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I just received my new T61p (UK spec) and I'd like to share a few first-use impressions for the benefit of potential buyers. This is not an in-depth review and I am by no means a professional journalist or reviewer, I'm writing solely from a user's perspective.
A bit of personal notebook background, so that you know what I am (at least mentally) comparing this T61p with: this is my third ThinkPad (used to have a T42p, a T40p before that; I also - casually, at work - used a T30 and a T23). I also had a couple of Sony Vaio machines, an old 333MHz computer whose model number I can't remember, and a VGN-S460 I've used extensively for the past couple of years, whose screen recently decided to pack it in. I was at a point where I actually need a pretty powerful machine to do Java development on, and it had to be a laptop since I travel. The 13.3" form factor of the S460 is lovely and portable, I considered getting a SZ6, but it just does not offer the all the performance and screen estate I wanted, not to mention the pitiful Sony warranty, hence the new Lenovo.
The T61p I bought is the standard 2.2GHz version with 2Gb memory, an 15.4" WUXGA screen having 1920x1200 pixels, 100Gb 7200rpm hdd, DVD writer, WiFi a/b/g/n, an nVidia 570M graphics card with 256Mb memory, the rest of the usual ThinkPad features, a 6-cell battery and I ordered a 9-cell battery as well. The Lenovo partner I ordered the laptop from did not sell the 3-cell drive battery, which wasn't much of a loss; based on previous experience, the 3-cell battery is nearly useless, as from a running time/weight point of view it's better to carry a separate 6 or 9 cell, hibernate the laptop and switch when running low.
Without further ado, here are my comments so far:
Physical impressions:
- it's pretty big, especially compared to my recently departed 13.3" Vaio
- it's slim and while not light, the weight is reasonable for the size
- feels very sturdy, I wouldn't want to drop it on my foot
- it's covered in the usual cheap looking plastics - I read somewhere that it was "smudge proof" or at least "resistant". It's not! The external plastic is made out of a rubbery plastic, and fingerprints will stick to it quite nicely. The plastic around the keyboard is textured and shiny, and after 5 minutes of use it was obviously smudged, and no I wasn't eating anything. The material used by Sony, for example, is much more "smudge resistant", although even with the Lenovo, (1) it can be cleaned and (2) I don't think it's that important, certainly not a show stopper.
- the screen is not centered, the left margin is noticeably wider than the right; however it's something instantly forgettable once you start using the thing
- I won't go into port placement, many excellent reviews here contain detailed explanations and photos; I'll just say it's a good idea on Lenovo's part to include USB ports on both sides of the laptop
Screen:
- it's brightness would be classed, in my opinion, as "moderate-to-low", as it's dimmer than my 3-year old Vaio, and completely pales in comparison to the new generation SZ laptops with LED displays
- in fact, I find the screen downright unusable when brightness is turned to lower than 50%; coupled with the very high resolution, turning it down so low is tiresome to my eyes in all environments including complete darkness. BTW, I'm lucky to have excellent 20/20 vision.
- side effect: if you're planning to dual-monitor with a desk monitor, be that LCD or CRT, you probably won't like it due to the obvious brightness difference when side by side
- it's not really usable outside; if you take your laptop to the park, roll with it in the grass on the college campus or do whatever outdoor laptopy activities you might do, this is not a good screen for it
- having said all that, the screen *is* suitable for indoor use, I can imagine that most people would keep it over 50% brightness anyway, and it looks even better when plugged in
- the resolution is superb, no dead pixels, same real screen estate as with a 24" panel, provided you don't change the OS DPI or enlarge the fonts
- I am not an optician, but I think that people with less than good/excellent eye sight would have significant problems using this screen; not all fonts and applications can be adjusted for font size, and some can be truly minute
- there is noticeable edge light bleed, especially so in the bottom side of the screen; watching letterboxed videos is less than ideal because of this
Noise:
- exceptionally little fan noise
- significant harddisk noise - there is an annoying background high-pitch whiny noise, probably caused by the disk rotation, and the usual read/write noise, which is higher than the average laptop
Heat:
- top of the laptop remains comfortable and cold, even after several hours at maximum performance profile
- bottom-left edge, especially towards the rear of the laptop gets very hot, I doubt it can be used in high-performance mode on one's lap for extended periods of time, except using thick clothing or perhaps azbestos pants
Keyboard, touchpad, trackpoint:
- unlike a lot of people I don't have a passion for the ThinkPad keyboards, I find the sideflex of the keys less than nice, and tend to hit two keys instead of one quite frequently, when typing fast. Having said that, this is a good keyboard, it has full-size Enter and Backspace keys as well as Page Up/Down keys, which on a lot of laptops require the press of Fn. Speaking of Fn, it is badly placed in the bottom left corner, where Ctrl should be. I would have preferred Page Up/Down near the arrow keys, instead of the browser Forward/Back buttons, however I think these can be configured. Overall, a decent keyboard.
- touchpad works perfectly out of the box, scrolls well when using the bottom and right edges
- trackpoint seems fine, I don't personally use this type of input
Speed:
- plenty! Windows Vista gave it a score of 4.8 due to the memory, everything else was over 5. It feels like a proper high-end computer
- some limited application testing: There's no point talking about MS Word and the likes, they work fine on a machine with a 10th of the specs. For those interested - Eclipse (with all the EE addons) runs nice and fast, this workstation lives up to the expectations; both PostgreSQL and Tomcat 6 experiments went very well.
- very limited games testing: (for WoW addicts) I installed World of Warcraft and can confirm that it will run at 1920x1200, 4x multisampling, AF slider half-way, everything else maxed out, at 25-26 fps in Shattrath (which is a close approximation of raid performance) and generally over 35fps outside. This is with the default graphics driver, I did not attempt to change to anything else. It also looks spectacular!
Software:
- the name of this section should probably be "Bloatware"
- Vista Ultimate, 32-bit version, came preinstalled on this machine. It is a nice, intelligent and beautiful operating system up to the point where it is downright idiotic, obscure and uncontrollable. Example: I connected the Ethernet port to the old laptop's Ethernet port to copy files, manually assigning IP addresses. This worked fine, except it disconnected the wireless (which I was using for Internet access), arguing that I already have a working connection and therefore I don't need two. It also runs various svchost processes in the background almost all the time, reading and writing on the disk and driving me generally mad as I cannot stop it.
- Norton with 90-days subscription: this is the ultimate bloatware. It runs, scans, keeps one of the cores at 100% use, messes with the files in a way that is both relentless and without any visible method of stopping it, with complete disregard to the user's need to work or play. Uninstalling it appeared to succeed until I attempted to reboot the machine, at which point is simply hanged in the "Saving your settings" screen, in full hdd activity, until eventually I pulled the battery out.
- PC Doctor: more bloatware
- A defragmenter whose name escapes me: a limited feature "home" version, seems decent enough, however I've seen much better
- DVD writer: Roxio. Less than ideal. Hangs when erasing DVD-RWs. I'll probably get a Nero license.
- the "ThinkSmart" utilities - probably best OEM laptop software on the market, quite extensive in options. Haven't played with them all, however based on past ThinkPad experience it's quite good.
Quirks and miscellaneous things:
- oddity when suspended: press power button, it wakes up to the login screen, I log in, it turns off the screen and goes back to sleep. Press power again, back to login screen, this time logs in and works. Doesn't do it every time but it certainly did it several times, not sure yet if this is a serious problem or not.
- the fingerprint reader works very well but only for my index fingers. Any attempt to register any other finger except for a thumb, which would be too awkward to swipe, resulted in a puzzling "too short" message, as I definitely have long fingertips!
- the software restore feature can be both a blessing and a curse. It does seem to guarantee that even on a deserted island you can have a working Windows. However it reserves quite a bit of space in the hidden partition (18Gb?) and I don't think this is Linux-friendly at all, including in a dual-boot configuration.
Battery life:
- haven't had time to properly look into this. It feels similar to my previous T42p, which is good.
I am planning to update this post as I discover more things. I will also get Valve's Orange Box and will do some benchmarks on Portal, Episode 2 and Team Fortress, as well as Counter-Strike, since I doubt people are very interested in its SQL performance
Feel free to ask anything else and I'll do my best to check and answer!
T61p first use impressions
Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by symphara, Nov 8, 2007.
