The Lenovo ThinkPad T400 is a 14” screen laptop commonly seen being toted around by business people, but if you’re looking for a quality laptop to last you four years of school then the semi-rugged T400 could fit your needs as well.  The price isn’t as high as many people assume, often starting at just over $800 after you apply frequently available 10% – 20% off coupon codes.  For a portable business class laptop that’s really quite a good price, especially for all that you get as you’ll find in this review.

Here are the specifications for the ThinkPad T400 as reviewed:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26GHz / 3MB L2 Cache)
• Screen: 14.1″ WXGA+ (higher resolution than the regular WXGA screen)
• Hard Drive: 160 GB 5400RPM
• OS: Purchased with Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows 7 installed for test purposes
• Optical Drive: 8X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Drive
• Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator M4500
• Memory: 3.0GB DDR2 SDRAM
• Wireless: Intel 5100 802.11 a/b/g/n card, Bluetooth
• Battery:  9-cell extended life battery
• Slots: ExpressCard 54mm and digital Media Card Reader (SD/MMC)
• Ports: Firewire, Wireless On/Off switch, Headphone/Mic, Kensington lock slot, AC Power, VGA out, Modem port, LAN Ethernet port, 3 USB ports, Expresscard/54, SD-Card Reader,
• Warranty: 1-year

ThinkPad T400 Build

The ThinkPad line is well known for its solid feel, and rightly so.  Though the ThinkPad T400 is not made of an all aluminum body like the MacBook Pro, it does use a very rigid molded plastic casing and has a magnesium internal chassis to give it a semi-rugged feel.  There’s very little flexing or give to T400 case, which means it will hold up well in your backpack that’s crammed with textbooks.  Furthermore, the internal roll cage and a shock-protected hard drive will make sure that even if the T400 is dropped from up to 3-feet there’s little risk of anything internal breaking or loss of data occurring.  Also worth mentioning in regards to durability, the T400 has drains in the keyboard area that will carry any liquid spills safely out the bottom of the laptop.

The ThinkPad T400 weighs in at 5.75lbs with the 9-cell battery, that’s quite heavy for a 14-inch laptop, but remember the weight will be about half a pound less if you go with the smallest battery size.  You just have to decide what’s more important to you – lower weight or a longer battery life.

ThinkPad T400 Design

The ThinkPad T400 is all black and looks very professional, some might say boring.  The edges are somewhat curved to prevent any sharp edges, but other than a mild slope on the edges the T400 is fairly boxy looking.  There is a ThinkPad logo emblazoned on the lid and the iconic red pointing stick, but other than that you’re pretty much looking at an all black paint finish.

Below is a comparison in size of the T400 to an 8 x 11 dimension paperback textbook / study guide

Screen

There are several screen options with the T400, you can configure it with an “old fashioned” CCFL traditional backlight screen, a high brightness CCFL outdoor viewable screen, or an LED backlight screen.  The LED variety screen offers a thinner profile, better power efficiency and somewhat more even lighting.  The chief advantage of the CCFL is that it’s cheaper and what most people are accustomed too.  The high-nit bright CCFL display is only useful if you want to use the laptop outside, which could be handy if it’s a nice day and you’d like to take the laptop outside to do some work.

In addition to these options you also get a choice of resolution with the CCFL display, you can choose between WXGA and a higher resolution WXGA+.  The higher resolution screen means icons and graphics will display smaller and you’ll fit more onto the screen, which helps for productivity but can strain the eyes if you have poor eyesight.

I went with the WXGA+ CCFL type of screen and am happy with it.  Though it would be nice to have the LED option for its advantages, the higher resolution display is not available for that type screen (at least at the time of order).  Having a higher resolution WXGA+ screen makes it easier to fit a couple of side by side windows on the screen at the same time.  The screen is bright enough, though not as blazingly bright as some might like.  The whites do have a slightly bluish tint, but it’s hardly noticeable.  The lighting is even across the screen and horizontal viewing angles are decent.

There’s an option for a built-in web camera which many who are college age will probably spring for, I ended up not paying the extra $60 it cost with the WXGA+ display (strangely, it was only a $30 upgrade with the WXGA screen, which seems much more reasonable).

ThinkPad T400 Keyboard and Touchpad

The ThinkPad keyboard is called “legendary” and for a reason, it’s got a very nice feel when typing thanks to its just right key travel stroke and overall firmness.  Lenovo apparently made some changes to the keyboard on the initial roll out of the T400 last year, but after customer complaints have since reverted to the older style keyboard with more support beneath the keyboard.  The keyboard is truly full sized, with 7 rows of keys and generous key spacing.  The only slightly odd thing about the keyboard is the fact the Fn and Ctrl key are flipped to what you’ll find on a normal keyboard layout.

The pointing stick is a nice feature to use in place of using the touchpad.  I’m used to using a touchpad and stick to using that for the most part, but the pointing stick is handy to use as you don’t have to lift your hand off of the keyboard to move the cursor with it.  The touchpad has a nice textured feel with good sensitivity and ease for moving the cursor.  The top mouse buttons have a very generous size and excellent tactile feel, while the lower buttons are smaller with less travel, but still serviceable.  There’s certainly no dearth of input devices and overall the keyboard and touchpad provide excellent usability.

ThinkPad T400 Performance

The ThinkPad T400 offers Core 2 Duo performance ranging from 2.26GHz to 2.8GHz, this is an excellent family of processors and even with the lowest 2.26GHz configuration I went with you’ll get very good performance.  I purchased the T400 with 1GB of RAM and bought a 2GB RAM stick of memory at Crucial.com to increase the total amount to 3GB.  Lenovo plays the game of overcharging you for RAM during configuration, it’s an insult they’d even offer 1GB of RAM with Windows Vista as the OS since everyone knows that’s only half of the recommended 2GB needed for Vista.  HP and Dell definitely have Lenovo beat when it comes to being reasonable in offering the right amount of memory for base configurations.  Dell won’t even let you configure a Latitude with 1GB of memory.

The T400 has the option of SSD or standard hard drive configurations.  You can get a high-performance SSD for +$400 if money is no concern.  Since money is a concern to most people, the most reasonably priced hard drive is a 160GB 5400RPM variety and is what I went with.  Having a 7200RPM would be a worthwhile upgrade, boot times are fairly slow on my T400 at close to a minute in Vista and about 50 seconds for Windows 7.  Having a faster spinning drive or SSD can really help get the boot time down.

The final component that will determine overall performance relates to the graphics solution you configure.  The T400 can be configured with an ATI Radeon 3470 graphics card with 256MB of GDDR3 RAM.  If you go for this graphics card you can definitely do some gaming, maybe not with the most demanding new games but 2-year old games such as Half-Life 2 will perform very well.  The ATI 3470 is considered a mid-range graphics card, so for engineering graphics programs and playing games on low to mid graphics settings you’ll do well.  If you have no interest in gaming, video encoding, engineering graphics programs or doing demanding media work then the extra cost of the ATI 3470 will not benefit you and you should just go with the Intel integrated graphics.  One thing worth mentioning is that if you do get the ATI 3470 graphics card you are able to switch to just using the Intel integrated graphics to save battery life when you are not doing work that requires extra graphics processing capabilities.

For those that care about benchmark scores, here’s what my Intel P8400 2.26GHz, 3GB RAM, 160GB 5400RPM, Intel graphics T400 scored on a couple of better known benchmark programs:

PCMark05: 4,096 PC Marks

3DMark06: 903 3D Marks

Battery Life

The ThinkPad T400 with the 9-cell battery provides a simply stunning 9 hours and 10 minutes of battery life when setting screen brightness to half, wireless on and using the notebook lightly for half that time and idling (with the screen on) for the rest of the time.  Although the 9-cell battery does add extra weight, the comfort of knowing you have 9-hours of battery life to get you through a day on campus is well worth the extra weight and upgrade cost in my opinion.  I’ve never used a laptop with such good battery life and it’s a tribute to the power efficiency of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and ThinkPad engineering team that the T400 veritably sips away at the battery instead of slurping up all the power.  Even when I put the screen at full brightness and used the T400 for lots of web surfing the battery was still going after 6 hours and indicated another hour of battery remaining before I closed the lid down to call it a day.  When your laptop can outlast your stamina to work the only problem you have is being able to blame the laptop battery for dying and giving you an excuse to pack-up early.

Input and Output Ports

The ThinkPad T400 is predictably business-oriented with the type of ports it offers.  There is no HDMI or DVI video output, as those are considered more consumer-like ports for the times you want to output video to your giant LCD TV in the living room.  In fact, the only type of video output you get is a VGA monitor out port.  You get 3 USB ports, which is just fine for a 14-inch laptop. A FireWire port for fast data transfer is included.  You have the choice between an SD-card reader or legacy PC card slot.  I went with the SD card reader as the convenience factor of having an SD slot to quickly move digital photos from a camera is important to me.  A lot of business users find they have accessories that still require a PC card slot, if you don’t have any old accessories that need this slot there’s a 54mm ExpressCard slot that you can use for future expansion.  Rounding out the port selection are both a modem and Ethernet port.

Here’s a tour of the ports:

The left side has two USB ports, VGA out port, Ethernet, Modem, ExpressCard slot and SD card reader (you can get a PCMCIA card in place of the SD card reader)

The right side has one USB port and the ultra bay optical drive

The front side of the T400 has the FireWire port, wireless on/off switch, headphone jack and microphone jack

The back side has just a power jack, vent and battery

ThinkPad T400 Audio

The speakers on the ThinkPad T400 are serviceable, nothing to write home about.  As usual with laptop speakers there is a serious lack of bass.  The headphone jack is located on the front of the T400 and is recommended for the best listening experience.

There are dedicated volume up and down buttons at the top of the keyboard along with a mute button that make it easy to quickly and easily control volume levels.

ThinkPad T400 Noise and Heat

The ThinkPad T400 uses a very efficient and proprietary cooling system, it does a supreme job in keeping temperatures down and generating little fan noise while doing that.  Using the T400 in your lap comfortably will not be an issue.

ThinkPad T400 Extra Features

The ThinkPad T400 has a lot of extra handy features, they are too numerous for a complete list, but here’s a few of the major features worth mentioning:

• A light at the top of the screen called the “ThinkLight” can be turned on to illuminate the keyboard in the dark
• A gyrometer is built-in (like what the iPhone has to detect tilt) that allows the T400 to detect when it is falling and park the hard drive to prevent data loss, this is called the Active Protection System
• The ThinkVantage set of software makes backup, recovery, wireless connection management and power management very easy
• The optical drive is easy to remove and hot swappable with a secondary battery, different optical drive or weight saver
• An expansion port bay on the bottom of the T400 allows you to purchase a docking station to provide more ports on the T400
• The ThinkVantage System Update utility makes it simple to stay up to date with all the latest software updates to your system
• The keyboard has a drainage system that carries liquid out the bottom of the laptop if a spill occurs
• There are “forward” and “back” navigation buttons on the keyboard next to the arrow keys that make for handy shortcuts to navigating forward and backward in your web browser

Conclusion

While the Lenovo ThinkPad T400 isn’t exactly hip or something you’ll choose to win looks at a coffee shop, it is certainly practical and a laptop that is built to last.  If you’re heading into a professional school such as law, business or medicine it might also fit the scene better there than say a bright blue colored Dell or Sony.  Reliability and durability should certainly be a major factor in purchasing a laptop, and the ThinkPad T400 meets that requirement.  The 14-inch screen size is a sweet spot for a balance between portability and having enough screen real estate to be productive.  There is a lot of room to configure the T400 to your needs and budget at Lenovo.com so take advantage of that, and also take advantage of the fact Lenovo offers a student discount to many colleges that can save you 5% or so off the cost of any ThinkPad.

Pros

• Very durable and solidly built
• Excellent battery life of up to 9 hours with the largest size 9-cell battery
• Good performance and reasonable starting price for a business laptop
• Lots of configuration options available, from budget to high-end
• Nice keyboard

Cons

• Not very stylish with looks
• Hard to find in stores to try before you buy
• A bit heavy with the large size 9-cell battery
• Memory and hard drive upgrades are over priced

Pricing and Where to buy

The Lenovo ThinkPad T400 notebook is available configure to order at Lenovo.com and varies in price depending on the promotions and marketing going on during any given week. Right now the starting price is at $869.