Living with my ThinkPad T43
I have had my laptop for a while now, and it has been mostly a positive experience. I had many reasons behind my choice to get a Lenovo/IBM machine, but now I am wondering if I should have just waited to see what Apple did (they released an Intel series of machines that can run both OS X and Windows).
Some things I am noticing about my ThinkPad T43 are worth mentioning though, so if you are considering purchasing one, you will know all of the pitfalls I have noticed.
The first thing I have noticed is that its battery life still seems too short, while that is very subjective, since it gets around three and half hours per battery, getting me seven hours for the two batteries I received. I still hope to see a real all day laptop sometime soon, but it seems like every time there is an increase in battery technology, they increase the size of the screen on the machine or something.
Another thing I notice is that the fan noise gets a bit high sometimes when the computer needs to cool down. The fan, hard drive, and optical drive make a fair bit of noise. The cooling fan leads me to the next point of contention with my laptop, it gets hot. I don’t mean like battery exploding hot. Thankfully neither of my batteries are part of the exploding battery recall. But it still gets to the point where I don’t want to put my laptop on my lap.
Also, when playing wide screen movies, you can really notice a while bar near the bottom of the screen, you don’t notice these brightness inconsistencies when doing other tasks, but it can be a bit distracting sometimes.
Lastly, the speakers are a disappointment. I sometimes wonder why laptop makers even put speakers on the machines when they are really so useless in all but the quietest of areas. Sometimes the optical drive is louder than the highest volume setting. This can be very frustrating.
Despite all the negatives of owning my ThinkPad T43, I still recommend it. It is fast, easy to use, and for the most part, very reliable. I can’t say I would not trade it in for the world, but I can say that most laptops don’t even come close.
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