Yet Another Set of T400 First Impressions

Let me start of by saying I am quite pleased with this notebook. With 4GB of RAM is it lightening fast—and it is one of the most solidly built notebooks I’ve had the pleasure of using. The LED LCD is beautifully bright and crisp and for all the hoopla around the Express and media card combination, I feel they look great and appear to be quite sturdy. My short list of pros and cons are below, which really are no different than Kevin’s. Cheers.

Pros

• Extremely quiet
• Sturdy and delightfully “boring business notebook”
• GPU is quit powerful for everyday use so Aero flies

Cons

• Like most other opinions, the keyboard does have a bit of a spring to it—more so than my current notebook. Don’t believe the official word or testing from Lenovo.
• The ThinkLight is blinding. The only way to prevent yourself from being blinded is to sit up high and position the LCD screen so that it is exactly perpendicular to the keyboard—but I don’t work like this and don’t know anyone who does. What a shame.

 

what media card option did you get?
any flex there?

did you get the plastic blank for the top?

 

I have the media card reader with the Express Card slot. Unlike others, there is no flex and, yes, there is a plastic blank in the Express Card slot.

 

do you get flex around the thinkvantage button?

is your finger print reader working fine (no random flashes at startup)

were you able to successfully burn recovery discs?

 

Yes, there is much flex is that area, but I don’t use that area often.

I don’t care for fingerprint readers—so I ordered mine without.

Because I bought a third party HD, I didn’t even try—since I still have the original HD.

 

wow, the thinklight is blinding? The thinklight on my T61 is barely anything for me -_-. I want to see this blinding thinklight

 

Keltix: for what it's worth:

Haven't noticed flex around Thinkvantage button. If I really push down on that area, yeah the skin flexes some. Big deal. It's skin on frame like an endoskeleton; that's the nature of that sort of design.

Fingerprint reader on my T400 works fine, no issues.

I burnt recovery disks fine; tested them by using them to load a factory image on my replacement HDD.

 

why people are so picky about "flexes" in some unusually area? I bet if you push hard on the screen, you'll make some major difference.

 

You can kind of see a much more luminescent ThinkLight in one of Kevin’s pictures in his T400 NBR review— http://www.notebookreview.com/picture.asp?f=36065. Even then though, the picture does not adequately express how blinding it is—especially when you’re in a setting that’s already dark enough to require use of the light.

 

In my opinion the LED screen is bright enough to illuminate my T400 keyboard in the dark naturally, even at half of the display's natural brightness. The Thinklight is more of an annoyance when activated only because the bezel just under it get's super white and tends to be distracting at times.

If only they had at least put a small plastic overlay over it...sort of like a miniature visor or protrusion from the plastic in an effort to at least cover the small amount of LED flare that escapes from it. I'm concerned that if I use the Thinklight in a dark classroom during a lecture, someone sitting behind me wouldn't only dislike my Thinkpad if you know what I mean.

But whatever...enough about the Thinklight. All in all I am most DEFINITELY buying a Thinkpad for my next laptop once my T400 becomes dated.