Virtues of the unsexy big laptop

[FragrantHead]

A good deal on a Thinkpad T520 at the Lenovo outlet is allowing me to try that model. This heavy-ish laptop wasn't my first choice on paper, but in the flesh I'm finding it's got it's virtues. One is the screen. I previously had an X220 for evaluation and, being used to the 14.1" 4:3 screen of my old T30, I found myself quite hunched over with the X220 on my lap. Not so with the T520. The screen still isn't as tall as a 14.1" 4:3, but it's close enough that wide-screen is actually beginning to make sense to me. I'm not loosing much height and the screen fills my field of view. The secret to wide-screen: Get a big one.

The other thing is the cooling. With an SSD, this Thinkpad idles completely silent. The fan stays off for long periods of time. When it does come on, unless under heavy load, the sound you hear is still almost inaudible and without the identifiable pitch of the faster running fans in smaller or thinner laptops. Mine has the integrated graphics. The cooling solution is probably under-stressed compared to the Optimus models or the W-series, which I'm guessing share the same chassis. It's nice to reap the benefits in the standard model.

[wolfman]

Congrats, glad you are happy with your machine.

I've been all over the board in the past, a21m, R40 all the way down to an X61, then a T410 and now a T420. I've come to appreciate that the 15.x inch models are bigger than I care to have, the 12.x inch models are smaller than I care to have and the 14.1 inch models are just about right for me. Now if technology advances enough in Haswell or it's successor for Lenovo to offer a quad core processor with only integrated graphics in a 14.1 inch form factor, I'll buy. Good to hear your experience with the T520.

[FragrantHead]

Seeing as you have a T420, which I assume also has SATA III, the other nice surprise was the speed of the Samsung 830 SSDs I bought, one for the machine, one for the Ultrabay. I had stopped paying attention to SSD reviews when the Intel X25-M were the pick of the bunch. These new Samsung drives are something else and they seem to be on sale, pending replacement by the 840 series. Truecrypt rated the 256GB model at 380MB/s during encryption. Even with Truecrypt, the transfer speed from one disk to the other is almost 1GB every 3 seconds when copying big virtual machine files. Being able to back up 30GB of virtual machine in under 2 minutes and being able to search gigabytes of email history in a few seconds will make a real difference to my working habits.

Actually, now I see you have an Intel 520, so you're already in the same place.

[wolfman]

Yes, the SSD's make a huge difference. I have a number of VM's on my 750gb in the ultrabay. I've been considering buying a 256gb mSATA SSD and moving my important VM's there and using the 750gb as the backup. I run the OS, etc from the 120gb Intel 520 SSD. I only use linux, so I'm swimming in disk for that OS, but not enough to move the important VM's over.

I'd say the SSD performance difference is worth more than a processor upgrade.

[Cigarguy]

Yep, just love these older Thinkpads. Sexy is nice eye candy but, when it come to computers, I'd rather have functionality than sexy. Sexy is also fleeting, doesn't age well and is high maintenance.

Just recently got a T420 myself to add to my T400 and T61 collection. A 240 GB SSD was the first thing I did to it. Once you're used to the speed of a SSD it sure is hard to go back.