Product Reviews

You could use a whole lexicon of conservative adjectives to sum up IBM's ThinkPad range - words such as 'solid' and 'serious' spring to mind, but it's not often that the word 'bargain' gets a look-in. This is with good reason - the ThinkPad T40p TC1G1UK had a shocking £2,929 price tag, but now mere mortals can get a foot in the door of IBM's elitist party and join the Centrino club while they're there. Have a look at the price of this ThinkPad T40 C122UK and prepare to be amazed.

At £1,353, this T40 is less than half the price of its big brothers, which begs the question of what you're missing out on. Surprisingly, and at the risk of sounding like Paul Daniels, the answer's not a lot.

There's the obvious drop in specifications, but it's nothing huge. The processor is a 1.3GHz Pentium-M rather than the 1.6GHz model, but that doesn't mean the T40 is slow. In fact, with an overall 2D benchmark score of 1.17, it still gives most Pentium 4-M notebooks a run for their money. There's also only 256MB of RAM, but this is enough for Windows XP providing you're not pushing it with huge graphics or CAD applications.

This was part of the reason why the TC1G1UK was so expensive - it came with 512MB of RAM and an ATi Mobility Fire GL 9000 graphics chip, which turns it into a mobile 3D workstation. Comparatively, the C122UK keeps things simple with a basic 32MB ATi Mobility Radeon 7500. Admittedly there's no DirectX 8 or 9 support for games, but that's hardly the reason people buy ThinkPads.

The main reason for buying an IBM notebook is build quality, and this is where the T40 excels over many of its comparatively priced rivals. The keyboard is the best place to start - it's solid, the keys are all the right size, and it almost feels like you're typing on a desktop keyboard. The only annoyance is that there's still no Windows key. Mind you, while it took the best part of a decade, IBM is now including a touchpad as well as a TrackPoint on the T40, and maybe one day it will be converted to the way of the Windows key too.

The T40's other

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notable asset is its superb 14.1in TFT screen. It's bright, sharp and the viewing angles are fantastic. What's more, the XGA resolution is ideal for the size, looking exactly as it should do, with none of the icons or text appearing squashed or stupidly small. It all makes for a thoroughly ergonomic experience from a notebook that's also reassuringly sturdy.

ThinkPads have a reputation for being built to last, and with its titanium composite top and bottom, the T40 is no exception. The lid is especially solid, so will afford good protection to the screen, and IBM has also paid attention to the internal design. The UltraConnect Wi-Fi antenna, for example, is built into the lid to avoid interference from the moving parts in the bottom, so you'll get the strongest WLAN signal possible.

Unlike the T40p TC1G1UK, the T40 comes with Intel's 802.11b WLAN adaptor. So while it doesn't support the faster 802.11a standard, it still has the Centrino badge on the palmrest, and according to Intel this means it should work in most of the wireless hotspots around the country.

The other bonus of Centrino technology is the Pentium-M processor, which has had a dramatic impact on the T-series of ThinkPads. The obvious improvement is battery life. The T40 lasted for more than five hours in our light-use test, and over two hours in our intensive test - significantly more than the 70 minutes we got from the Pentium 4-M-based T30 TC082UK (see issue 95, p114). The second area is size. The T stands for 'thin and light', which in the case of its Pentium 4-M-based predecessor was a little economical with the truth. Thankfully, the Pentium-M's cooling requirements are significantly smaller, so the T40 is now 7mm thinner than the T30.

At 2.25kg, it's also 150g lighter, so it's all in all less bulky, easier to carry around and much closer to the original 'thin and light' description. The other main change is the lack of a serial port, but a parallel port is still situated on the back, and two USB 2 ports are sensibly mounted on the side. It's otherwise pretty sparse, though, with no PS/2 or FireWire ports and, perhaps more importantly, no Bluetooth.

But you can't expect everything for the money, and at £1,353 the ThinkPad T40 C122UK is a genuine bargain - you even get a DVD-ROM and CD-RW combo drive included in the bundle, not to mention IBM's embedded security system for hardware-based file encryption. The minimal three-year, return-to-base warranty is forgivable with this in mind, and considering the superb build quality, great screen and fantastic battery life the T40 is a first-class business notebook that almost anyone can afford.