No Thinking Necessary - Great Buy!!

After owning many computers, this Thinkpad T40 is my first new notebook. I read many reviews and had worked on my brother-in-law's during vacation, and had to have one. I purchased it from PCMALL.com and it arrived safely and as promised. They also offered a 6-month 0% interest payment plan which I took advantage of.

The notebook is lightweight (4.5) and 1" thin which is nice when lugging it around. It feels pretty solid, the door for the cd/dvd opens and closes firmly and easily and same with the screen. My System is: Intel® Pentium M™ 1.5GHz processor, 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD, DVD drive, modem, 10/100 Ethernet, UltraNav, 14.1" XGA display, XP-Pro.

The touchpad is dead on and there is the option of using a trackpoint which I find hard to use but that's just me. It's been 7 months since the purchase of this and I have yet to get more than 4 hours out of the battery with even minimal use, although it was advertised for 7 hours....but there are a lot of options for screen brightness and useage which can help your battery life. It's still better battery life than other makes I've played with (Sony, Toshiba and Dell) but it is running on Centrino.

I was worried about Centrino being powerful enough, when working on the road, that battery life was more important to me than power. But even when workng with multitasking with Adobe Photoshop, Pagemaker, Word, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and being on the Internet wireless all at the same time, I can't believe the power! Filters load fast in Photoshop, faster than my AMD-K6 and Pentium III desktops. The keys are soft, quiet, and with the screen light option, makes typing late at night in bed, nice for your spouse. Overall it's quiet, the hard drive spinning at its maximum is barely noticeable and I like the fact that there is very little heat generated, so working on your lap is comfortable without having to put a pillow between your legs and the notebook.

It came with XP-Pro but I have had an issue with loading software, and XP threw a default window up that asked for the XP CD. Not having it, I called IBM and they said they would send it. Two weeks later I received four recovery CD's and not XP. I called again to find that they won't give me the XP cd b/c they have a contract with IBM and they just load it with the system at sale. I had to buy XP-Pro for $100. That angered me, but it's an IBM/Microsoft issue...not the thinkpad.

The integrated wireless-B card works well with my Linksys wireless router but I do drop connection sometimes. I think I have narrowed the dropped connection to an older corldless phone which I speculate is near the same frequency as the Linksys router or the integrated wireless card.

Sound is OK (high treble and a little distortion - but I've heard worse). The screen is crisp and sharp when looking dead on...I work with graphics and have no complaints.

Overall, this is a solid buy.....I highly recommend it.