T400 experiences

I've had a T41 for the past 4-5 years and after having it die (GPU came loose from the planar) my new T400 came in three days ago.

All and all the T400 rocks!!

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The following problems posted here and elsewhere that while they kept me up at night waiting for it to ship were not (lucky me) an issue.

First and foremost my led backlight dispay looks awesome (LG model). Even lighting throughout except for very slight drop-off on the extreme right edge/corner. I installed the color profile from the T400 support site. Screen is much brighter than I'll ever dare set it, no dead pixels and all colors looked right on. I was scared of a blue tinge you notice in most LED flashlights and I've seen in the store on some older apple displays but nothing like this was noticable.

Looks a little better than my T41 in terms of viewing angle but this is not saying much coming from my old T41 SXGA+ display.

The keyboard does not sag when typing and seems a little 'faster' than my old T41. In short I really like my t400 keyboard.

The 4-1 reader takes up the PC-card slot if you order it that way. The actual reader is contained in a richo jack of all trades chip that supports multiple functions (including fireware) nativly. It is not an old pc-card permanently glued into the port It works with my 16GB sd card and seemed pretty fast copying a 2mb file every sec or two.

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Other things I liked:

Its quieter than my T41 and the fan either never seems to go on or if it does I can't hear it.. The system runs very cool. On idle the cpu temps are about 10deg above ambient.

The antennas and wlan radios have dramatically improved since my T41. I can connect from much further away than my T41. Having extra radios for cell modems, wireless usb, wimax upgrades is a good idea.

The speakers sound pretty good for a notebook. The positioning and where they are really makes stereo sound effects stand out compared with my old T41. The placement of mic/headphone jacks in front are good too.

Having two separate video cards for performance/battery use is a pretty wild idea. It actually works for me without weird system/driver problems like I was suspecting might happen due to applications freaking out when switching from one to the other. You can't switch when a 3d app is running but no display driver problems that I noticed.

The built-in intel card itself is no slouch...2d is fast with plenty of power for older 3-d games and apps like google earth. For newer games / higher res/detail you have to switch to the ATI card to get good performance.

Upgradable to 8GB when prices come down Beware no 64-bit windows OS can currently hibernate with more than 4GB installed.

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What I don't like:

The web cam is a joke. Even after playing with the manual adjustments the background is ususally over-exposed, picture very blurry, weird coloring (can be mostly corrected by playing with hue). Without perfect lighting conditions that will never exist its pretty bad. Save your $20 and buy an external USB camera.

Edit: Turns out *behind* the webcam trapazoid sticker there was some plastic wrapping covering the lense they forgot to remove at the factory before applying the sticker. After carefully prying it off with a safety pin and removing the clear plastic wrapping I discovered the webcam is actually pretty good quality -- not blurry or washed out at all.

I like the thinkpad style but without the red stripes on the keyboard clickers it looks a little too bland.

The battery compartment should have been bigger. With the 4-cell and ultra-bay battery I was getting a ~5hr estimate which is great but it would have been nice if the 6 cell or higher could fit flush.

I hate wide-screen displays. People playing video games and watching movies might appreciate them but they are a distraction for people doing real work... Especially coming from an sxga+ display. In addition full screen slide shows of pictures taken with digital cameras now have blank areas on screen and some older applications I use now actually stretch and look weird. Its sad and pathetic that notebook manufacturers have let panel distributors strong-arm them into not providing full screen models. It should be our choice!!

The computer came with default install of windows loaded up to the brim with bloatware.

 

nice to hear you like your thinkpad

 

good review. Really unique and has better information then kevin's review. due continue to update with more reviews in a while. see if your opinion changes.

 

i totally agree with the battery compartment. my 9-cell sticks out to a ridiculous degree. a bigger battery compartment would be an improvement.

 

Thanks for the review, though I am dissappointed to hear about your webcam experience. Personally I am holding against the W500, due to the fact (one of a few) that it doesn't come with a webcam (not the configured ones available in Denmark anyways).

Is the webcam identical with the one in the T500/W500?

 

I'm really liking my T400 so far as well.

Can you provide a link to that color profile.

This is one of the few things I really don't like on the T400. I'd much rather have them on the side.

Have you removed the clear plastic over the webcam? I thought the web cam was garbage until I found out it had a sticker that you have to remove covering it haha... it still isn't the greatest web cam but it is MUCH better now.

 

I personally find the web cam to be pretty decent....not excellent quality...but it does what a web cam does. Note that I took the mentioned plastic off first thing when I opened the laptop.

As for the widescreen tidbit, not sure what programs you're using, but I find it beneficial to people that do work. More on screen work area is always better...

 

I do think now Lenovo ship all their thinkpads with a LG screen. Good work everyone for complaining and asking of exchange.

Couldn't ask too much for the webcam. After all this is thinkpad, if I had wanted a top-notch camera I would have bought a Sony

 

I had the same thing happen to my T40. I guess motherboard flex really was an issue, and hopefully the rollcage does a good job of preventing this on newer models. I was lucky enough to have it happen mid way through my third year when it was still covered by warranty. They replaced the board on my T40, and it served me well for another 2.5 years after the fix. I'm glad you like your new T400, and hope it serves as a worthy upgrade to the very good T4x series.

 

I'm glad that your T400 was shipped with a better keyboard than what I had received on my W500.

If you do remove your keyboard to check on your system internals, do you mind letting me know the FRU of the keyboard? Mine's 42T3937 and there are two other keyboard models, so if there is a better keyboard I would like to ask lenovo for a replacement keyboard.

Thanks!

 

I take back everything I said about the T400 webcam sucking.

The blurry washed out effect I was getting from the web cam reminded me of something like a clear plastic cover but for the life of me I tried to see/find it and failed miserably.

After some thinking took a safety pin and carefully pried the trapazoid sticker covering the webcam off (the one with the green light / movie camera)

It turns out *behind* the sticker there was some plastic wrapping covering the lense they forgot to remove at the factory before applying the sticker.

Looks much much better now!!

 

We'll you guys gave me a good scare.

But finally my t400 arrived.

Keyboard flex. I didnt notice it at all. I cant feel it, using it on my lap. Then I tried pushing the keyboard hard in different spots and yep it flexes. But I mean never during my typing have I noticed it. What I did notice is that its squishy when I use my laptop on a hard surface, because of the ultra soft rubber legs. It feels like the keyboard is flexing, but after careful observation I realized that the rubber feet are squishing under pressure, way before the keyboard would start flexing. So I would give the keyboard an A. I see no noticable bending while typeing or anything like that. Slightly better than the keyboard on my x40.

LED Screen. Well you guys had me going on this one. Then vista booted, and I was appalled. OMG, this is awful. But wait. Smooth lines are nice and not that awful so are svg graphics and the rest. Why is it awfull then. This is a high resolution 129dpi display. Makes jpeg artifacts more visible, so highly compressed images (like the backgrounds provided by microsoft and lenovo.) look like doodoo. But good quality pictures and generated graphics are STUNNING. Cant currently imagine a better screen for photoshop work.

I just addressed the to main concerns over this laptop. Im running vista bussiness x64 and ubuntu x64 dual booted. Im extremely pleased with the machine. Even supprised with the gaming performance I got from the 4500mhd so far.

 

Since I also have strange colors and since my cam is also behind a plastic layer, I wonder whether I should remove the layer. Could you post a picture showing the webcam? - Maybe we can find out which parts are supposed to be there and which ones not.

 

good review! keep up.

 

It seems that Lenovo has addressed to the keyboards issues.

pppeterd, could you please check if the keyboards being shipped are different from Kevin's review?

That would be really nice! Thanks

 

Hey, It is also my problem. But mine seems to be worse because both my screen's left and right corners experience that drop-off. Poor me

 

A picture of my webcam with the clear plastic covering in front of the lense removed. (The way it should look)

If it looks whitish and you can't clearly see the glass lense through the sticker cover then you might have the same problem.

I scratched the transparent front plastic trying to figure out what was wrong.. If you need to remove the cover carefully pry the entire sticker off with a safety pin or something, don't be like me and try to gough a hole through the clear plastic

 

Does all the hardware work in Linux? Are you using Ubuntu 8.10, which has the kernel with support for the Intel 5100/5300 wireless chipsets?

 

regarding the webcam, I peeled off the trapezoid sticker, and there was nothing underneath to remove. My webcam picture is still very yellow. I think that this is a driver issue.