At first glance, a ThinkPad is a big rectangular hunk of black plastic. Nothing special on the outside and given the price premium a ThinkPad commands over notebook computers, an expensive hunk of black plastic. However, I think the design of the notebook holds up well when compared to a Sony Vaio or a MacBook.
When you first pick it up, it feels very solid with no flex in the body and is relatively light without the batter. Lenovo put a magnesium roll cage around the entire notebook for protection and more importantly should rduce the chances of the LCD screen being cracked or otherwise abused. The top of the notebook has a rubbery texture which I like.
The keyboard is your standard ThinkPad keyboard; full-size, stiff, with a great tactile response when typing (speaking of keyboards, Apple's new aluminum keyboard is fantastic!). This is one of the biggest reasons I bought a ThinkPad; most notebook keyboards are flimsy and otherwise terrible. The computer has drain holes at the base of the notebook and a reservoir in case you spill liquids on keyboard - this is a feature I do not want to test but it's nice to know that accidently spilling coffe on the keyboard can be easily handled. Another key feature for me was the pencil eraser in the middle of the keyboard, otherwise known as the TrackPoint, because you don't have to remove your hands from the keyboard when using the mouse to navigate. It also comes with a touchpad for those who prefer it.
The screen itself is 1680x1050 with good resolution and brightness. There is some slight light leakage from the top and bottom of the screen that I only notice when the screen is completely black. I got an NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M video card (256MB) that runs Vista's Aero GUI smoothly.
Battery life is respectable given a 9-cell battery; it runs a little over 2 hours on the Maximum Performance power setting. On the downside, the 9-cell battery is heavy and feels as if it weighs as much as the computer itself.
It's running 32-bit Vista Business and so far, the only problems I've had are a few random lockups. I've spent 5 days using it as my primary development machine and I'm pretty happy with it. I think that Vista is getting a bad rap because Microsoft has really done an excellent job making Windows easier to use (well, maybe turning off your computer could use some work) and the Aero user interface is clean and crisp. After working with Aero, the classic Windows interface seems dull and lifeless. Sure, you need to throw a lot of hardware at Vista to get it to run smoothly but today's high-end PC is tomorrow's standard entry-level PC. In the short term, Microsoft needs to add Physical Address Extensions (PAE) to allow 32-bit Vista to use more than 3GB of RAM.
ThinkPads come with ThinkVantage software to help manage the computer and for me it was another key feature in choosing a ThinkPad. I've always liked the ThinkVantage software because it makes dealing with minor but annoying Windows shortcomings much easier to handle.
Think pad always been on a top of the list as it makes some of the successful models in which it didn't left a single on it as it's performance,keyboard,screen and built in software has been quite amazing as well......
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