DISCLAIMER: We ALL disabled the "Standby" option, so that might have a little to do with something, also as system engineers, our usage is considerately more heavy than the average user, so keep this in mind! As far as your battery requirements go, our requirements are most likely considerably more demanding.
- Durability: The T30 swings far back into the positive in this category. We've dropped them from ceilings while running cat-5, we've put them under stacks of manuals, certification books, (in one case a goodly amount of atlases.) We've knocked them off of chairs onto hard floors, sat on them and crammed them into tightly-packed luggage and subjected them to airport baggage handlers. I brought mine to my Reserve UTA/drill weekends and dragged them here and there, without a single complaint from my trusty little thinkpad. The only documented problems that we've encountered throughout the torturous routines was one suffered display problems, (after being dropped 9 feet out of a ceiling tile, it's a little understandable!) Another suffered slight hard drive problems after being knocked 3.5 feet to the floor, but was fixed by one of our engineers by re-seating the HD.
Again, those are pretty much the most important things to me when deciding to purchase a laptop. Other pros and cons, I list below:
- Port replicator: very, very nice. Comes with digital video, S-video, and one interesting thing, there's two USB connections on the back of the laptop standard, however only one on the rear of the port replicator. Odd and slightly annoying, but okay I guess.
(UPDATE!): (My original statement about the screen resolution was incorrect! Here's some good info from another epinions user):
- Display: "I have a T22 and there is also the T40p that both have native SXGA+(1400X1050). This is a higher resolution than the mighty 17" Apple Powerbook. However, you need _really_ good eyes as the dot pitch is tiny. I love my T22 and will probably get another T once I outgrow my P3 1Ghz." (credited to: takotech)
(and many thanks for the good catch mate!)
Hopefully this has helped someone else come to a decision.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1700
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30
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Epinions.com ID:
grepcat
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Location: United States of America
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
ya-poni-my-eat-choo. (say it out loud, tavahrishch.)
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