Nice review... guess what im typing this on right now. yepp, a T60, although with the 14.1" 1024x768 screen. But then, i didnt pay for it, my work did, and this comes in at half the price. Except for the relatively low res and un-contrasty screen, im incredibly happy with it so far. But then, for work its fine, and this is only for the mobile part, at work i have a dock and external screen, although i usually drag it with me and spend time on trains and so swapping between work and a movie or two. Also, battery life with the small battery is fine. 3-5 hours depending on the work im doing. And the finger reader that i was thought to be a gimmick, i love it. I cant ever whipe that smile off my face when i get to the office in the morning, severly in need of a pot of coffee and i dont have to remember my password.

Oh, and thanks for pointing out the fact there was a tiny headlight there. Hadnt found that one yet.

Now for the bad things. Showelware. The thing was loaded with so many small things from the start i almost freaked out. Uninstalled most of em except for fingerprint utility and the hard drive shock-detection. Although im probably reinstalling some stuff, like the utility for the trackpoint and extra buttons. Also, the fact that once seem to have to use the intel utility to get the dual screen feature to work as it should was a downer. For some reason windows own settings wasnt enough. But after that it works as advertised, and as i have a dock and external screen at work, i love being able having my SNMP-console on one screen and work on the other. Although, i dont like the placement for the kensington lock at all, especially on the dock, where it sits on the left side. And having to juggle a kensington lock with the off-hand is a total bitch. And as that lock is also the lock mechanism for the dock, it gets annoying real fast. Also, as a com-tech, i would have liked some form of serial port, especially as the options is in the chipset and even shown in the bios. But now i have to rely on those stupid dongle-things.

Havent had time to really test out the virtualization feature that i enabled in the bios yet, but as i have a couple of Virtual PCs on this to run my VPN-clients in, thats gonna be one thing in the next few weeks. I wish TR would do a test and article about Virtualization though.

All in all, if Lenovo keeps doing this, i really cant see how they taking over the Thinkpad brand was a bad thing. Prices seem to have gone down abit atleast.

I hope this fairs better than all the R40's around here. One fails to boot. Two have bad HDDs. Two have bad displays. :rolls:

I'll never buy one: no Windows key, and the Fn' function key is to the left of the CTRL key!! It drives me insane. (I'm stuck with a thinkpad at work...)

I like the form factor of a decent sized widescreen laptop. Maybe I don't cart it about as much as a laptop user should, but I chose the laptop because it has to come to and from uni and so needs to be small enough to fit in my suitcase. If I were more mobile with it I might reconsider, but I'm still young so then again, maybe not :-D

I found that I produced substantially fewer typos on this keyboard than I do on my Sharp M4000 WideNote's.

This is why people get snobbish about keyboards :-D

And it's why I love the keyboard on my laptop, and couldn't stand the one on my parent's old one. Mistakes were endemic, and typing was an exercise in patience - you weren't so much typing on the laptop, more sharing the experience (and if some work got done in between all the typos, so much the better...)

Some points on that keyboard though. First off it looks awfully similar to the bad one mentioned above - the small return key is a bugger to get used to, but that eases over time, you learn to hit low on big enter keys and all is right with the world again. Second, why do keyboard makers inside on cramming buttons around the arrow keys? I understand that there's a space tradeoff in anything they do here, but cramming buttons everywhere like that does nobody any favours.

Seems to me like the T series really hits its niche though - massive reserves of battery power and generally aimed at a business user.

(typing on parents newer compaq widescreen laptop :-D),
-Mole

Not a word on build quality.

Not a word on the X60, which is a subnotebook in the Sharp's weight and size range.

Not a word on how the T60 vs the Sharp function in sunlight, where the glossy screen really shines (lol).

Please, there's a lot more to a portable computer than just its performance and built-in gizmos. And you know, there are different market segments for notebooks.

Does Lenovo have 14/15" screens with ~1600ish resolutions? I had a 15" (before widescreen) notebook a long time back with 16x12 and I'm not buying another lappy until I get a similar screen. 14x9 and 14x10 is nice, but I want the 16!

Good review. I currently have a T20 that was purchased when IBM first introduced the line. Its almost 6 years old now, and reaching the end of its life. But it has served me well. Interesting comment on the keyboard, as the one on my T20 is pretty flimsy and not clickety at all. I do like the eraser head mouse, and much prefer it over the tracpad most other laptops have. Though that preference is moot, since I use a laptop mouse.

I have been shopping for laptops and this time I am leaning towards the Macbook Pro. I would be curious to see how the Macbooks (regular and Pro) do in teh Damage Labs. The regular Macbook has a very nice keyboard as well, one I am hoping Apple will migrate to the Pro models - hopefully they refresh the Pro line when they ship with Merom.

While it does categorically beat the older laptop, the margins of victory seem awfully small to me. It has a clockspeed advantage, a newer architecture, and a second core. A few tests where it's only slightly faster would be perfectly understandable -- ones which don't take to either the second core nor the architectural advantages, and only care about the clockspeed -- but here, that seems to be the vast majority of them. And the couple of tests where the second core gets some action aren't anywhere close to twice as fast, either. (The best is Roxio, at about 50%). I know you can't get a 100% speedup from a second core, but you can get pretty close, and certainly much closer than this.
Is this just a function of the applications tested, or could there be something else at play here?

this post was meant to be a comment to another, and has been relocated. meh.

Whats the price on that sharp?

You ever going to review a Macbook?

"and its lighter weight if I were to configure a T60 for myself. Long battery life is a wonderful thing to have, but I wouldn't be surprised to see this laptop deliver four to six hours of battery life with its stock battery. Given the tradeoffs involved, that might be a better choice for everyday use."

Weak nerd whinings.
;)

Trackpoint > trackpad. Once you get used to scrolling with the 3rd trackpoint button, nothing else will do.

The base frame of the T60 is alot more rigid than the older T4x series machines too. Upgrading the memory is a bit more of a pain, since you have to remove the palmrest, but thats something most can live with.

LCD quality appears to vary quite a bit, tho. The XGA ones are exceptionally poor (but thats true for pretty much EVERYBODY's XGA displays, honestly). The SXGA+ models I've seen so far appear to be okay.

I have 8 of these on my desk at work at the moment (I work in a big mining company, its corporate office is 95% laptops [X and T series] and 5% desktops), and the thing I've noticed most about them (and previous T series) is the poor screens. At the lowest contrast setting, it has uneven colouring of the display, with the left and right edges being noticeably darker than the middle.

Running of A/C power, its not as evident, but its still there.

Why this is the case is not something I've investigated, but damned if its not irritating.

I wonder, however, if it experiences the same problems as some batches of T43p's, where they have a condition in which the wireless card wont initialise unless power is plugged in before turning it on. I forgot to test this at work.

[edit]

Oh, and my recommendation is to wipe the drives completely and do a reinstall. Their recovery thing, whilst nice, gobbles up too much HD space. Also, I'd recommend not installing every single one of their tools...after a little while, the system will start to chug.

Well, I'm glad Lenovo has retain most of the ThinkPad's characteristics. Would be nice to someday upgrade/replace my current ThinkPad with a new one.

You didn't mention about Linux compatibility? :-)
(Besides the build quality, ThinkPads are known to be one of the most Linux friendly solutions).

I see ThinkPads still has that nice keyboard I'm used to. :-)

Wow, the old eraser head J-mouse still lives? I remember them things on laptops back in the 90's, maybe sooner...

And shame on you, Scott. Kicking tail outside of Ascalon? Those level 3 gargoyles and grawl were just asking for it, eh? ;)

Sweet review.

Two friends of mine recently asked me for advice on what laptops to get, and within the last thwo weeks I guided both of them to purchase a Thinkpad configured similarly to the one reviewed here. Hopefully more reviews like this will be forthcoming... and forthcoming in a timely fashion ;)

And three cheers for the clicky keyboard!