I bought a Lenovo T420s to replace my now deceased IBM T41p, and I’ve used it enough to write a somewhat rambling field report.
First, the short version.
Pros: Keyboard, size, weight, overall feature set, keyboard, speed, keyboard, styling, keyboard.
(You can probably tell that I like the keyboard.)
Cons: Screen (imagine the worst LCD panel you’ve ever used, and it’s worse than that), lack of Blu-ray option, hard drive physical size limitation, poor system integration by Lenovo.
The IBM T-4x series for a few years was plagued by a manufacturing flaw. When the chassis was flexed *just right* (usually by holding the laptop by one of the front corners with the lid open), the motherboard would flex enough to fracture the video chip solder points. There is no reliable way to fix this, and it instantly destroys the motherboard. Sometimes if you insert a shim to press down on the top of the video chip, you can use the laptop long enough to transfer data and settings, but it’s pretty much dead until the motherboard is replaced. My T41p lasted 7 years but by chance the defect manifested itself while I was on a business trip. I stuffed some shims under the keyboard and was able to get the computer to work intermittently, but even adjusting the tilt angle of the LCD panel could cause the computer to freeze or enter an endless reboot cycle.
So I started searching for a new computer to replace the T41p. Not just a new computer, but a true replacement. That meant a few specifications were absolutely required. First, it needed to be lightweight and thin with a weight under 5lbs and a screen size in the 13-14” class. Second, it needed to have a fast cpu. Third, it needed an internal optical drive. Fourth, it had to have reasonably up to date internals and external ports including USB 3.0, digital video out, good wireless networking, etc. After searching through many alternatives, it came down to the Toshiba portege R800 series or the Lenovo thinkpad T420s. The macbook pro was considered but not chosen for a few reasons, mostly weight, some modern tech that is simply omitted (such as usb 3), and the inability for me to field service the computer. The T420s was finally chosen over the portege due to the thinkpad’s field serviceability, chassis durability, and available cpu speed since the portege was soft-launched with only the i5 cpu available. The portege keyboards are also notoriously poor. Sony equivalents were not considered because they cost a lot more and I still haven’t forgiven them for installing the rootkit on my computer several years ago during the Sony audio CD rootkit fiasco.
For options, I picked the core i7 cpu, the intel 3x3 wireless lan card, and the nvidia optimus graphics option, but otherwise kept the computer fairly standard. The T-series thinkpads were also soft-launched, probably due to a combination of supply issues and internal system integration deficiencies within Lenovo (more about that later). In any case, my system was configured with a dual core i7 cpu, 2GB ram, a DVD burner, wifi, and a 7200rpm 320GB hard drive. Because I work from home after hours (glutton for punishment) I also added an internal smart card reader and got the factory SD memory card reader that fits into the external expresscard expansion slot.
Now is a good time to talk about storage. The T420s has a severe hard drive size limitation. Standard 9mm height laptop hard drives will not fit. Only 7mm high laptop drives will fit, and currently that means the max HD size is 320GB due to the maximum platter density in the current designs. Not only that, there are no 2.5” SSDs on the retail market that will fit without modification. Some SSDs have a spacer that can be removed and then they will fit, but that will probably void the warranty. The T420s also has an mSATA socket, which is the same physical socket as a mini-pci-e socket but wired up for either micro SATA drives or WWAN cards. Here is where the first system integration failure pops up – Lenovo advertises the option to populate that socket with an SSD, but they only offer that as an option for certain laptops. As of 2 months after purchase, this option was not available either due to incomplete system integration or, more likely, supply problems. In any case, one serious shortcoming of the T420s is very limited internal storage options with one highly attractive advertised option not even available for sale yet. The SSDs that are being sold by Lenovo have been identified by owners as fairly old designs, priced above the current generation of retail SSDs while giving measurably less performance. Better to buy the cheaper conventional drive and upgrade later.
To make the computer more useable with 64bit windows 7 pro, I purchased a 4GB stick of DDR3 ram. I installed this after I ran the stock computer for a while to ensure it was functioning properly from the factory. The computer is much more responsive with 6GB ram, vs. 2GB. My recommendation is to use high quality third-party ram as it costs less than half the price Lenovo will charge for the same upgrade. At the time of the purchase, Lenovo was charging $80 to go from a single 2GB stick to a single 4GB stick, but a high quality 8GB kit (2x4GB sticks) should cost under $60 from retailers such as newegg.com. I think 4GB ram is now standard, but you’ll still have to remove one or both memory sticks to increase to 6 or 8GB so just go with the cheapest memory option and do self-installed memory upgrades when necessary.
When the computer first arrived, it took some time to set up properly. I was limited to a 256k network connection while away from home, so just updating windows took 3 days. While setting up the system and transferring data from my T41p (in between T41p system crashes), I noticed a few things. First, the keyboard is wonderful. It is an evolved version of the classic T-series keyboard, with great feedback and plenty of throw. It also has the usual water-resistant design. The keypress throw is slightly less than my T41p, and I also have one sticky key which I’ll probably have to get fixed under warranty. But the keyboard design is simply incredible. I also noticed that bootup times were pretty slow, even with almost none of the thinkpad utilities installed and running. Boot time from pushing the power switch to being able to open up a web browser window was well over 2 minutes. Installing the additional 4GB of ram and pruning unneeded utilities trimmed boot time to approx. 1.5 min, still slower than my T41p which also runs win7 pro on an ancient single core 2.0ghz “Dothan” Pentium-M booting from a 5400rpm drive. This was with Lenovo’s “rapidboot” driver installed, which optimizes bootup processes and delays loading of non-critical drivers. At this point I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied unless I did something fairly drastic to the computer, either a clean install (not possible with the Lenovo rescue media so I’d have to buy another win7 license), or figure out how to do an SSD upgrade.
I’ll get to the SSD upgrade after I complain about the screen and the other cons.
The screen. Where to start. I will say that the brightness is good, and if you sit exactly centered with the screen at the exact angle, colors in the exact center of the screen are good. And that’s it for complements on the screen. This is the worst panel I’ve ever seen on a mainstream consumer product, TN, MVA, PVA, or any other type. The screen colors are extremely sensitive to vertical screen angle, with very small (less than 10 deg) tilt angles sufficient to drastically change how colors and images are viewed. Even worse than that, this screen ghosts worse than any screen I’ve ever seen, even the very old MVA or PVA panels from several years ago. Whenever the mouse cursor is moved across a dark background, I can clearly see a white blur up to half an inch behind the cursor. If I wiggle the mouse cursor into a circle approx. 1 inch in diameter on a dark blue background, the mouse pointer will be lined up with the trailing edge of the ghosting blurred circle. This is hideously bad response time by any standard. You can find detailed reviews with more data on the exact screen characteristics on various review sites, but I’ll save you some time by summarizing all of them with one word – “awful”.
Lenovo has several official company blogs discussing design features of their screens, and at least one of the design bloggers has stated that he will refuse to answer any comments about the crummy screens on the T-series laptops. That’s how bad they are, with official company PR reps refusing to discuss the issue any longer. These laptops are intended for business use but I would be ashamed to actually bring one of these to a business event if there was ANY chance someone else might potentially look at my laptop screen. I don’t think it would even be possible to give an informal presentation to more than one other person using the laptop screen, because the screen is nearly unreadable with bad color distortion unless you’re sitting dead center with the lid angle just right. This is the second of Lenovo’s internal system integration failures, putting the worst screen I’ve ever seen onto what should be a premium “hey look at my awesome tech” business laptop. Ironically, the initial desperate pleas for Lenovo to stick with the older “business friendly” 16:10 aspect ratio instead of the new 16:9 “consumer” dimensions, have been overtaken by complaints about the poor screen quality regardless of what shape it is.
The third system integration failure is the optical drive options, or the lack thereof. Lenovo is aggressively marketing the wide “HD” screen, the “HD” 720p camera, and “HD” speakers with multiple microphones and software designed to enhance teleconferencing. Ok, it’s all HD, except for the optical drive which is DVD only. No BD option. WTF Lenovo? I asked and got back a snippy answer that Lenovo does not put BD drives in ANY of their business class computers. They delivered an HD capable computer that in spite of having an internal optical drive, has no way to accept native HD media input – FAIL.
The fourth system integration failure is partially inferred as a deficiency in basic product line management, by some interesting failures in the configuration and delivery of the product. One failure was the unavailability of key advertised features such as the mSATA SSD. Another failure was the fact that accessories such as carrying cases and sleeves were clearly designed for the previous year’s T410 series lineup, which used the taller/narrower 16:10 screen format instead of the new 16:9 format. Popular carry-case accessories like the Lenovo branded neoprene sleeve for the new T420s (and related T420 line) fit poorly because they didn’t bother to update the accessory line designs for the shape of the new laptop. Epic fail at the corporate level, with the launch of this entire line. How embarrassing is it when your $2000-$3000 premium laptop doesn’t even fit into the branded case you bought to put it in? Who shows up in the boardroom with an expensive suit that doesn’t fit? Lenovo has offered to refund purchases of the cases that don’t fit right, but shipping back the sleeve I bought would cost almost as much as the sleeve itself is worth, so I’m going to keep it and just not use it if I’m going to a place where a professional image is important.
Back to the hard drive dilemma. Being dissatisfied with bootup times and overall system performance, I searched online to figure out what kind of SSD would fit. Lenovo X-series owners have a similar problem finding 7mm height drives to fit into their laptops. These X-series owners suggest a couple of consumer 2.5” SSDs that have case spacers that can be removed, slimming the drive height by the required 2mm. The problem is that if I went that route, I’d be even more storage space limited than before after spending up to $600 on a drive with a voided warranty. Populating the mSATA slot became a much more attractive option. Unfortunately, there is only one realistic mSATA option right now. Intel sells 40GB and 80GB “Intel 310 series” mSATA SSDs, the same ones that should have been offered for sale by Lenovo in the first place. The 40GB versions are plentiful and easily found in stock, because even if you do a custom win7 installation and keep all data on a second conventional hard drive, it takes some effort to make win7 fit onto a 40GB SSD. Nobody is buying those drives. The 80GB SSD is still on the small size and somewhat expensive at $199, but managing a split installation with 80GB to start with is a much easier task. Unfortunately, the supply problem is just as big of a problem in retail stores as it was with Lenovo. The 80GB Intel 310 SSDs sold by most online retailers were arriving only a few at a time, every 2 weeks. At newegg.com, they would get a few in stock and sell out before their automated notification system even had time to email people that they were back in stock. After missing 2 shipments, I finally camped out at newegg.com 3 hours before the expected in-stock date, and watched movies all morning while hitting refresh every few minutes. When they listed in stock mid-morning, I managed to order one a few minutes before they were out of stock again.
Migrating the installation that I had already spent a month customizing on the 320GB HD to the 80GB SSD was not trivial and involved multiple steps. First, I reduced the size of the original personalized installation to approximately 60GB by copying off all data files. This left room for the approx. 10GB system recovery partition that would also need to be created (and later merged back into the system partition). I used Lenovo’s rescue and recovery software to make a DVD set of the factory image, and then I made a backup image of my shrunken customized installation onto an external hard drive. I then removed the internal 320GB hard drive and installed the 80GB SSD, and used the factory restore DVD set to partition the SSD and install a basic setup, which barely fit onto the SSD. This step was required to ensure that the filesystem offset was set to the proper 4k alignment required for SSD performance. A simple image copy to an SSD may not result in the correct alignment, resulting in poor performance and high wear levels on the SSD. After the basic installation was done, I used Lenovo system rescue/recovery to recover the saved customized image onto the SSD. After that, I re-installed the original 320GB drive and formatted it to clean it out for use as a data drive, and then went one by one through most of the data storage folders in a standard win7 installation and re-located them from the SSD to the 320GB data drive. Fortunately Microsoft has made relocating the typical data folders in win7 fairly painless.
It only took me 4 tries to get the sequence right… Doing it in any other order resulted in failed restores of the backed up installation or running out of space even when the restored partition should have had about 5-10GB of available space after the restore. Complicating the installation customization, I discovered that Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 (AKA version 14) has a bug where relocating the data file results in an unusable configuration even after telling outlook where to look for the data file. The “deliver mail to...” setting does not change the delivery location properly, so you have to change the delivery location to a bogus file and folder, and then change it a second time back to the actual outlook data file you want to use. It only took 6 hours of google and Microsoft knowledge base searching to figure that one out and MS still doesn’t have an official numbered solution for this bug, even though it’s been known and discussed in the MS office support forums for at least several months.
After doing all that, my primary system drive is the 80GB SSD with 25GB free space on it so I can keep installing programs to the SSD, and my data drive has about 150GB of various types of info stored on it and accessed through the usual user “my documents” folder scheme. After getting it right and turning off most pre-fetch loading, I re-installed Lenovo’s rapidboot driver to further optimize boot times. Then I timed bootup… 20 seconds from power switch to login screen, and another 10 seconds until the desktop sidebar is fully populated and I can get a browser screen open. 30 seconds from pushing the power button to a fully booted and usable system is not too shabby for an installation that is not really stripped down to improve bootup speed. Putting the computer to sleep takes under 3 seconds and waking back up is effectively instantaneous.
Still, while the intel 310 series mSATA drives are great for this application, those drives are clearly last-generation devices. They have the same quick access times as even the newest SSDs which makes pre-fetching of applications generally unnecessary, but the sustained throughput and ability to handle multiple requests is in some cases barely 10% of the performance of the current generation of equally priced consumer 2.5” SSDs. For most users it won’t be noticeable but anyone working with large datasets or multi-tasking with background file crunching (like video transcoding in the background while editing other images or videos) will notice that the intel 310 SSD just isn’t as fast as the newer drives. But for now it’s the only one that fits, so it’s the one I have.
As for the rest of the story, there isn’t very much left to talk about. The physical build quality is very good, with the exception of the previously mentioned crummy LCD panel and one key that sticks a little bit sometimes. A minor problem I have noticed is that the wired network port is tighter than normal, so the network cable doesn’t “click” into place like it should. The computer is noticeably lighter than the T41p, and the materials used in the shell still feel quite durable. USB 3.0 transfers are really nice, making external USB backups and data dump a realistic option without buying hyper-expensive external storage (looking at Apple here). You can actually USE data stored on a USB 3.0 drive without really noticing much slowdown compared to an internal drive. I bought a fast 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black drive and put it into a Vantec NexStarCX USB 3.0 enclosure, and it’s like having another 750GB of internal storage as far as speed is concerned. The lack of BD optical drive remains infuriating. Requiring an external device to be hauled around with such an otherwise beautifully integrated laptop is stupid. Everything on this laptop screams “I can do EVERYTHING!”, including the HD+ resolution screen and HD theater quality sound solution. But good luck getting any HD content actually onto the laptop, per official Lenovo corporate policy to not sell BD drives in any of their business machines. Stupidly narrow-minded groupthink at work there.
I should mention battery life, since many web reviews have slammed the T410s and T420s battery life. Yes, the battery is small. They integrated it under the palmrest instead of under the LCD hingeline, which means you can’t even buy an extended capacity battery that sticks out the back a little bit. The only option for more battery life is a second battery that would replace the optical drive, which sort of defeats the purpose of buying the T420s instead of a macbook air (or any other slim/light laptop for that matter). In the end, this means that real-world light-use battery life is on the order of 3 hours or so for the i7 equipped T420s. That isn’t very good at all, and the second bay battery realistically adds only another 2-3 hours. Still, if battery life is the primary concern then this laptop probably doesn’t have the right feature set to begin with anyhow. There are plenty of other more attractive thin/light laptops with 8-10 hour batteries that would be “good enough”, such as the macbook air or the nifty looking Lenovo X1.
Would I buy this laptop again? Probably, because it is the closest I could find to the feature set I require for my travel computer. It is a very nice replacement for my T41p and looks/feels pretty much the same in daily use, just faster. The nvidia optimus video is probably unnecessary unless your application absolutely requires an nvidia GPU, since the Sandy Bridge i7 cpu has a reasonably capable GPU on-chip that is almost as fast as the nvidia option. Civilization V runs just fine on either GPU, and the GPU on all sandy bridge cpus are good enough for most uses including casual gaming. I am deeply disappointed however at the poor LCD quality and unwavering refusal by Lenovo to consider offering a Blu-ray/BD drive. Regardless of the cost, I would have spent whatever was necessary to buy an upgraded LCD panel, if it was offered. The lack of an optional IPS panel would have been mitigated somewhat if the installed TN panel wasn’t so horrible, but it is absolutely terrible and I’ll be seeing those awful mouse pointer ghost trails for the life of this laptop.
And that is actually the bottom line… This is a premium quality laptop, and it will probably last 7 years or more just like my T41p. That’s a long time to look at the worst display I’ve ever seen, and it makes it hard to recommend this otherwise incredibly well built laptop.
First, the short version.
Pros: Keyboard, size, weight, overall feature set, keyboard, speed, keyboard, styling, keyboard.
(You can probably tell that I like the keyboard.)
Cons: Screen (imagine the worst LCD panel you’ve ever used, and it’s worse than that), lack of Blu-ray option, hard drive physical size limitation, poor system integration by Lenovo.
The IBM T-4x series for a few years was plagued by a manufacturing flaw. When the chassis was flexed *just right* (usually by holding the laptop by one of the front corners with the lid open), the motherboard would flex enough to fracture the video chip solder points. There is no reliable way to fix this, and it instantly destroys the motherboard. Sometimes if you insert a shim to press down on the top of the video chip, you can use the laptop long enough to transfer data and settings, but it’s pretty much dead until the motherboard is replaced. My T41p lasted 7 years but by chance the defect manifested itself while I was on a business trip. I stuffed some shims under the keyboard and was able to get the computer to work intermittently, but even adjusting the tilt angle of the LCD panel could cause the computer to freeze or enter an endless reboot cycle.
So I started searching for a new computer to replace the T41p. Not just a new computer, but a true replacement. That meant a few specifications were absolutely required. First, it needed to be lightweight and thin with a weight under 5lbs and a screen size in the 13-14” class. Second, it needed to have a fast cpu. Third, it needed an internal optical drive. Fourth, it had to have reasonably up to date internals and external ports including USB 3.0, digital video out, good wireless networking, etc. After searching through many alternatives, it came down to the Toshiba portege R800 series or the Lenovo thinkpad T420s. The macbook pro was considered but not chosen for a few reasons, mostly weight, some modern tech that is simply omitted (such as usb 3), and the inability for me to field service the computer. The T420s was finally chosen over the portege due to the thinkpad’s field serviceability, chassis durability, and available cpu speed since the portege was soft-launched with only the i5 cpu available. The portege keyboards are also notoriously poor. Sony equivalents were not considered because they cost a lot more and I still haven’t forgiven them for installing the rootkit on my computer several years ago during the Sony audio CD rootkit fiasco.
For options, I picked the core i7 cpu, the intel 3x3 wireless lan card, and the nvidia optimus graphics option, but otherwise kept the computer fairly standard. The T-series thinkpads were also soft-launched, probably due to a combination of supply issues and internal system integration deficiencies within Lenovo (more about that later). In any case, my system was configured with a dual core i7 cpu, 2GB ram, a DVD burner, wifi, and a 7200rpm 320GB hard drive. Because I work from home after hours (glutton for punishment) I also added an internal smart card reader and got the factory SD memory card reader that fits into the external expresscard expansion slot.
Now is a good time to talk about storage. The T420s has a severe hard drive size limitation. Standard 9mm height laptop hard drives will not fit. Only 7mm high laptop drives will fit, and currently that means the max HD size is 320GB due to the maximum platter density in the current designs. Not only that, there are no 2.5” SSDs on the retail market that will fit without modification. Some SSDs have a spacer that can be removed and then they will fit, but that will probably void the warranty. The T420s also has an mSATA socket, which is the same physical socket as a mini-pci-e socket but wired up for either micro SATA drives or WWAN cards. Here is where the first system integration failure pops up – Lenovo advertises the option to populate that socket with an SSD, but they only offer that as an option for certain laptops. As of 2 months after purchase, this option was not available either due to incomplete system integration or, more likely, supply problems. In any case, one serious shortcoming of the T420s is very limited internal storage options with one highly attractive advertised option not even available for sale yet. The SSDs that are being sold by Lenovo have been identified by owners as fairly old designs, priced above the current generation of retail SSDs while giving measurably less performance. Better to buy the cheaper conventional drive and upgrade later.
To make the computer more useable with 64bit windows 7 pro, I purchased a 4GB stick of DDR3 ram. I installed this after I ran the stock computer for a while to ensure it was functioning properly from the factory. The computer is much more responsive with 6GB ram, vs. 2GB. My recommendation is to use high quality third-party ram as it costs less than half the price Lenovo will charge for the same upgrade. At the time of the purchase, Lenovo was charging $80 to go from a single 2GB stick to a single 4GB stick, but a high quality 8GB kit (2x4GB sticks) should cost under $60 from retailers such as newegg.com. I think 4GB ram is now standard, but you’ll still have to remove one or both memory sticks to increase to 6 or 8GB so just go with the cheapest memory option and do self-installed memory upgrades when necessary.
When the computer first arrived, it took some time to set up properly. I was limited to a 256k network connection while away from home, so just updating windows took 3 days. While setting up the system and transferring data from my T41p (in between T41p system crashes), I noticed a few things. First, the keyboard is wonderful. It is an evolved version of the classic T-series keyboard, with great feedback and plenty of throw. It also has the usual water-resistant design. The keypress throw is slightly less than my T41p, and I also have one sticky key which I’ll probably have to get fixed under warranty. But the keyboard design is simply incredible. I also noticed that bootup times were pretty slow, even with almost none of the thinkpad utilities installed and running. Boot time from pushing the power switch to being able to open up a web browser window was well over 2 minutes. Installing the additional 4GB of ram and pruning unneeded utilities trimmed boot time to approx. 1.5 min, still slower than my T41p which also runs win7 pro on an ancient single core 2.0ghz “Dothan” Pentium-M booting from a 5400rpm drive. This was with Lenovo’s “rapidboot” driver installed, which optimizes bootup processes and delays loading of non-critical drivers. At this point I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied unless I did something fairly drastic to the computer, either a clean install (not possible with the Lenovo rescue media so I’d have to buy another win7 license), or figure out how to do an SSD upgrade.
I’ll get to the SSD upgrade after I complain about the screen and the other cons.
The screen. Where to start. I will say that the brightness is good, and if you sit exactly centered with the screen at the exact angle, colors in the exact center of the screen are good. And that’s it for complements on the screen. This is the worst panel I’ve ever seen on a mainstream consumer product, TN, MVA, PVA, or any other type. The screen colors are extremely sensitive to vertical screen angle, with very small (less than 10 deg) tilt angles sufficient to drastically change how colors and images are viewed. Even worse than that, this screen ghosts worse than any screen I’ve ever seen, even the very old MVA or PVA panels from several years ago. Whenever the mouse cursor is moved across a dark background, I can clearly see a white blur up to half an inch behind the cursor. If I wiggle the mouse cursor into a circle approx. 1 inch in diameter on a dark blue background, the mouse pointer will be lined up with the trailing edge of the ghosting blurred circle. This is hideously bad response time by any standard. You can find detailed reviews with more data on the exact screen characteristics on various review sites, but I’ll save you some time by summarizing all of them with one word – “awful”.
Lenovo has several official company blogs discussing design features of their screens, and at least one of the design bloggers has stated that he will refuse to answer any comments about the crummy screens on the T-series laptops. That’s how bad they are, with official company PR reps refusing to discuss the issue any longer. These laptops are intended for business use but I would be ashamed to actually bring one of these to a business event if there was ANY chance someone else might potentially look at my laptop screen. I don’t think it would even be possible to give an informal presentation to more than one other person using the laptop screen, because the screen is nearly unreadable with bad color distortion unless you’re sitting dead center with the lid angle just right. This is the second of Lenovo’s internal system integration failures, putting the worst screen I’ve ever seen onto what should be a premium “hey look at my awesome tech” business laptop. Ironically, the initial desperate pleas for Lenovo to stick with the older “business friendly” 16:10 aspect ratio instead of the new 16:9 “consumer” dimensions, have been overtaken by complaints about the poor screen quality regardless of what shape it is.
The third system integration failure is the optical drive options, or the lack thereof. Lenovo is aggressively marketing the wide “HD” screen, the “HD” 720p camera, and “HD” speakers with multiple microphones and software designed to enhance teleconferencing. Ok, it’s all HD, except for the optical drive which is DVD only. No BD option. WTF Lenovo? I asked and got back a snippy answer that Lenovo does not put BD drives in ANY of their business class computers. They delivered an HD capable computer that in spite of having an internal optical drive, has no way to accept native HD media input – FAIL.
The fourth system integration failure is partially inferred as a deficiency in basic product line management, by some interesting failures in the configuration and delivery of the product. One failure was the unavailability of key advertised features such as the mSATA SSD. Another failure was the fact that accessories such as carrying cases and sleeves were clearly designed for the previous year’s T410 series lineup, which used the taller/narrower 16:10 screen format instead of the new 16:9 format. Popular carry-case accessories like the Lenovo branded neoprene sleeve for the new T420s (and related T420 line) fit poorly because they didn’t bother to update the accessory line designs for the shape of the new laptop. Epic fail at the corporate level, with the launch of this entire line. How embarrassing is it when your $2000-$3000 premium laptop doesn’t even fit into the branded case you bought to put it in? Who shows up in the boardroom with an expensive suit that doesn’t fit? Lenovo has offered to refund purchases of the cases that don’t fit right, but shipping back the sleeve I bought would cost almost as much as the sleeve itself is worth, so I’m going to keep it and just not use it if I’m going to a place where a professional image is important.
Back to the hard drive dilemma. Being dissatisfied with bootup times and overall system performance, I searched online to figure out what kind of SSD would fit. Lenovo X-series owners have a similar problem finding 7mm height drives to fit into their laptops. These X-series owners suggest a couple of consumer 2.5” SSDs that have case spacers that can be removed, slimming the drive height by the required 2mm. The problem is that if I went that route, I’d be even more storage space limited than before after spending up to $600 on a drive with a voided warranty. Populating the mSATA slot became a much more attractive option. Unfortunately, there is only one realistic mSATA option right now. Intel sells 40GB and 80GB “Intel 310 series” mSATA SSDs, the same ones that should have been offered for sale by Lenovo in the first place. The 40GB versions are plentiful and easily found in stock, because even if you do a custom win7 installation and keep all data on a second conventional hard drive, it takes some effort to make win7 fit onto a 40GB SSD. Nobody is buying those drives. The 80GB SSD is still on the small size and somewhat expensive at $199, but managing a split installation with 80GB to start with is a much easier task. Unfortunately, the supply problem is just as big of a problem in retail stores as it was with Lenovo. The 80GB Intel 310 SSDs sold by most online retailers were arriving only a few at a time, every 2 weeks. At newegg.com, they would get a few in stock and sell out before their automated notification system even had time to email people that they were back in stock. After missing 2 shipments, I finally camped out at newegg.com 3 hours before the expected in-stock date, and watched movies all morning while hitting refresh every few minutes. When they listed in stock mid-morning, I managed to order one a few minutes before they were out of stock again.
Migrating the installation that I had already spent a month customizing on the 320GB HD to the 80GB SSD was not trivial and involved multiple steps. First, I reduced the size of the original personalized installation to approximately 60GB by copying off all data files. This left room for the approx. 10GB system recovery partition that would also need to be created (and later merged back into the system partition). I used Lenovo’s rescue and recovery software to make a DVD set of the factory image, and then I made a backup image of my shrunken customized installation onto an external hard drive. I then removed the internal 320GB hard drive and installed the 80GB SSD, and used the factory restore DVD set to partition the SSD and install a basic setup, which barely fit onto the SSD. This step was required to ensure that the filesystem offset was set to the proper 4k alignment required for SSD performance. A simple image copy to an SSD may not result in the correct alignment, resulting in poor performance and high wear levels on the SSD. After the basic installation was done, I used Lenovo system rescue/recovery to recover the saved customized image onto the SSD. After that, I re-installed the original 320GB drive and formatted it to clean it out for use as a data drive, and then went one by one through most of the data storage folders in a standard win7 installation and re-located them from the SSD to the 320GB data drive. Fortunately Microsoft has made relocating the typical data folders in win7 fairly painless.
It only took me 4 tries to get the sequence right… Doing it in any other order resulted in failed restores of the backed up installation or running out of space even when the restored partition should have had about 5-10GB of available space after the restore. Complicating the installation customization, I discovered that Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 (AKA version 14) has a bug where relocating the data file results in an unusable configuration even after telling outlook where to look for the data file. The “deliver mail to...” setting does not change the delivery location properly, so you have to change the delivery location to a bogus file and folder, and then change it a second time back to the actual outlook data file you want to use. It only took 6 hours of google and Microsoft knowledge base searching to figure that one out and MS still doesn’t have an official numbered solution for this bug, even though it’s been known and discussed in the MS office support forums for at least several months.
After doing all that, my primary system drive is the 80GB SSD with 25GB free space on it so I can keep installing programs to the SSD, and my data drive has about 150GB of various types of info stored on it and accessed through the usual user “my documents” folder scheme. After getting it right and turning off most pre-fetch loading, I re-installed Lenovo’s rapidboot driver to further optimize boot times. Then I timed bootup… 20 seconds from power switch to login screen, and another 10 seconds until the desktop sidebar is fully populated and I can get a browser screen open. 30 seconds from pushing the power button to a fully booted and usable system is not too shabby for an installation that is not really stripped down to improve bootup speed. Putting the computer to sleep takes under 3 seconds and waking back up is effectively instantaneous.
Still, while the intel 310 series mSATA drives are great for this application, those drives are clearly last-generation devices. They have the same quick access times as even the newest SSDs which makes pre-fetching of applications generally unnecessary, but the sustained throughput and ability to handle multiple requests is in some cases barely 10% of the performance of the current generation of equally priced consumer 2.5” SSDs. For most users it won’t be noticeable but anyone working with large datasets or multi-tasking with background file crunching (like video transcoding in the background while editing other images or videos) will notice that the intel 310 SSD just isn’t as fast as the newer drives. But for now it’s the only one that fits, so it’s the one I have.
As for the rest of the story, there isn’t very much left to talk about. The physical build quality is very good, with the exception of the previously mentioned crummy LCD panel and one key that sticks a little bit sometimes. A minor problem I have noticed is that the wired network port is tighter than normal, so the network cable doesn’t “click” into place like it should. The computer is noticeably lighter than the T41p, and the materials used in the shell still feel quite durable. USB 3.0 transfers are really nice, making external USB backups and data dump a realistic option without buying hyper-expensive external storage (looking at Apple here). You can actually USE data stored on a USB 3.0 drive without really noticing much slowdown compared to an internal drive. I bought a fast 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black drive and put it into a Vantec NexStarCX USB 3.0 enclosure, and it’s like having another 750GB of internal storage as far as speed is concerned. The lack of BD optical drive remains infuriating. Requiring an external device to be hauled around with such an otherwise beautifully integrated laptop is stupid. Everything on this laptop screams “I can do EVERYTHING!”, including the HD+ resolution screen and HD theater quality sound solution. But good luck getting any HD content actually onto the laptop, per official Lenovo corporate policy to not sell BD drives in any of their business machines. Stupidly narrow-minded groupthink at work there.
I should mention battery life, since many web reviews have slammed the T410s and T420s battery life. Yes, the battery is small. They integrated it under the palmrest instead of under the LCD hingeline, which means you can’t even buy an extended capacity battery that sticks out the back a little bit. The only option for more battery life is a second battery that would replace the optical drive, which sort of defeats the purpose of buying the T420s instead of a macbook air (or any other slim/light laptop for that matter). In the end, this means that real-world light-use battery life is on the order of 3 hours or so for the i7 equipped T420s. That isn’t very good at all, and the second bay battery realistically adds only another 2-3 hours. Still, if battery life is the primary concern then this laptop probably doesn’t have the right feature set to begin with anyhow. There are plenty of other more attractive thin/light laptops with 8-10 hour batteries that would be “good enough”, such as the macbook air or the nifty looking Lenovo X1.
Would I buy this laptop again? Probably, because it is the closest I could find to the feature set I require for my travel computer. It is a very nice replacement for my T41p and looks/feels pretty much the same in daily use, just faster. The nvidia optimus video is probably unnecessary unless your application absolutely requires an nvidia GPU, since the Sandy Bridge i7 cpu has a reasonably capable GPU on-chip that is almost as fast as the nvidia option. Civilization V runs just fine on either GPU, and the GPU on all sandy bridge cpus are good enough for most uses including casual gaming. I am deeply disappointed however at the poor LCD quality and unwavering refusal by Lenovo to consider offering a Blu-ray/BD drive. Regardless of the cost, I would have spent whatever was necessary to buy an upgraded LCD panel, if it was offered. The lack of an optional IPS panel would have been mitigated somewhat if the installed TN panel wasn’t so horrible, but it is absolutely terrible and I’ll be seeing those awful mouse pointer ghost trails for the life of this laptop.
And that is actually the bottom line… This is a premium quality laptop, and it will probably last 7 years or more just like my T41p. That’s a long time to look at the worst display I’ve ever seen, and it makes it hard to recommend this otherwise incredibly well built laptop.
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