Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Well I've had my new ThinkPad for a few days now and have some thoughts on it.
Generally I like this laptop a lot. Installing Vista was a breeze. It looks very utilitarian and is a bit larger than I would have hoped (I've gotten really used to 3lb subnotebooks). But I don't want to compromise performance at this point so a fast Core 2 Duo and a 7200 RPM drive are in... I'll go back to subnotebook when Intel's new 45nm chips are out.
I wish the LCD was widescreen (like 13 inches) and that it was LED backlit and had a glossy finish. But that's about the only nit that I have. LED backlit screen would save some battery life.
The LED status icons are very functional. The BIOS is easy to use (I had to set that up to turn on the Trusted Platform Module and Hardware Vitalization) for BitLocker and Virtual PC 2007 respectively.
The keyboard is fantastic as is the tactile feel of all the buttons, trackpad and trackpoint device. Lenovo/IBM has always made the best trackpoint devices IMHO.
The laptop feels very solid. No flex anywhere. It's EXTREMLEY fast. I mean this think smokes my desktop machines.
Running Vista has been a breeze. Other than setting up BitLocker (more on that nightmare later) I basically did a clean install of Vista, then downloaded a single application called ThinkVantage System Update, and that program did all the work of downloading all the required, recommended and optional components and craplets . Big Kudos to Lenovo for creating a single unified application to update, download and install all the things required to utilize the enhancements on the laptop (like the volume buttons, trackpoint, fingerprint reader etc).
I would like to point out that the Lenovo craplets are pretty crap free. I mean these things take advantage of Vista. For example, look at this nifty Windows Mobility Center customization.
Nice integration! There are other nice touches like this.... but Lenovo gets big kudos for doing things properly. I'm also really impressed with their battery charging optimization that extends the life of your battery by not charging it if it's got more than 96% juice.
This is also the first laptop fingerprint reader I've used that doesn't suck and works reliably from the welcome screen before and after standby. I like using my finger to login to the computer.
Battery Life is decent but no where near the 5.5 hours I got with my Fujitsu P7120. So far I'm getting close to 4 hours with the 9 cell battery. This is with heavy usage of WiFi and Hard Disk.
OH, BTW, the Lenovo folks get mad props for blogging. It's no wonder they have the best PC Laptop Brand.
I think I might be stuck to this brand. It makes me feel happy and not pissed off.