Digital Trends

Lenovo ThinkPad T61p

September 11th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Wireless

Like the Lenovo 3000 V200, the T61p ships with the latest Intel 956 chipset, which includes the latest in wireless technology. The included adapter can connect to A, G, and N routers for speeds of 11Mbps, 54Mbps, or 140+Mbps if you have an N router. Even though the N spec hasn’t been ratified, routers are already flooding the market, and for a notebook to be truly future proof today it would have to have an N adapter inside. In our testing, N is over three times faster than G, so it’s definitely something to consider if you transfer files across a network on a regular basis (once again, if you have an N router). The T61p also offers Bluetooth support as an option, though our review unit did not have it.

Storage

The T61p comes with a 160GB, 5400rpm hard drive, which is rather large but not the biggest drive money can buy. It’s also a shame that the drive is just a 5400rpm model, rather than a faster 7200rpm drive. The notebook does ship with Lenovo’s drive shock protection software, which can trace the movement of the notebook in real-time and move the heads off the platters if it senses the notebook is in a freefall or being knocked around. It’s a slick feature, and since notebook hard drives move around a lot it’s useful in the event of an inadvertent bump off a desk.

Move the T61p a bit and it’ll stop the hard drive to protect your data

ThinkVantage

We’ve covered the ThinkVantage suite of utilities before, and generally given it high marks for usefulness and functionality, albeit with a few grips. The suite has not changed at all recently, so we won’t rehash those remarks here, but a summary would be it is very useful to have everything in one place. You touch the blue ThinkVantage button (or click on the desktop shortcut) and a menu pops up on the left-side of the screen allowing you to perform a variety of tasks ranging from finding wireless networks to backing up your data to chatting with a Lenovo tech. It’s very handy, as we said, to have all these tools in one spot. We take issue with the backup and restore mechanisms however, as they are confusing to use. We also don’t like how the “run a virus scan” link only works with Norton. 

Software Bundle

Like any notebook, the T61p comes with a software bundle. The majority of the pre-installed software is the ThinkVantage tools, which are mostly useful. There are also a few third-party trialware apps installed too, including Microsoft Office 2007, Diskeeper 9, and Norton Internet Security. We like Office, but have no need for Diskeeper and would never in a million years install Norton. Lenovo also installed PC Doctor 5, which can reportedly help fix your PC, but we’ve always been wary of these types of applications since we have never seen them actually fix any problems.