A T400 was a good choice for me where I was looking for portability, speed, and durability. For gamers, maybe something else. For those who don’t need the speed, look at something a little less pricey. All included I paid about $2,500. That’s with discounts and accessories, it can be knocked down a grand with lesser needs. For a more detailed view of my experiences with my T400 and Lenovo try here and here respectively. It has been great, except the hard drive. I’m even getting it to work on foreign OSs.
A number of problems have popped up initially and have been fixed, I have compiled a list of these updates:
- Fingerprint reader misread constantly, fixed by BIOS update
- Keyboard was flimsy, dropped back to t61 design and offered replacements
- Thinklight reported to reflect into eyes, newer models including mine have grooves in the screen bezel to prevent this
- Intel 5300 dropped connection, either BIOS or driver update
Pros:
- Extremely fast
- Rugged
- LED backlit (AMAZING brightness range)
- Small and light for the power
- Switchable Graphics
- Hotswappable Ultrabay
- Great Fn key subset
- Insert + Printscreen key sections where they belong (really bugs me when they’re not)
- Fn key in the corner
- Backwards compatible dock
- PCI-E in advanced dock
- 9 hrs battery on lowest settings
Cons:
- Issues early on
- Relatively weak graphics card
- Widescreen only
- No dock available (works in t6x docks)
- Lots on crapware with Vista (I formatted to solve this)
- Pricey
- Drivers not updated nearly enough (I still can’t use the password manager with the newest version of firefox)
- No switchable support for anything but Vista
- No compatibility with older accessories without dock
Specs
- 2.8ghz core 2 duo 6mb cache
- 4gb DDR3 @ 1067mhz
- Intel GM45 chipset
- 20v 90w input (very tolerant with variations, but may not charge with lower adapters)
- 4-cell battery (9-cell available, but sticks out)
- 3yr Warranty
- 1.1″ thick @ ~4.7lbs
- ATI Radeon hd3470
- 256mb GDDR3
- 800mhz core speed
- 640mhz clock speed
- Shader 4.1
- DX10 compatible
- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD
- 533mhz core speed
- Shader 4.0
- DX10 Compatible
- Extremely low power
- Wide range LED Backlit WXGA+ 14″ widescreen
- Hard drive Active Protection System
- Roll Cage (holds over 100lbs, but don’t try it)
- Composite casing
- 320gb 5400rpm+160gb ultrabay 7200rpm SATA hard drives
- Conexant HD audio with mic and speakers
- Intel wireless 5300 AGN
- Intel 82567 Gigabit LAN
- Bluetooth II PAN
- WWAN
- Wireless USB (Ultraconnect)
- Ultrabay 8x DVD burner
- Ultrabay battery
- Trackpoint and Touchpad
- Fingerprint Reader
- Security Chip
- 2mp webcam
- Thinklight
- Ricoh PC Card Slot
- Expresscard Slot
- Ethernet and Modem
- 3 MPCI-E slots
- 3 USB ports
- VGA
- IEEE 1394
Other epansions are through the dock:
- High power adapter
- PATA Ultrabay
- 1x PCI-E (fits many 16x cards)
- 5 USB ports
- VGA, DVI, and SVideo
- Audio passthrough with SPDIF
- 6-in-1 Card Reader
- LAN and Modem passthrough
