Back in October 2011, I replaced the netbook I’d been using as my primary machine with a Lenovo T420. My problem with computers is that I tend to accumulate too many of them — one of my coworkers was laughing the day I had three laptops and a desktop going simultaneously on various projects.
I was using a netbook for meetings because of its portability and long battery life, a 17″ Gateway laptop for gaming, a Dell laptop for scanning and other secondary projects, and a desktop for video editing (I also have another Dell laptop given to me as part of a freelance project).
Too many f’ing laptops (I blame cloud-based syncing software). What I wanted was a single laptop that would be light enough and have the battery life to tote around everywhere in my backpack and yet be powerful enough to run games like World of Warcraft, Portal 2, etc. at decent frame rates.
I opted for the Lenovo T420, throwing in an i7-2640M Processor, 8gb of RAM (essential if you’re running Windows — 4gb just doesn’t cut it anymore), a 500gb 7200RPM hard drive (I’d have preferred an SSD if it weren’t for issues with doing whole disk encryption on them), a Nvidia Optimus 4200M graphics card, and a 9-cell battery.
With the 9-cell battery, the T420 weighs in at a little over 5 pounds. It is light enough that I have no problem sticking it in my backpack and taking me pretty much wherever I go. The 9-cell battery coupled with Lenovo’s software for managing power means I’ve had only 2-3 times in the past four months where the laptop actually ran out of power for me (on the other hand, I travel very infrequently — a real road warrior might find the battery life in my setup lacking). Obviously the battery life goes down considerably when I’m playing games and the Optimus 4200M kicks in. The battery does also stick out a bit from the body of the laptop, but much less pronounced than on other laptops I’ve used.
Overall the T420 hits the power vs. portability sweet spot for me. I can play games like World of Warcraft or Portal 2 a 1600 x 900 and get very high frame rates. Similarly, the T420 excels at all of the business and personal tasks I throw at it. Certainly I’ve used laptops that were much faster or much lighter, but the T420 is one of the few laptops I’ve owned that I felt I could do pretty much everything I wanted to do on it anywhere I wanted to do it.
One thing I’ve been especially impressed with is the T420’s cooling. I’ve never seen a laptop perform this well and yet stay so cool. If I set up a processor intensive job on my Dell, the damn thing heats up to the point where it would be unhealthy to continue to cradle on my lap. I really have to stress the T420 to notice much of any excessive heat.
The Lenovo keyboard is, of course, awesome. I type about 120wpm and the Lenovo is just a few steps below my Unicomp keyboard (though much quieter than the Unicomp’s switches, which makes my wife happier).
The only thing I wasn’t impressed by was some of Lenovo’s utilities, which I found to often conflict with existing Windows utilities. Also, I’ve seen a lot of longtime Thinkpad fans defend the LED light for the keyboard, but I’d definitely preferred a genuinely backlit keyboard like Dell has on some of their models (though not if it required changes in the keyboard itself).