The best laptop available, but do you need it?
Written: Jan 03 '04
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Pros: BATTERY LIFE, keyboard, screen, weight, performance
Cons: Expensive, today's hardware is overkill for today's software
The Bottom Line: Simply the best laptop on the planet, but unless your needs are high, it is probably overkill.
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| lawman67's Full Review: Lenovo ThinkPad® T40p (2373G1U) PC Notebook |
I just spent the morning setting up an IBM ThinkPad T40 laptop computer. This thing is top of the line, with the Centrino processor, built-in-WiFi and a CDRW/DVD combo drive. Loaded with Windows XP Professional on its 60GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM, this is by far the most powerful laptop computer I’ve ever had the pleasure to use.
The laptop belongs to a co-worker who wanted me to set up all of her software and install all of the many Windows and Office updates and patches before she puts it to work. Since I was thinking about buying a new and powerful laptop myself, I was very interested in using the T40. To compare it with, I had my current ThinkPad 600 and ThinkPad 570, both with Pentium II processors (the 600 at 233MHz and the 570 at 366MHz) and 13.3” LCD screens.
First I’ll discuss the ergonomics, or human design. Like all T-series since the first T20 in 1999, the T40 is a two-spindle machine with a 14.1” TFT screen (some early T-series had 13.3”), a thin profile and light carrying weight. I’ve owned a T20 and a T23 before, and the T40 was a like a familiar friend. The keyboard layout is unchanged and the key action is improved over older T-series ThinkPads, though still not quite as good as that of the 600 or 570.
What is different than any other ThinkPad I’ve ever owned is the UltraNav mouse, which is the familiar IBM TrackPoint (eraserhead) and a small touchpad underneath. Now I’ll be upfront and say that I HATE touchpads and love the eraserhead. This is one of those areas that divides otherwise rational people into warring factions, not unlike manual v. automatic transmissions or analog v. digital watches. Personally, I find that with a touchpad the fleshy part of my thumb often touches the pad and sends the cursor to someplace other than where I want it. As a touch typist, this is a problem.
With the T40 I didn’t have that problem, perhaps because the touchpad was much smaller than usual, or because of the UltraNav control panel which let me disable it as a mouse and set it to only work as a scroll wheel – BRILLIANT!
The T40 is a bit thinner than the older T-series at roughly 1.1”, and noticeably slimmer than the ThinkPad 600. The 570 is a bit slimmer at 1”, but of course the 570 lacks an on-board drive bay. With the media slice attached, the 570 becomes an ungainly beast by comparison at 2” thick. At 5.0 lbs the T40 also falls between the 600 (5.5 lbs) and 570 (4.0 lbs) in weight. What makes that remarkable is that the T40 is sturdier than the 570 and has a larger LCD.
Of course the real reason to buy an ultra-modern, top-of-the-line laptop is performance. The T40 is not an ultimate speed demon as it uses the Pentium –M (Centrino) instead of the Pentium 4, but rather the Centrino excels in efficiency. In use it feels a bit slower than my desktop (Athlon XP 1800), and a smidge faster than my last 1.2GHz T23, not a bad performance, but not cutting edge. Where the T40 really makes me want to plunk down cold cash is its battery life. I got over 4 hours from the T40’s battery, which doesn’t sound amazing, but considering I had the screen at full bright, was listening to music CDs (spinning an optical drive uses a lot of juice) and didn’t slow the processor, all while connected to a wireless network (another notorious power-hog), I call 4 hours a revelation. In comparison, my 570 with TWO BATTERIES barely tops 3 hours in the same conditions (WiFi PC Card) and the 600 barely squeezes out 2 hours.
Is battery life the only reason to get one of these? Of course not, but for me, it’s the big one. The build quality, while not quite up to the high-water mark set by the 600 series, is better than anything else on the market and a notable improvement over my T23, which wasn’t up to the standards of the T20 and was a bit disappointing. The keyboard is the best on the market today, and the screen, while smaller than the massive multimedia playthings that are all the rage, is sharp, bright and simply gorgeous.
IBM is rather skimpy on the software, not even including an Office suite in my co-workers package. There also is no floppy drive included, though many people won’t need one. I was also a bit disappointed to find that IBM doesn’t give you recovery CDs, rather they allocate a portion of the hard drive to a recovery partition. Come on, if I pay for 60GB, I want 60GB, not 53 and 4 hidden (the rest is used by the file format).
DVD movie playback is perhaps my key measure of a laptop’s quality. While mega graphics chips may get better frame rates on some game or another, I personally care more about accurate, artifact-free movie playback. The ThinkPad T40 is very good, the graphics chip providing acceleration (not a true hardware decoder) and the LCD having fast refresh and natural color. It doesn’t match hardware acceleration, but definitely good enough for my high standards. Audio matches with excellent sound coming from the tiny hidden speakers, so long as the laptop is on a table or other hard surface (they fire down and reflect the sound up).
Needless to say, with this much speed and memory, Windows XP is very responsive and even applying filters in Photoshop to 5 megapixel photos is very fast. Of course, for over $2000, it better be.
I’m not going to buy a T40. No, its not the small faults in the package, all of which I can easily overcome (Norton Ghost is great for making restore CDs), but rather that I believe we have reached a point where the hardware has so outstripped the requirements of the software that upgrades, for now, are irrelevant. Case in point, the 366MHz Pentium II laptop sitting right next to the T40. Both machines have the same operating system and applications installed, and with the exception of Photoshop filters, the speed differences in everyday tasks is minor. Word opens twice as fast on the T40, but at 3 seconds to 1.5, who cares? Even movies are handled well on the 570, without a hardware accelerator. Sure, I can’t hope to play Quake III, but I’m not a gamer. With the addition of my DVD-to-Go hardware PC card, the 570 provides better video than the T40 (that same card is great in the T40, by the way).
No, I won’t buy a new T40, but I will always envy my friend when I see hers.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 2200
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
lawman67
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Member: Andrew F
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Reviews written: 207
Trusted by: 63 members
About Me:
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl but she doesn't have a lot to say.
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