Got My Lappy! T400 First Impressions

So this morning around 11:30AM the real Santa Clause showed up in a brown truck and rang the bell. I opened the door and there he was smiling ready to hand me my own gift which I ordered on 6/17 and received today 6/26. So I missed out the W7 upgrade program, oh well, I'm still ecstatic about my purchase.

First impressions:

Upon opening the box my T400 was shipped it and taking everything out I realized the how small the T400 is! I thought it would be a bit bigger but it was not. It is definitely the perfect size for me and I don't regret getting the T400 over the T400s at all. Even with the 6-cell battery it's plenty light and portable and quite solid.

After a thorough inspection of the chassis and notebook I did not discover any defects or anything wrong with the system. It is very solidly built and does not feel cheap at all, I admire the serious business looks quite a bit and this notebook definitely means business. Everything about the notebook is great including all of the buttons and placement of ports. The only thing I noticed was the little panel where the volume and power buttons are located seems to be arching up a little in the middle, I believe another user in the forum reported the same issue with their T400 a couple of days ago. Anyways, it's not very apparent and I really do not mind.

The keyboard is a dream, I am actually typing on it right now and I can achieve an incredible rate of words per minute and accuracy, much better than my older laptop and desktop keyboard. The only noticeable flex there is if I press down hard on the keyboard, otherwise it's a solid keyboard that I LOVE and I have not even used it for four hours.

The display is a epic, the matte coating is far superior to the glossy displays on other systems and the LED backlit screen is so bright that I actually use it a few notches down from the maximum brightness setting. Battery life is amazing, initially according to Windows estimation I've got about 4 hours left of battery and that's before the battery has been cycled a few times to achieve maximum capacity.

Immediately, upon receiving it I tried to make a virtual set of recovery disks to burn on my desktop since my laptop does not have a DVD burner and I do not want to burn 7 CD's. However, that did not work out so well so I nuked all the partitions and installed Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit on it. I must say that the factory installed OS was quite bloated and I'm definitely glad I clean installed, right now I'm downloading Vista SP2 and then I will install all of the drivers for the system.

This laptop is nearly perfect, I will enjoy using it for years to come (hopefully). That's it for now, I'll post more thoughts and expressions as I finish setting up the system and begin to use it in school!

 

Sounds good, I just placed my order for nearly the EXACT same configuration. The only difference is I have Business x64 not Premium x64. Glad that you liked, hopefully I will feel the same.

 

I'm sure you will like it, I was a bit skeptical when I heard of Lenovo's quality going down the tubes, I however, can assure you that it is not. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, I'll try to answer them as best as possible.

 

I've had mine for about a week and so far its great. I love the battery life as well. I normaly get around 4 hours surfing the web, youtube etc but i haven't played any games on it yet. It seems to run very cool as well. The bottom does not get hot at all and that was one main gripe I had with my dell. Always felt so hot underneath.
There is way too much bloat on it though. I've got 90 processes running but I don't know which ones to uninstall because they all seem to be lenovo programs.
Anyways I want to install windows 7 eventually.
overall happy.

 

I'm almost done updating, does anyone know how to get the onscreen brightness indicator working in Windows x64?

 

Congratulations! FWIW, Windows 7 will make your new toy even snappier—and, if you want, a bunch of retailers, including Amazon, are offering pre-order upgrades for Windows 7 Home Premium, and others, for half price tonight.

 

Thanks man. I think this will be enough for me to decide going for the T400!

 

You went with the DVD-ROM, penny pincher are you?

 

It was a $50 upgrade, if it would have been more reasonable then maybe...besides...I rarely use my DVD burner on my desktop anyways, so I really have no need for a burner on my mobile.

 

Make sure you have the Hotkey and System Interface Driver installed properly. I have Vista Business x64 that I clean installed and the volume indicator works perfectly.

 

Congrats!!!

 

I fixed it by installing the latest graphics driver from Lenovo's website, previously I was using the one on Intel's site.