Alright, I got the T40p in today. The seller shipped the unit the first available business day and I am very impressed with the overall quality of the transaction. I am typing this message right now on the T40p. Out of the box, it came with about an 18% battery charge. The unit was sealed new inside a IBM box. The FREE RAM upgrade advertised to up it to 1GB was not installed, it was placed in an envelope taped to the IBM box. The RAM included was Kingston PC2700 200 Pin DDR RAM 512MB. I installed that before anything and it took only seconds. There was only one available DIMM slot though so I'm guess this unit maxes out at 1.5GB RAM. When I first booted the system, it went through all kinds of crazy crap setting up the software for the first time. This whole process took about 1 hour to complete. After several reboots, I could finally use Windows and started installing my own stuff on it. The installes went well. The only problem I experienced was that Microsfts Office 2003 Pro CD Was too thick and rubbed the top of the CD drive cage so it could not spin up. I had to share a CD drive in my network and install it off of that. The wireless works well, and has much better range than my old notebook. It connects at 54MBps and has nearly 100% signal all through out my apartment. The keyboard is simply to die for. It is the most accurate comfortable thing I have ever typed on in my life. If eve kicks the crap outta my desktop keyboard which I paid a pretty penny for (Saitek Eclipse). The Screen is incredibly sharp and bright and even though it is not glossy the picture is incredible at 1400x1050 resolution. (The fonts are a bit small though so if you have bad eyesight then you may want to adjust some things. The video card is what has been brought into question. The only app I use that makes use of the video card extensively is Lightwave 3D. I loaded up the modeler program and made a ball object containing over 2000 polygons. No problem. Then I started duplicating it to see how far I could get. The Program started getting VERY slightly choppy around 50,000 polygons, and was somewhat choppy at 90,000 polygons (unlit/not textured) I stopped at just over 90,000 polygons, because in practice my models are not ussually this big, and it was still VERY workable. The choppiness did not affect my workflow at this point. I have no experience with AutoCAD but from my findings the OpenGL graphics performance is better than my old nVidia GeForce4 Ti4600 Card, but performs a little slower than my old 9800Pro. I'm still getting used to the trackpoint button mouse, but it's slowly coming back to me. The touchpad is responsive, and has a nice feel to it. The weight is very manageable, and is quite a bit lighter than my old Presario 2100 series notebook. The size is also nice, and it will fit into my backpack quite nicely. The only gripes I have so far with the unit are that the Hard Drive is bit noisy when seeking. Not horible, but if you are in a silent room its can be bothersome. and the right side of the palm rest gets a little warm. Not hot, just warm. Other than those two issues and the Microsoft CD issue I described This thing is pimpin.... hence T40p 🙂
