A Student's T420 Review (running linux as well)

My Thinkpad T420 Review

First, I'll tell you who's reviewing. I'm a soon to be college freshman who's had experience with, say, three other laptops (a dell precision, military issue, hp pavillion dv6000 and a dell something or other that my grandma has)

My Thinkpad Specs
4177CT CONFIGURED SYSTEM

0A68270 SBB 2NDG ICI3-2310M IHD G200
45M3092 VBB GENWIN7HOMEPREM64
0A68394 SBB GW7 HP64 US ENGLISH
0A68252 SBB 14.0 HD+ (1600 X 900) LED
0A68248 SBB INTEL HD GRAPHICS 3000
45M4572 VBB 4GBPC3-10600DDR3 1333SODMM
45M4839 SBB KEYBOARDUS ENGLISH
0A68253 SBB FINGERPRINT RDR
0A68288 SBB 720P HD CAMERA I MCR
0A68283 SBB 500GB HDD7200RPM
0A68277 SBB DVD RC8XMXDLLRULT E ATA
0A68292 SBB EXPRESS CRSLT4IN1CR
45M4815 SBB 6CELLLI-ION BATTERY
41W1787 SBB CPK NORTH AMERICA
0A68264 SBB IEEE 1394A PORT
45M3439 SBB INTELCENTRINOWIRELESSN1000
44C7950 SBB INT WRLSSWDAREANTWRK UPGR
0A68293 SBB LPUS ENGLISH

First Impressions

Honestly, it's probably a misnomer to call them first impressions since I had been watching every unboxing video and looking at pictures for the weeks leading up to my purchase. I had an intimate relationship with this machine before it arrived. Nonetheless, there were some surprises.
1 – My first thought was, wow. When closed, this laptop honestly is a beautiful machine. I love the simplicity and the design of the hinges.
2 – The screen is pretty wide. I'm not used to a 16 x 9 display, and it is quite the rectangle. Not bad, necessarily, just surprising.
3 - The keyboard is very user friendly. Really big letters and numbers. I like it.

Screen

Other than the wideness mentioned earlier, the screen is just fine. I opted for the 1600:900 display, and I have two windows open side by side right now. It's nice, and I recommend it. As for graininess/brightness, I don't have any issues with either. I'm not one of those screen aficionados either, though, so to my unrefined eye the screen is just fine. A user on here mentioned that he fiddled with a few of the settings and made major improvements, so if you hate the screen then you can look for his post (I couldn't find it, else I would link to it). I just walked outside, into full sunlight, and I can tell you that the screen is completely usable out here. On full brightness, though. If you're in partial shade you can probably make do with 2/3 brightness. A quick note – when indoors, the screen didn't look too much different than my glossy one on the HP, but outdoors is where the matte display really shines (bad word choice, but you know what I mean. It doesn't actually shine,)

Battery

I haven't done a full drain on the battery and don't anticipate doing so, as I'm kind of hell bent on making it last as long as possible for me. I currently have the charging thresholds set to charge at 45% and stop at 85%. I'm pretty sure that'll help preserve the battery (let me know if I'm wrong) I'm at 70% now and have 3:50 left with wifi on, 2/3 brightness and basic word editing/browsing going on. With light and smart usage, the battery should easily last five hours, maybe even five and a half. 3:52 x 10 / 7 makes almost exactly five hours at my current settings for a full battery. So if the windows indicator is any good, expect five hours of light use. This is a six cell, by the way.

Sound

I'll cover the sound the machine makes as well as the speaker quality. Speaker's are fine, one of the few things I've actually splurged on in the last few years has been some high end headphones so I use those when I want good quality. But I have some music playing and honestly it's not terrible quality. I don't listen to rap or hip hop though so those genres might be lacking with the poor bass. The laptop itself makes very little noise. The keyboard clacks, but so do all keyboards. The fan hasn't moved past its lowest setting, which is only perceptible if you're looking for it.

Keyboard

I'm a wee bit disappointed that I didn't experience nirvana upon first touching the keyboard. Frankly, I can tell it's better than my other laptops but marginally so. I don't do a TON of typing, but I do my share. The keyboard is good, but I honestly have to say that the hype surrounding it kind of got my hopes a little too high. Don't get me wrong – great keyboard. Just wouldn't be a selling point for me, like it is for some other people. One thing I do very much like is how defined the notches on j and f are for knowing you're in the home row. A joy to touch . Sorry to those whom I've offended with the keyboard comments, I'm just not sensitive to keyboards.
Oh, and there's little flex as far as I can tell, though honestly I don't know why that's even a criterion in choosing keyboards. How hard do people push on the keys? Unless it's ridiculously flexible, keyboard flex shouldn't really be an issue in my opinion.

Trackpoint and Touchpad

The touchpad texture is actually great. I love it. Scrolling along the side is iffy, 2 fingered scrolling is jerky, but they're usable. The trackpoint I'll have to get used to. It's a little too insensitive to me, so I'll have to change my settings, but there's a steeper learning curve to it and one that I haven't mounted so I'll refrain from passing any judgement.

Performance

I'm hardly gonna comment on this, because it varies so widely with specs. I have a 7200 rpm drive, 4 gigs of ram in 1dimm (though I'm considering upgrading, should I?) and an i3, lowest end processor. Performs admirably. I'm not a computer speed demon and coming from my previous systems I don't expect to have any issues with the way this computer performs.

The Rest

Ports are fine, I really use just usb. It's funny, those things are TIGHT. I had trouble putting my ipod cord in. Kinda made me laugh. I personally love the looks of the thinkpad, no complaints there. Why'd they have to put T420i on the bezel? I don't want other people to know how cheap I am! The fingerprint reader works very well, I like it more than I expected to. Webcam is fine.

Running Linux

So, I've recently converted to linux, mainly because it ran so damn well on all this old hardware I had lying around (relatively old). I tried Ubuntu on another computer, liked it, decided to give Fedora 15 a try and oh my god, it is fantastic. The UI is just so much easier to use and more intuitive. Gnome 3 > Unity in this man's opinion. So I shrank the C partition on Windows and gave myself 90 gigs to install Fedora. Did so, had very few issues. It wouldn't let me run a system update through the GUI, something about a transaction error, so I did it through the terminal and it was fine. The fingerprint reader is up and running, thanks to an online tutorial. I'm still working on charging thresholds.( Edit: apparently charging thresholds are stored in the battery so are OS independent once they're set. Thanks bogatyr) Everything else seems to be working just fine.

One thing I have to mention. If you're considering running a distro of linux that requires a password all the time when making changes, like Ubuntu or Fedora, do consider getting the fingerprint reader. You can authorize software changes with it and it's SO much easier than typing a password. I went back and forth on the feature, but now that I'm running fedora I'm overjoyed that I went with it.

Comparison

This notebook makes the HP look downright flimsy. The dell precision approaches it in percieved sturdiness, though I can't comment on the actual make of the machine. The deal is heavy as sin though. I feel as if, barring any major issues down the road, I'm probably gonna be a thinkpadder for a long while

Anything I missed? Just let me know, I'll try to review it.

 

For the charging thresholds, you can set them in Windows and not worry about Linux. Once set, they work across the board and they're stored in the battery circuitry and not in the software.

 

I doubt most people could tell the difference. Thanks for posting.

 

Good review, its nice to see you like your T420. I stickied the review on the T420 thread.

 

Thanks for the quick responses guys. I didn't think an extra 4 gigs would make a difference with the type of computing I do. I'll always have the option though. And Bogatyr, thanks for the info about the charging thresholds. That's really good to know.

 

Haha! I'm on the exact same boat as you for pretty much everything. Incoming college student, intimate relationship with laptop even before seeing it (still waiting on mine), and even the specs.

Glad to hear you're enjoying your ThinkPad, hopefully i'll be joining you shortly.

 

For your touchpad, you can configure it to the way you need it. I noticed the scrolling was so much better in linux than windows and later I found out that you can configure it in windows under Control Panel -> Mouse -> Ultranav.

Also, are you having any shutdown issues on your linux? When I am just on battery power, the laptop shuts down for 1 second then starts on its own. I've been trying to find the culprit for about a week yet with no success...

I agree with you on the keyboard. It's not as good as what people make it to be. I almost want to try their new chiclet keyboard on their X1 for comparison.

 

You mean when you unplug it it'll shut down? I haven't had any issues with shutting down, so I can't really help you sorry. I'm running Fedora 15, maybe try using that.

 

Great review, how would you comment on the weight of t420? Does it feel heavy and bulky?

 

I haven't had much experience with ultraportables so I can't comment compared to them, but the T420 doesn't feel too heavy to me (and I'm no macho man). Bulky it is not. The best word I can use to describe how it feels is probably "solid". As in, if it were significantly lighter, I might be suspicious. When I first picked it up, it was a little lighter than I expected but not shockingly so. I'm used to heavier/older laptops though.
Hope that helps

 

I wouldn't necessarily call it bulky, but it is on the heavier side. It's definitely heavier than the HP elitebooks.

Btw, I found my shutdown issue on battery power. I had to disable the module ehci_hcd on shut down which is some sort of a USB controller. I'm going to guess that the always-on usb messed something up somehow.

 

Glad you fixed it. I haven't had any trouble with that yet with Fedora (knock on wood!)

 

I'm interested in setting the charging thresholds, but I cannot seem to find how to set it. Is it in the Lenovo Power Manager?

 

Yeah, if you start the thinkvantage suite and go to like power settings there should be a "battery" application you can open up. Then you can toggle between basic and advanced mode, you'll find battery thresholds in advanced. If you google it, you can find more detailed directions, I'm not with my laptop right now so I can't look specifically. Sorry, hope that helps.

 

Good review. I'm just going to comment on the keyboard part. ;p

Some people like myself are crippled in typing on flat, short throw, chiclet keyboards like those found in MacBooks and pretty much all the Asus laptops I've used. So, a curved, long throw, traditional style keyboard is almost a necessity to typing accurately and quickly. I personally fell in love with the keyboard after pressing 1 key. The more subtle excellence of the keyboard lies in its layout (no pun intended), all the traditional keys are dedicated, and in the place that you'd expect them to be in, which is great for word processing and coding. Keyboard flex isn't an issue unless you press really hard on the keys when typing (and keyboards on like the W520 do flex on the left side when heavy pressure is applied), but I've used many laptops while shopping around that had keyboards that bounced when I was just poking at the keys lightly with my right index finger, and bounced even more when I used both of my hands to type normally.

Hope you enjoy your machine and stay problem free!

 

Ah I see. I've never used a chiclet keyboard nor do I code or anything so thankfully most keyboards work for me. But after having used it for a few days it is extremely pleasant. Though for me it's not a reason to buy the laptop itself, it is a wonderful bonus to have such a keyboard on a laptop that is better than the competition in most other regards anyhow (which is why I did buy it)

 

Believe it or not, the main selling points for me were:

1. No glossy parts
2. Great keyboard
3. ThinkPad reputation/durability
4. Price for specs compared to other laptops that satisfied the first 2 categories



i guess the saying "To each his own" really applies to people's preferences for electronics.

 

Thanks for the reply, they are really helpful, I'm considering either a T420 or T420s. I'm used to a Dell 1420 which weigh about 2.7kg with 9c. So I think the 2.2kg T420 is already a big leap in terms of weight. However, I'm still not sure about having a even lighter 1.8kg T420s.
I'm going to grad school and The courses schedule will not be intense.

 

t420s also offers USB 3.0 port. I saw yesterday t420 and t420s, for me difference is bigger than the numbers can say. Right now I'm using notebook almost the same size as t420 and when I picked up t420s it was another class of portability.
I would say that the difference between t420 and t420s is the like this between Macbook Pro and Macbook Air.

The only thing that scary me a is the noise fan in t420s, but TP fan control can tame it and also as we can read at lenovo forum Lenovo is working for solution so I believe that next BIOS will solve this issue ( It looks only like software problem )

 

@ChrisMC That's a really big difference!

 

Yeah I mean if I had the cash I totally would have spec'd out a T420s. I guess the real test of portability will come when I have to carry my laptop all over campus.

 

Which online tutorial did you use to get the fingerprint reader working under Linux? Sounds like you've been able to use it just like how it's used under Windows.

 

Fedora 15: Enable your laptop fingerprint reader nfolamp blog

Keep in mind that applies to Fedora 15 which is what I used it for, I'm not sure about other Linux os's but a google search should yield some results with the most common distros.

It doesn't unlock the login keyring. It logs you on, but you have to type in your password to unlock the login keyring. Where it really shines is in software install authentication. Just swipe and done. Let me know if you need any more help.