Last year, millions of consumers flocked to netbooks, the stripped-down machines viewed as low-priced alternatives to laptop computers. If you were one of the netbook converts, a few minutes with the Lenovo ThinkPad T410 laptop might make you backslide.
Like many of Lenovo’s business-focused ThinkPad laptops, the T410 is nothing special to look at. Don’t be fooled by the matte-black industrial shell that evokes the ThinkPad’s IBM lineage.
Under the hood, the $1,350 T410 is smoking fast. It uses Intel’s new Core i5 dual-core chips, which boast a clock speed of 2.53GHz and a chipset design that removes speed bottlenecks. The notebook took about half the time to download photos, music, and video as my six-month-old Sony laptop, which has a comparable chip clock speed.
To keep computing tasks humming along, Intel’s processors adjust clock speed up or down, depending on the task being handled. Lenovo also built in power-management software that it says boosts battery life 25 percent over previous generations, up to 10 hours. The timing assumes you’re using the laptop mainly for word processing; otherwise, expect about four hours of battery life.
Big Plus: Lenovo Access Utility
Lenovo’s T410 also rises to the challenge — largely posed by Macintosh maker Apple — of making computing easier. For one, it features the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system, a vast improvement over its widely derided predecessor, Windows Vista.
Then there’s a handy tool called the Lenovo Access connections utility, which scans for wireless access points and then shows a map that is zoned by relative signal strength. It also tells you if the connection is an open or a secure network and it lets you switch the computer between competing wireless choices, including Wi-Fi, WiMax, and 3G wireless broadband.
The connection tool will become all the more important later this year, when WiMax becomes more widely…