Ultra portable and flexible
Written: Nov 10 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Lightweight, great display, can do anything
Cons: Price
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| pkdunn's Full Review: Lenovo ThinkPad T20 (264746U) PC Notebook |
WHY I BOUGHT THE T20:
My previous ThinkPad was great and reliable, but at two years old, the 385-ED was getting slow, and the 2Gb HD meant I was either going to spend a fair amount of money to get a larger drive and replace the now-dead battery, or replace it. I looked at a lot of different laptops, but I focused in on two mandatory features: the Trackpoint and a DVD drive. And initially, I decided on the A20p, since it had all the features I wanted.
Unfortunately, the A20p was on a long, long backorder, and the IBM sales rep suggested that I consider the T20. Slimmer and lighter than the A20, the T20 looked like it had everything I wanted, and had a considerably smaller form factor.
MY CONFIGURATION:
I bought the 2647-41U, which comes with Windows 98SE, a 700MHz Pentium III, 128Mb RAM, a nice bright 14" TFT screen, 12Gb HDD and gobs of ports: USB, serial, audio in and out, headphone jack, microphone jack, 2 PCMCIA Type II (1 Type III),RJ-11, RJ-45, S-Video, IR, a security lock attachment, and the new UltraBay and UltraPort connectors. I added another 128Mb of RAM, a CD-RW and an UltraBay battery. And of course, the glistening black titanium composite case is very cool. A mini-PCI card holder can hold a 56Kbps modem or a combination network/modem card.
I should note that the power management that comes with the T20 could qualify as an application in itself: not only does it tell you the anticipated battery time to charge or discharge, you can customize dozens of power usage setups. The details window even tells you the make and serial number, battery temperature and number of times each battery has been charged. And best of all, if you are like me and use the laptop on AC power most of the time, once the battery is charged, it is disconnected and the system runs on AC, without further aging of the battery. After two months using the T20, every day for at least 14 hours a day, the primary battery has only been through 13 cycles, and the second battery is on its 2nd cycle. My old laptop used up its $180 battery completely in two years by being constantly charged.
WHO IS THE T20 FOR:
Anyone who wants a fast, light laptop that can connect to anything and is not concerned about cost.
ACCESSORIES:
Everything has worked well, but you do want to be sure and download the latest drivers from IBM.com (which easily lets you set up a machine-specific page). I did have problems with the DVD initially, which would freeze up after a few minutes, but an updated display driver corrected that problem. I also had some spontaneous reboots, but resolved that problem but unloading the HackTracer program I was running. There also seems to be a problem with the hot swap function of the UltraBay, but I anticipate that problem will be corrected too. I haven't used the UltraPort yet.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
pkdunn
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Member: Peter Dunn
Location: Denver, Colorado, USA
Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Pro-am gadget connoiseur, bought my first PC in 1982.
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