The T400 is here.

Well, only a day after the shipment notice, I have the T400 in my hands. I'm actually writing this on my new laptop right now.

The construction and design of the chassis definitely shows the signs of being targeted at 'Business' class of users, which I'm beginning to take to mean as people who need to earn their living using computers. Yes. this computer is very reliable, and various human interfaces buttons and their layouts show careful thought and experience on allowing for greater efficiency on the part of the user. I'm new at this particular layout and am still stumbling along, but someone who are used to this particular shortcut/keyboard layout will probably be able to get a lot of work done in a fraction of the time most people would take on 'normal' layout, i.e. those commonly seen on most Dell/Toshiba laptops.

The screen is very bright, very crisp. The webcam is of acceptable quality, nothing to be writing home about. The keyboard is spill-resistant, and the tactile feedback is marvelous. I find this to be even better than the full-size keyboard I use at the lab, and definitely light years ahead of the Asus mini keyboard I've been forced to use exclusively during my leisure. Despite my worries, the size of the laptop is not as large as I thought it would be. And the weight is surprisingly light for its size. I don't really feel any real-life difference between the T400 and the MacBook I tested in the Apple store. I fell comfortable swinging this computer with one hand.

The performance is as expected, it should be considering the extensive amount of research I had to do before ordering this thing. >.> The processing speed is certainly better than my old XPS 1210, and the graphics performance is better by leaps and bounds, though I do need to perform a bit more tests later on (work comes first, right?). I am somewhat saddened by the fact that this laptop is only slightly better performing than the MacBook, (2.0 vs 2.3 ghz, ~2100 3Dmark 06 vs ~2500) but then this laptop cost me 300 dollars less for more performance, so I'm not complaining...

If there's one thing I can't stand about my brand new laptop, it's the windows Vista. Now, I'm not the one to be subject to fanboyism for a particular brand of OS simply for aesthetic preferences or menu interfaces. I regularly use all sorts of operating systems due to the nature of scientific computing, with varying degrees of proficiency... And speaking from the experience, windows series operating systems must be the most irrational and difficult operating system to handle for any sort of hard-core computing on the market. I've spent nearly four whole hours into tweaking the system so it can run the programs required for the labwork, and I'm still not finished. I still need to hunt down a few obscure wrappers and modified shells, and some of them are of different version from what I actually need, so I'm looking at some version incompatibility headaches in the future. If I was on OS X, or Linux, I'd be able to simply apt-get the required programs and let the built-in systems handle the rest... I admit that those platforms entail their own brand of headache-inducing issues, but I think it'll be far less than what I would have to encounter while using Vista. (Being able to use exe installer for python is nice, but needing to fix every single pathway by hand isn't. It's much better than I remember but it's still an issue that shouldn't even exist in the first place.)

The worst crime of all, this Vista gobbles up system resources like there is no tomorrow! Thinkpads have advertised battery life of six hours, so I was expecting at least five hours of wifi using work performance. Well, so far I haven't seen the battery life timer rise beyond the four hour mark, with the six cell extended battery. Considering that the MacBook gets 4.5 hours in OS X using similarly specced hardware and lower capacity batteries, this is simply ridiculous. I'm currently trying to find all sorts of tweaks and peripheral programs I can add on to Vista for near-advertised battery life, which is in itself a ridiculous endeavor the user should not be subjected to in the first place. I want an operating system that doesn't make its own user spend hours 'fixing it' so it can do what it's supposed to do in the first place. This is SP1 version, so it is supposedly significantly improved over the original release of Vista.

For Vista's credit, however, the interface is much cleaner than the XP version I've been using for years. The general program-side design and performance definitely felt improved, though not quite mature. Despite all the negative press (generated primarily by Apple and people with no knowledge of computers), Vista will prove to be a decent, if not good operating system on Desktops where you don't quite have to worry about limited battery life and component devices... The failure of Vista isn't quite the failure of software engineering. It's the failure of software execs who failed to predict the trend of the personal computers market.

The increased screen estate is certainly welcome. I can have a lot of stuff on screen and running all at once on this brand new system with 1440x900 resolution... Less than the 30 in screen at the lab, but more than useable on a laptop.


All in all, I love this laptop. The Vista woes might be remedied by installing a partition of Linux on it. I'll write something up on that process later.