Fabulous Out Of The Box Laptop
Written: Jun 21 '01
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Pros: Huge, clear display, fast, great features
Cons: Heavy, poor documentation, difficult to set up drivers, lower resolution display not as crisp
The Bottom Line: Even with its flaws, this is a sweet laptop. It can hold its own against desktop PCs. It's definitely a good choice for a high-end user.
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| engwall's Full Review: Lenovo ThinkPad A21p 2629 (2629P14) PC Notebook |
The A21p is a kick in the seat laptop with power to spare. If you use your laptop out of the box, then you can't go wrong. Just beware doing any reinstalls or OS changes. The drivers are very difficult to get set up just right, and the documentation is scant.
Nice screen
The first thing you notice about the A21p is its huge, clear 15" TFT LCD screen. With a default resolution of 1600x1200 and up to 32 bit color depth, this is a gorgeous display. The 16MB ATI Rage 128 Mobility graphics chipset provides enough power to run a DVD at 1600x1200 without a flicker, and there's virtually no discernible ghosting (where motion leaves fading trails). The icons and text are tiny at 1600x1200, but everything is so crisp that it's not hard to read text at that resolution. However, if you have trouble seeing that small, Fn+Spacebar gives you an instant screen magnify that brings the resolution down without permanently displacing screen objects (the way that actually changing the resolution would do). The crispness definitely suffers at lower resolutions though, so if you are of a mind to permanently reduce the resolution, this may not be the laptop for you. But if you've got good eyesight, then you'll probably love the display.
Speed III
The 850 MHz Pentium III makes the A21p about as fast as they come. It also comes with 128 MB of RAM which is plenty for today's applications. There's another spare slot (I put in another 256 MB in mine) so when tomorrow's applications come along, you can scale your RAM up to meet the need.
Drive me home
My A21p came with a 29GB hard drive, which leaves plenty of room for work apps, games, music, and even some video (more on that later). It also comes with a floppy and a DVD-ROM standard. If you want, you can get a CD-RW that swaps with the DVD-ROM, and is great for burning audio CDs, data CDs, and with rewritable CDs, makes a nifty backup device.
Multimedia Monster
In addition to a great display and video card, the A21p comes with S-Video in and out. This, along with the ample hard drive space and RAM make the A21p good for video editing. The only thing missing is Firewire support. That would have been nice, but the S-Video is still pretty good. The audio on this laptop is great (for a laptop). Don't expect big sound to come out of the speakers, but it's definitely above par for built-in laptop speakers. Plus, they are positioned up near the hinge, so they don't get blocked by your wrists
It keeps going... and going...
The battery on the A21p is awesome. I haven't really done a good measure of how long it lasts, but it does last a long time. You can watch a whole DVD on a single charge. The performance does degrade a little as the battery drains, due to the Speedstep technology (which is a battery saving feature that clocks down the system in order to use less power... you can disable it). But the quality is still very good. As for normal use, you can go a long time before you have to recharge the machine.
Reach out and touch someone
The A21p sports built-in ethernet & modem connections, which means you don't have to worry about breaking any dongles (sounds painful). This is getting more common on laptops these days, but it's still a nice feature.
It's the little things
Of all these great features, there's one that seems to get the wow factor with all the people I show it to. The A21p has a cool little keyboard lamp built into the inside top edge of the lid. This is the attention to detail that makes this an extra nifty laptop for gadget freaks like me. Speaking of the keyboard, it's full-size and with a good feel to the keys. The number pad, of course, is mapped over some of the letter keys, as is fairly standard, but the arrow keys are nicely laid out and not difficult to use.
Every rose has its thorns
As much as I love this laptop, it is not perfect. First off, the documentation just stinks. There's hardly any of it. It doesn't even come with a lousy diagram of the laptop so that you can see how to add RAM or other such maintenance tasks.
Also, if you decide to chuck the pre-install and go with a fresh OS install, you'll regret it. The drivers are not at all easy to deal with, especially with Win2K, and it's very hard to get the laptop back to the state of functionality it was in out of the box. There's a software disk that does come with drivers, but the driver install section is incomplete, and there are other drivers hidden on the disk that you have to get at through Win2K's driver update feature.
Even so, I ended up with some very odd quirks (such as pinball freezing up when you repeatedly struck the keys that control the flippers). There is a nice recovery CD, but if you're not careful, this will wipe out any additional partitions and end up with all of the same pre-installed software you wanted to get away from. But hey, the laptop seems to like it that way.
Finally, a few minor gripes. At 7 lbs., this is not an easy laptop to lug around, and I don't recommend charging the laptop while you're using it, especially if it's on your lap, because it gets very hot. These are very minor gripes, though, and are to be expected, given the power this thing wields.
The bottom line
Even with its flaws, though, this is a sweet laptop. It can stand up to most desktop PCs and hold its own quite nicely. Especially with a 1600x1200 display, which many desktop LCD displays can't even handle, this laptop is definitely a good choice for a high-end user. And despite the challenges, I was actually able to get Red Hat Linux and Win2K installed on mine, in a dual-boot configuration, with plenty of unpartitioned hard drive left over for emergencies, so you can customize it (just be prepared to do a few reinstalls before you get it right).
I highly recommend this laptop to anyone. It's well worth it!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 0 (work pc)
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30
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Epinions.com ID:
engwall
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Member: Keith Engwall
Location: Chicago, IL
Reviews written: 67
Trusted by: 67 members
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