Thinkpads Forum

Hello everyone. I'm brand new to Lenovo / ThinkPads but almost everything I've read has been positive and I've made a decision to purchase one -- most likely the t510. I know you get these types of posts quite frequently but I'd appreciate you taking some time to respond. Below are the general specs I'm looking at, along with a few questions. I work in the investment industry and am a part-time MBA student, so the laptop will be used for professional and personal purposes. I travel on occasion but not frequently. I'm not concerned with the size so no need to provide comments on that. I'm not a gamer but am interested in the HD+ or FHD screens to increase the resolution when working on huge, multi-page Excel spreadsheets and watching video (streaming or watching DVDs on planes / in hotels, etc). I want to keep the final cost below $2,000 which I don't think will be an issue -- especially since I plan to wait until Lenovo's next promo to offset some of the cost. Here's what I'm looking at:

ThinkPad t510
Intel Core i5-540m processor (I've read that the bump in speed with the i7 isn't worth the extra $150 -- thoughts?)
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 (any reason NOT to go with the 64?)
FHD Monitor (I'm torn between HD+ and FHD; but why not just go with the FHD?)
NVIDIA NVS 3100m Graphics (only option I have)
4GB PC3-10600 SDRAM 1333 Mhz (What's the main difference between the 4GB 8500 and 10600? Worth the extra $130? Any need at all for 8 GB?)
UltraNav w/ Fingerprint Reader
Camera
500 GB Hard Drive
9 Cell Battery (I can deal with the extra bulk; nothing more annoying than losing power halfway through a long flight)
Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 wireless card (worth the extra $20 over the 6200?)
Integrated Mobile Broadband (Gobi 2000 3G) (This is the one thing I know the least about -- I want mobile broadband option but do I need this over the standard option? (which is just "Integrated Mobile Broadband -- upgradable")

I'm pretty sure for my purposes this will be more than sufficient -- but maybe it's overkill in some regards? Appreciate your thoughts. If there are any other models that could serve my purposes as well, I'd appreciate those comments.

To answer a few of your questions:

If the i7 is still a dual core, there's not much of a difference between it and the i5. I think you can only get the i7 quad-core with the W510, but I haven't really delved into the newer ThinkPad models all that much. So if it's only a dual-core i7 the general consensus is that it's not worth the price.

Go for a 64-bit OS. Your hardware supports it, and unless you have a critical application you absolutely need to use that won't work on a x64 OS, there is really no need to stick with a 32-bit OS. Also, you on't see a full 4GB of RAM due to the 32-bit addressing limitations.

There's no reason to go less than FHD(1920x1080, right? I get those 'HD' designations mixed up all the time) unless you're extremely sensitive to small text(and even then you can scale the fonts to compensate) or like to game at native resolution. I can see the T510's GPU not really pushing the latest and greatest games all that well at that resolution, but if you're not really gaming you should be just fine. Since you work in the financial field you will probably appreciate the greater screen real estate, especially if you work with spreadsheets.

As far as the RAM goes, I think you will see a small performance boost with the PC10600 RAM, if the computer's chipset supports it(I think it does, but I'm not sure). If you're going to be running very memory-intensive applications such as multiple virtual machines, possibly some very large Photoshop work, and etc... 4GB should be fine for now.

I'm unsure about the wireless card, unfortunately. It may give you a little faster throughput or signal strength. I personally wouldn't bother with it, but maybe someone here with a better understanding of the latest wifi cards could be a better help on this.

The 'upgradable' option is just that... there's no WWAN card installed, but you can add one later... the T510 will have all the requisite antennas. The Gobi card installed just means you have a WWAN card in the system. I'm unsure which carrier that one works with, or if that card isn't tied to a specific carrier.

All in all, if this is your first ThinkPad you won't be disappointed. I've owned many over the years and am even using my old T21 to type this post... a nearly decade-old machine(I'm getting warranty repairs done on my others, just a couple of small issues I want fixed). All of these systems I've owned have been robust, reliable, and overall dreams to use.