At 2.4kg, Lenovo's ThinkPad R61i is the lightest laptop here, and its matt black case feels sturdy and rigid. The 14.1in screen has a matt finish, and the same 1,280x800 resolution as the other 15.4in laptops here. It's reasonably bright but the backlight is uneven. White areas had a slight blue cast and we noticed some speckling in our colour and greyscale transition tests.
The R61i has a touch stick pointing device, which can be tricky
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to get used to, although a conventional touch pad is also present. The keyboard is responsive and comfortable to type on, and is the best in the group.
A small light mounted above the display illuminates the keyboard for use in poorly lit places. Unlike the other laptops here, Windows XP is preinstalled rather than Vista.
Performance
Even though the ThinkPad has only 1GB of RAM, it outperformed laptops with twice as much memory in our video-encoding and applications tests thanks to its 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7250 processor. There's plenty of room for images and video on its 160GB hard disk.
The R61i's integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics chip isn't powerful enough to play the latest 3D games. It couldn't run our Call of Duty 2 benchmark at our standard settings. The ThinkPad was the third longest-lasting laptop in our light-usage battery test, managing three hours and 51 minutes. This is only a few minutes behind the leaders, and is long enough for an afternoon out of the office.
