Random thoughts after 1 month - T42 3VU

[sugo]

First of all, many thanks to Bill Morrow for a smooth transaction. He answered all my emails within half a day turn around time. From mailing out payment to receiving thinkpad via ground shipping took 8 days. Tracking number was sent out promptly. With the cherry pick option (cost extra), I would buy from him again in the future without a second thought.

Build Quality

My last notebook was a Made in Japan panasonic. The T42 was Made in China. The T42 really can't compare with the perfection came with the panasonic. It shares a few issues reported by other 14.1" T42 owners:

- Left palm rest creaks.
- Left side of LCD cover can still move up and down a little when it's closed.
- Due to the space left unfilled by the dvd drive, the plastic bar above the drive has no support and can bend easily when the thinkpad is held one handed on the right side.
- Battery is loose.
- The (China) Keyboard makes a lot of noise on typing. Right lower part of the keyboard bends downward when the arrow keys are pressed.

IBM sent me a brand new Thailand keyboard. The Thailand one is definitely much more solid. Even I have never been too picky about keyboards I can tell the difference. Noise is cut by more than half. Right lower side flex remained. Putting a small piece of double side tape under the keyboard fixed the issue. The battery is acceptably firm when battery lock is engaged. I left the rest alone as they don't bother me too much.

It sounds silly but ... with the lid closed, I can sit there for minutes and admire how beautiful the thinkpad looks. I love thin laptops with simple look. The top and base are totally flat. The T42 is quite thin and practically without any protrusions. The black looks professional.


Hardware

The fast Dothan CPU, SXGA+ screen, Mobility Radeon 9600 and DVD burner capability were the reasons I went with T42. I haven't been disappointed so far.

It was a great joy to watc HDTV quality clips on the high resolution screen. Microsoft has quite a few on their site:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/window ... wcase.aspx

The 1920x1080 clip was pushing the 1.7GHz Dothan to the limit. Nonetheless it played the video smoothly without activating smoke detector. HDTV will only get more and more popular and it's nice to know the thinkpad can handle it.

The LCD is an IDTech. White is white. Color is a little on the cold side but still very good. At 150 nits it's not really that bright, but I found brightness at 5/7 work well for me in normal in door office lighting condition. The response time is fairly poor. It's about the same as my 5 year old desktop LCD (~50ms). I am lucky enough not to be a gamer.

3DMark2001 gives a score of 9400s here.

The dvd drive is a M a t s u s h i t a UJ-812. Nero works great for CD/DVD-Rs. If you need DVD-RAM capability and don't need packet writing on RW media I strongly recommend panasonic drivers over Sonic DLA. The panasonic driver takes only 1.7MB of RAM and is very stable. I can drag/drop to DVD-RAM discs in windows explorer and use it like a big floppy. Effective DVD-RAM writing speed is about 1.0 MB/s.

My 3VU does have bluetooth antenna.


Fan / Noise / Heat

I am very sensitive to noise. I went as far as buying a fanless laptop (the panasonic) after using a noisy desktop for years. I was quite worried about the thinkpad after reading all the posts on T40/T41 fan issue.

I use adaptive CPU power setting for AC power. The fan is on all the time running at low speed. There is only very low level sound of air flow. It's practically inaudible unless my ear is within 20cm from the vent.

When CPU is running at full speed. The fan runs at medium speed. It's louder but at least it's at a constant level thus not extremely annoying. Either way, there is no 5 seconds/30 seconds spin up spin down issue here.

When the Hitachi 5k80 is idle, it's actually louder than the fan running at low speed. Thanks to the autuator design, during read/write operations it makes much less noise than say, Toshiba MK3004GAH.

The headphone audio jack gives a fairly clean signal. At max volume playing a silent mp3 file, there is only a low level noise heard on a Sony D66 headphone. At normal volume, there is no audible background hiss/pop/noise during track start, track play, track switch and track end.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised at the overall quietness on my T42.

With room temperature at 27'C, adaptive CPU power scheme on AC power, CPU temperature averages at 44'C and HDD at 38'C. No heating issue here even after running CPU at full speed for 15 minutes.


Pointing device

After being a firm trackpad supporter for years (thanks to Toshiba trackpoint), I switched camp and became a total IBM trackpoint convert within days I got my thinkpad. With trackpoint sensitivity set to highest (max light touch), I can say I won't need a mouse on the road anymore. The trackpoint buttons are silent and easy to press.


Software

I did a fresh install of XP SP2. Wireless with XP Wireless Zero Config works well with Airport Express via WPA-PSK. Compared with the Atheros mini-pci (AR5002G) on my old laptop, the Intel 2200BG has better range and runs cooler. With driver 8.1.026, I never had a single BSOD related to wireless, even when using Cisco VPN.

I use DVD-RAM along with a software called SyncBack to backup my files. SyncBack allows me to specify which directories on hard drive should be backuped. I believe it uses timestamp and file size to determine which files need to be updated. It has very flexible settings on what it should do when source and target file differs/is missing. It's very easy to use yet powerful. I can keep directories on hard drive in sync with those on DVD-RAM discs in a matter of clicks. Best of all, it's completely free.

Here are a few other "my favourites" on my thinkpad:

- ffdshow for DivX/XviD decoding (free)
- MobileMeter for CPU/HDD temperature, CPU frequency and battery monitoring (free)
- Nod32 for antivirus
- Outpost Pro firewall


Battery life

With CPU running at 600MHz, screen brightness at 5/7, WiFi on, battery discharges at rate of around 12.0W (as reported by MobileMeter in real time). Mathematically, with a 47.52WH battery this translates to about 3 hours 57 minutes of usage. In one occasion, same condition as above except screen brightness at 1/7, battery dropped from 91% to 59% after 1 hour and 31 minutes of usage. The ATI Powerplay does make a difference of about 2W.


Photos

Finally, IBM has some nice high resolution photos on the T42 here:

http://www-5.ibm.com/se/news/archive/im ... 42/T42.jpg
http://www-5.ibm.com/se/news/archive/im ... /T42-2.jpg
http://www-5.ibm.com/se/news/archive/im ... 2/T42p.jpg

[dd]

Hi Sugo.

Nice review. I for one really enjoyed reading it!

Thanks

dd

[lilserenity]

Aha! Playing one of those 1920x1080 clips finally found me something my T23 1.13GHz can't do! Thats the very first thing I have thrown at it and it's not thrown back. (it's got 1gig of memory and a 60gig 5400rpm disk for what its worth).

The video plays very smooth and looks awesome on my SXGA+ panel; but the audio jumps.

Still something tells me I shan't be after a T4x or such like just yet since it plays the 1280x720 video fine, and frankly, with DVDs at 720x576 still looking awesome enough, I'm not gutted

Thats a nice synopsis of the T42 though and good to see high resolution pictures.

As it stands, I remain firm to the T23 and will do until it is unable to hack what I want it to do, and for now, it's more than fast enough.
--
I should add that the 720p file plays great when using Media Player Classic or PowerDVD, but oddly - (sarcasm = on) WMP 10 it jumps around. How strange indeed.... I wonder if MS makes that player laggy on purpose (and yes I have the settings tweaked) so as to get peeps to upgrade to a system which can handle even more eye candy in future MS wares? The3 1080p won't play well though, not surprised; as thats a huge resolution, that probably is just too much for my video chip (16meg S3 SuperSavage IXC/16). I won't say anymore as I don't wish to hijack this thread...

[sktn77a]

I'm most impressed by the quality of the pictures. How did you get those close-ups and that depth-of-field also? What camera and what settings did you use?

[Humpa]

lilserenity, yeah those 1080p's play perfectly in my T42

sktn77a, those pics are on IBM's site ... not sure who took them, but there is no EXIF data on them. I was wondering about them too - they could have a little better DOF, and they could also be sharper. They aren't bad, though.