Official I finally got my T60 review thread!!

This is my follow up to my "Waiting on laptop? Memory Backorder?" thread. That thread was so negative that I thought I would create a simple review thread for all of us that were waiting on our T60's. Plus it will give anyone still waiting something to read.

Ok this review will be very simple and in no way thorough. I am NO expert but I have used a good variety of laptops. I apologize in advance for my grammar. This review will be structured as follows.

Board Hype vs. My reality.

I will give a score 1-10 of what I thought the product would rate from reading all the stuff I get on this board vs. The real score I give it from using it the last few days. Lets begin.

THE BUILD.

What Ive been reading: 8/10
What I rate it now: 9/10

This is my first Thinkpad so you can imagine my reaction to the build quality. The thing feels solid to me. WAY more then any dell, compaq, toshiba, or sony I might have used. I was seriously impressed. I think some of you guys may rate it a little lower since lenovo has begun manufacturing it, but as my first thinkpad I think its excellent.

THE KEYBOARD.

What Ive been reading: 9/10
What I rate it now: 9/10.

The keyboard is as good as everyone says it is. I love it compared to sony's and toshiba's especially. Every keystroke feels fantastic.

THE SCREEN-14.1" SXGA+

What Ive been reading 6/10
What I rate in now: 8/10

This is what I was worried the most about. Everyone kept saying how the screen was inferior to other brands. I dont know if its just my screen (this may differ for others) but I think it is way above what I've been hearing. The screen is in no way dark. It is bright and the resolution is just right. The font is in no way to small for me. The screen is much better looking then any T43 Ive ever looked at. Its veiwing angles horizontally are fine, the vertical one could be better. Dont let that stop you though, this screen is nice. My girlfriend has a dell inspiron 1505 and she commented how nice my screen looked compared to hers. Also got NO dead pixels. Ive never seen a flexview and I'm sure they are much better, but I am much happier then I thought I would be with the screen.

THE WEIGHT: (6 cell battery)

Read on the boards : 8.5/10
My review: 7/10

I might be biased on this one but I dont see this being much lighter then a lot of laptops Ive been using. I was hoping it would be a more like the 13.3" sony or macs however, to me its significantly heavier. When I first took the laptop out I thought "Wow this thing is so light". I then added the battery and it became a little heavier then expected. Now dont get me wrong its not heavy like a desktop replacement, its just that when you hear the term "thin and light" on here so many times you expect something a bit lighter. My brother who owns a 17" Dell XPS commented on how its heavier then it looks.
The good news is that its build quality is so superior i can afford some weight.

THINKPAD SOFTWARE:
Read on the boards: 9/10
My review: 9/10

I love the thinkpad software. Makes life so much easier and its a great way to keep the performance of your computer top notch. The one point loss is only because of the number of thinkpad processes running. Thats a lot of processes at boot up.

Overall:

I really love this thing. Once you start typing on one of these things going back to another laptop feels like using a toy. Its hard to explain. I was typing on my girlfriends dell and when I rested my palms on her palm rest I heard a creaking noise. Before when I heard this noise it didnt bother me, now i feel like its going to fall apart. If everything hold up the same over the years then count me as officially converted to the thinkpad line.


Again sorry about my english grammar.

If you have any questions please ask, or ignore this post and let it die out.

If I have any updates I'll make sure to post them here. Good or bad.

 

Finally received mine.

Ordered 11/14 and received 12/11, took me about 4 reimages to find out what works and what I needed to get it lean and mean.

Thinkpad T60p

T7400 Core 2 Duo
1.5GB RAM (no info from SPD)
120GB HDD (Fujitsu)
14.1in LCD (How do I check screen mfr?)
FireGL V5250
DVD+RW (LG)
a/b/g wireless (Atheros)
Fingerprint reader
Bluetooth
XP Pro Upgrade
6 cell

Ok, so I think CPU is overkill T5600 is a better choice, fingerprint reader is useless the Thinkvantage software used to control it is bloated and slow. It also takes over the whole windows login process. LCD is good enough. XP Pro upgrade was a waste, I only got it because I wanted to be able to restore from the hidden partition, but I decided to wipe it instead because the factory image has too much bloatware even after unchecking all the options in the custom restore section. I basically hate all the thinkvantage bloatware except for the HDD protection and the HotKeys.

Those are my little rants, but overall it is excellent. Feels solid as a rock, fit and finish is precise like my old T40p. Runs reasonably cool for a dual core @ such high speeds. HDD is very quiet after I ran the Hitachi tool and set it to the fastest position under quiet (192). Weight is very decent for size and balanced not heavy on one side more than other. Oh, no dead pixels that I can see so far. I do have so rippling when I open close lid with one hand, not a big deal, always use both hands.

I wiped it clean and reinstalled XP Pro SP2. I got it down from 65 running processes to a mere 33 processes. I found all the drivers from the IBM support site, I didn't install any Lenovo applications except for the HDD protection and HotKeys. I am still trying to find the last driver which is the Fingerprint reader, I don't want to install the Thinkvantage security app, i just want the driver. It starts up much faster and also feels a lot more responsive and Windows looks like Windows not like Lenovo Thinkvantage takeover city. I use Windows wireless management as it's simple and good enough, I don't need all those connection profiles.

Ok, so hardware-wise it's a 9/10, no real faults. It can stay 9/10 if you wipe it and customize the OS and installed applications. As is from factory I would say 7/10, the bloatware just makes this excellent laptop so slow and adds so many unnecessary processes that eat up RAM and cpu cycles.

 

I agree with iatacs19 with the fingerprint software. Although I love the rest of the Lenovo stuff on there the fingerprint stuff just takes over. I had to totally disable it because it was bothering me so much. But other than that I am really enjoying my first laptop

 

Perhaps it's because the laptop I was previously using was a T30, but I find the weight, even with the 9 cell battery, just fine. I was carrying it around yesterday without any problems. Maybe I would think differently if I had the 6 cell and it didn't shave off that much weight compared to the 9.

I got the NMB keyboard, and it's really nice. I still prefer my desktop keyboard, or even my well worn t30 keyboard, but I expect I'll grow to like it. It has good tactile feedback, and doesn't make an awful amount of noise. I'm able to type as fast as I can on any quality keyboard, so it can't be that bad. My only complaint about it is the blasted Windows keys. This is a laptop, the keys are already small enough without cramming more in than necessary. I've gotten along fine without Windows keys on every keyboard, desktop and laptop, that I've used until now, and I don't really see any more need for them at this time. Now my Alt key is tiny and my Control key is slightly shrunken, both of which I use a lot. It sure would be nice if a version of the keyboard without the Windows keys was available, even if I had to replace it myself.

I was also concerned about the screen due to all the bad things I'd read, but my TMD is just fine, a lot better to use outdoors than my t30, no dead pixels, and quite crisp and clear. The only thing that could be better, IMO, is the slightly blue tint it has. I don't mind relatively low viewing angles, as I prefer to not have my screen readable by everyone on the airplane. That said, the viewing angles are quite decent on this screen; all that off angle viewing gets you is a slight drop in apparent brightness.

The plastic piece used to remove an ultrabay device was much more solid on my t30 than it is on the t60. It seems like I could easily snap off the one on the t60 if I weren't being careful.

I have to disagree on the fingerprint software, though..it works fine for me, but I have had a bit of experience with it on a t43, and I watched the video that shows you the best way to position your fingers for a good read. Despite that, there were several fingers I couldn't get a good read on during enrollment, but the ones that did seem to work fine. Only once or twice has it ignored my swipe at startup..

IMO, Access Connections is still the best thing since sliced bread. I loved it on the t30, and it's only gotten better with time. It works very well with the wired LAN, the WLAN, and the WWAN. They took the time to make sure that WWAN wasn't the red-headed stepchild win it comes to ease of configuration and switching. There's not anything that you'd want to do with it under normal use that would require the Sierra Watcher software.

The WWAN card works well, although a couple of times it's gotten stuck on EDGE and I've had to configure it to 3G only and back to automatic to get it to use 3G first, then EDGE. The Access Connections software reports what the card tells it, so it can tell you whether you're on GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, or HSDPA, so you know what speeds to expect on any sort of network. Since Cingular is always EDGE or HSDPA, it's not very useful on their network, but when roaming, it's nice to know whether you can expect stupidly slow (GPRS) or slightly better than dialup (EDGE).

I have read that the Sierra PC Cards don't have good reception, but the unit in my laptop works just fine. My only nitpicks relative to the WWAN are the location of the antenna and the SIM slot, but I'm not upset with the antenna like some posters I had read on the Thinkpad forums. The antenna is on the right side of the screen and is not flush with it, but it's on there solidly, so I don't anticipate any problems with it. The SIM slot is inconveniently located underneath the battery, so you either have to hibernate the laptop to insert/remove it or be plugged in, unless you have an Ultrabay battery.

As far as network speed is concerned, even at -90 to -95 dBm (red in Access Connections' signal strength monitor) I get 500-600Kbps on speed tests. With better signal strength comes slightly better speeds, but only by 100Kbps or so. Latency is always right around 200 milliseconds, and browsing seems quite snappy. So snappy that I keep forgetting to switch back to Wifi when I'm around an AP.

I don't find the fan noise to be particularly objectionable, but to be fair, my t30's fan was so gunked up that it often ran on high speed during web browsing, and was much, much louder at that level than the t60 fan is at any speed. I'm also usually surrounded by all sorts of devices with hard drives and fans galore, so I'm used to those sorts of noises. I was using it in a quiet place last night and could barely hear it, for what it's worth.

The overall speed of the laptop is absolutely wonderful with the dual core CPU and 1.5GB of RAM. I can leave a ton of programs open and still it remains snappy.

On the 9 cell battery, using the default power settings, except with the screen brightness at 2 and doing some simple web browsing or other non-intensive tasks I get right around 4 hours of life using the WWAN, with slightly more on WLAN only. I haven't run it down all the way, but it the timer remains pretty consistent and correlates well to the actual runtime seen for the percentage drop in the battery meter.

Video performance wise, the v5250 seems to do pretty well. It runs the ATI x1800 demos without any slowdowns, but I haven't run any demanding 3d games on it yet. Although I do a little gaming, it's pretty irregular, and I've been too busy enjoying everything else about the laptop to install any.

Overall, it's a rather solid laptop that does everything I could ask of it.

P.S. Windows wireless management is trash compared to Access Connections, but I suppose if you don't have clients without DHCP servers, thus requiring you to input DNS servers and other network settings manually and if you don't use different printers on different networks, there's no need for it.

Edited to add: The fingerprint reader works fine with the welcome screen style logon, FWIW.