lenovo t61 review

So how does the lenovo t61 battery excel build-wise? Basically the same as its predecessor T-series notebooks did. The T61 body is a rugged plastic that does not flex. Inside the stiff and thick plastic casing is a magnesium roll cage in both the lid and main chassis. The lid on the previous lenovo t60 battery was a magnesium material, while the lid on the T61 is a plastic composite with a magnesium "roll cage" plate inside. The reason for plastic now being used in the lid is to allow better penetration of radio waves, such as 802.11 and WWAN, thus providing greater wireless range and signal strength.

The keyboard remains the same between the lenovo r61 battery and lenovo t400 battery -- meaning it's once again excellent. The only difference is that now there's more room on the keyboard side areas since the notebook body is wider, the speakers have been relocated to this extra real estate. The keyboard is spill proof and has two drain holes to make sure if you do happen to spill your morning Starbucks coffee, the liquid is carried away from sensitive components and out through the bottom of the notebook

The thick metal hinges that attach the screen are very rigid and ensure the screen does not wobble. You'll need two hands to adjust and open the screen as the hinges are very tight. The double screen latch system locks securely to make sure the screen stays down when being carried around.

The hard drive is protected within the magnesium roll cage and shock mounted. Even if your T61 lenovo x60 battery is dropped the included Active Protection System (APS) software will work with the on board accelerometer to detect a fall situation and end hard drive activity to prevent data loss.

Dimension wise the ThinkPad lenovo r60 battery 14.1" certainly changes from its predecessors, it is wider but not as deep since it has shifted to widescreen. The dimensions of the T61

Important to note is that this review covers the 14.1" widescreen version of the vgp-bps8 . As with any laptop model series, there are going to be widely varying configurations you can choose that will greatly affect system performance. For this review, we're dealing with a T61 with the following specifications:

Specs

Processor: Intel T7300 Core 2 Duo (2.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 4MB Cache)

Graphics: Intel GMA X3100

Operating System: Windows Vista Business

Display: WXGA+ 1440 x 900 (LG screen)

Hard Drive: 100GB 7200RPM (Seagate Momentus 7200.1)

Memory: 2GB (1GB x 1GB), up to 4GB max

Ports: 3 USB 2.0, 1 FireWire, Monitor out, modem, Ethernet, headphone out, microphone in

Slots: 1 PC Card Slot, 1 ExpressCard slot (optional media card reader and Smart Card reader)

Optical Drive: Ultra-slim Super-Multi Drive

Dimensions: 13.2" x 9.3" x 1.09 - 1.26" (335mm x 237mm x 27.6 - 31.9mm)

Weight: 5.1lbs

Design and Build

The ThinkPad T61 sony vgp-bps9a/b is a premium product with a durable build, it is geared towards business users or simply those willing to pay a bit more to get something that won't fall apart after 1-year of use. For somebody that travels a lot or relies on their notebook to earn a livelihood, the build and reliability factor is probably more important than having the latest and greatest components inside.

The ThinkPad T61 14.1" dell latitude d630 battery and e6400 battery widescreen notebook was recently released by Lenovo as an update to the T60 series. The T61 uses the new Intel Centrino Duo platform (Santa Rosa) and offers a number of design updates

Another thing you may notice about the screen is that it’s off center within the frame -- there’s a greater bezel area to the left than the right. This doesn’t bother me, I know it will some people.

One change that you won’t see, but that is present, is the fact inspiron 1545 battery the lid is now constructed with a magnesium roll cage inside for better protection of the screen area when you shove books on top of the lid. The actual outer lid is now made of a high-tech plastic composite, that actually feels like a metal when tapped (very cool). The benefit of the outer lid now being plastic is that radio waves (Wi-Fi, WWAN) penetrate through the lid more easily and provide better wireless throughput.

Speakers

The T61 as acer aspire 3680 battery speakers are located on the sides of the keyboard, taking advantage of the extra real estate width due to the wide format. The speakers are quiet; you have to be fairly close to the laptop to hear the audio, it won’t work to try and watch a DVD from across the room as the audio won’t carry (especially dialogue). But Lenovo made an interesting move by putting the headphone jack on the front side of the laptop. This is to make it easier to quickly plug in your headphones and get superior audio. The slight downside now is that if you plug in external speakers the wiring running around the front is not as convenient. The move is better for me because I use headphones more, with a portable laptop such as this I think that will be the case for most.

The hardware buttons at the top of the keyboard to quickly adjust audio volume are very nice to have, the quick mute button is clutch in business situations as well.

Processor and Performance

The ThinkPad T61 lifebook t5010 battery now uses the Intel Centrino Duo (Santa Rosa) platform. You get a faster processor front side bus (800MHz), more processor cache (4MB) and an improved integrated graphics solution in the form of the Intel X3100. If all that talk is nonsense to you, then suffice it to say the T61 offers newer and better processing components than the T60. Will this performance be perceivable in helping to run MS Word faster? No of course not, but certain processor intensive tasks such as encoding video will be faster. And even if you won’t be utilizing every ounce of processing power, just knowing the processor is faster and you’re on top of the game is enough to make people like myself want to buy it.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Intel X3100 performance in 3DMark05, it certainly performed much better than the Intel GMA 950 ever scored. Intel claims they’re still working on better drivers for the X3100, so there might be quite a bit of room to grow in terms of performance here too.

Conclusion

The ThinkPad T61 14.1"as a1175 and a1185 widescreen notebook is easy to recommend as a laptop for those that want a highly durable system that provides powerful performance while on the go. The new cooling system design works wonders for keeping the temperature of the notebook down below 50C and limiting the need for the fan to run. The keyboard is as excellent as ever, the sturdy build is great, and the new port options are appreciated. I'd like to see a brighter screen option, in strong office lighting situations the screen can appear pretty washed out. Overall though the ThinkPad T61 does a great job of combining excellent usability features and performance, keeping the T-series well established as the leading portable business notebook.

What Security Will Look Like in 2010

It used to be that end-of-year security predictions were bold and almost science-fictiony. They as vgp-bps8 have become more conservative this year and therefore more reasonable. I've been barraged with them and have attempted to collect the best here.

It's clear to me and many others like lenovo v100 battery that the major security development of 2009 was the emergence of rogue security software, a.k.a. "scareware," as the biggest problem out there for most users. Rogues have been around for years, but their escalation in 2009 was palpable. Many of the 2010 predictions have to do with where rogues go next, and this is a reasonable line of speculation. Rogues are about making money more directly than prior forms of malware, and the predictions deal with how they plan to do that.

Security vendor Fortinet predicts expansion of some of the 2009 rogueware trends: affiliate networks and ransomware. We have reported recently on rogueware that encrypts your files latitude d630 battery and demands money for a decryption key. They also foresee increased sophistication of rogueware business models, including expanded affiliate networks, although these were news over a year ago.

Symantec as a1175 and a1185 has been moving for a while in the direction of relying on reputation as a major factor in determining the security of files and other data, and this factor leads the predictions for 2010 from MessageLabs, Symantec's secure e-mail hosting service. For large companies like Symantec with customers and honeypots world-wide, reputation is an invaluable tool. For smaller actors there have been predictions for years (from yours truly, for example) of more open markets for reputation services. These companies exist and may be doing well, but their rise has been subtle so far. Nothing about 2010 should make them more prominent.

For the most part Symantec's predictions are low-hanging fruit and undifferentiated from the pack: social engineering will be the major hook (it has been for years), rogues will lifebook t5010 battery escalate (everyone says this, it's obvious), social networking third-party apps will be target of fraud (this has been happening this year, of course it will continue and accelerate), URL shortening will be popular with phishers (and has been for a while). They do predict that CAPTCHA technology will improve, which would be good, but that the use of real people in CAPTCHA sweat shops to solve them will increase.

Another Fortinet prediction has to do with the growth of the money mule business, and this too seems reasonable. We first started hearing about as sony vgp-bps9a/b widespread use of money mules a few months ago. A weak economy will make easy money schemes more tempting, but the real news is about schemes by ID thieves to scam other people into laundering funds unwittingly.

F-Secure's Security Threat Forecast 2010 is one of the better ones like sony vgp-bps9/b :

• Windows 7 will sell a lot in 2010, XP will drop below 50%, this will severely cut the amount of low-hanging fruit for attackers—I agree entirely; I've seen this coming for years and I think 2010 is the year it really begins to happen. It as acer 3680 battery could have been earlier if Vista hadn't been so poorly-received.


• IP-based geolocation will allow attackers to localize their messages—Some of this happens already, but it's true that it's growing and it's an obvious way for attackers to grow internationally, or even to customize locally within national markets.


• "We may see a large-scale internal attack lenovo t61 battery against a target such as Google Wave."—Interesting and plausible, but just a guess.


• "Attacks related to online games will continue. Such sites and games are particularly popular in the Asia-Pacific region. Not enough focus is put on securing them and the problem will be further fueled by the fact that many users are younger and therefore more vulnerable to experienced cyber-criminals."—We really don't see so much of this in the US, but it's a big issue in the far east. Perhaps there are ways those attacks could migrate over here.

It's a staple of yearly predictions that heretofore untouched platforms will see attacks for the first time. I can't remember the last time t60 battery that next year wasn't the first year of real mobile malware, and yet it never really materialized, especially in the US. Many vendors make the usual predictions in this regard, but nobody has anything specific to say and it's hard to get too worked up about it. This time it's not just mobiles and the Mac, but Vista and Windows 7, both of which are uncommon targets for malware.

What could make things better in 2010? It's just a business phenomenon, but my money's on application whitelisting, as I argued last month. For years it's been understood by many that blocking (blacklisting) new threats was a strategy losing out inspiron 1545 battery from sheer volume against the tidal wave of new malware variants. Wouldn't it be better to approve what is known to be good and to reject everything else? New business-oriented tools make this practical, whereas in the past it was a difficult approach to implement. Sadly, consumer-oriented whitelisting is only primitive at this point and will remain so in 2010.

I spoke with Sam Curry, Chief Technology Officer, Marketing, at RSA about their expectations for the new year. Curry picks up on the theme of rogue vendors and other malefactors looking for better ways to make money and points to some of the less-obvious trends: They will focus less on the big score and instead find ways to bleed you slowly so that you don't notice that you're being taken. We saw this recently in the case of a bank Trojan that tried to keep withdrawals low enough that they wouldn't get noticed. He also sees rogues looking to offer more actual value to users in an attempt to make the sale. This could include utilities like system optimizers of dubious value, but we've already had reports of rogue products built on free anti-virus systems like ClamAV which are actual AV products, but not necessarily all that good in any one distribution.

Curry's real hope for security is industry collaboration: Security firms already talk to each other a lot and even share research, but a lot more could be done. I agree with Curry that this could help, but I suspect that companies will always be more self-interested than public-spirited, and perhaps they should be. A lot of talking was done last year about the Federal Government acting lenovo r60 battery through a new "cybersecurity czar," but nobody seems to want that position (including RSA's President Art Coviello, who was reported to have turned it down recently).

Coviello sent out his own predictions to press folks like me. He says they see a rise in coordinated attacks with the goal of harvesting PII (personally identifiable information) from systems. Don't be surprised if such information is combined in sophisticated databases with other information, public and semi-public, like Facebook profiles. There's a lot of information out there about you, and if someone could put it all together they might be able to impersonate you with it. To combat these trends Coviello sees cloud-based security services as essential and he's got a point. Such coordinated systems can know a lot more, and stay more up to date.

Websense has their own list of security trends for 2010. Much of it is the same (mobile malware, Macs attacked, etc.) but there are more interesting ones. We saw in 2008 examples of malware distributors going beyond infecting ad banners and lenovo x60 battery instead buying actual ad space. Websense expects more of this and I wouldn't be surprised by it. It takes money to make money. They also predict that "web 2.0" sites will be popular targets. I agree, but I think it has less to do with "web 2.0" than the fact that the sites are popular.

Trend Micro's 2010 Future Threat Report has one observation that has been largely true for a while, but should be uncontroversial by now: Global outbreaks will become extinct and localized, targeted attacks will grow. The closest thing to such an attack we've had recently is Conficker and it's clearly the exception to the rule. Other eye-catching bullet points in the Trend Micro report: "Windows 7 will have an impact since it is less secure than Vista in the default configuration"—(Wow, that's bold. They must be talking about UAC changes. I think the security impact will be minor.) "Bots can't be stopped anymore and will be around forever"—(Sad but true.)

Even cherry-picking lifebook u810 battery aggressively I've covered a lot of ground here. Overall I'm optimistic. Even if we know that some problems can't be solved, I think we know more than ever about how individual users and companies can protect themselves, if they want to take the time and money to do so. New secure versions of products and tools to use are better than ever.

You Grade The Brands: Dell Notebooks

From now until the end of the year we’re taking a holistic look at notebook brands such as vgp-bps8 and how vendors fare when we aggregate data

from our reviews, research, and third-party data. Generally, we focus on individual systems, but over time we’

ve been able to identify trends based on the vendor. One company might always offer great design and excellent

keyboards, another can be counted on to produce notebooks that get too hot. Each vendor has its strengths and

its Achilles heel.

Until a few months ago, Dell lenovo v100

battery held the number 2 position in notebook sales worldwide. Though recently passed by Acer, the company

shipped over 10 million units in the third quarter of this year alone. Check out the brand’s strengths and

weaknesses, its 2009 review scorecard, and overall rating. Then sound off in the comments and tell us what you

think of the brand and about your own experience. Without your input, our report card will be incomplete.

Strengths

• Performance – Dell’s latitude d630 battery notebooks consistently impressed us in 2009 on overall performance and sometimes
  
  brought the graphics muscle. The XPS Studio 16 multimedia machine blew away the averages on our benchmarks, then
  
  later in the year the Studio 17 with Core i7 blazed through them again. We were pleased to see several
  
  notebooks offer solid state drives as an option. The Latitude E4300’s SSD gave it a performance edge over systems
  
  with traditional hard drives.
  
• Displays – We also often praised Dell’s displays for offering bright, popping colors,
  
  true blacks, and excellent viewing angles. Dell took a leadership position in offering LED-baclkit panels and in
  
  experimenting with new technologies like RGB, which offer a wider color gamut.
  
• Personalization – Dell does a good job with its consumer fujitsu lifebook t5010 battery fujitsu u810 battery notebooks when it comes to
  
  customization, both in terms of allowing customers to build their systems with the specs they desire but with a
  
  wide range of color options. Dell Studio gives shoppers an opportunity to pick artist-inspired lids, as well as
  
  MLB teams, for about $65 a pop.

Weaknesses

• Battery Life - Over the past year the major weakness of Dell’s vgp-bps9a/b notebook line was poor battery life.
  
  This issue cropped up across every category of system from ULV ultraprtables like the Inspiron 11z to the Latitude
  
  XT2 business tablet to the multimedia-driven Studio XPS 13 and 16. However, there were some welcome exceptions,
  
  like the Studio 14z.
  
• Touchpads – Though not as severe an issue as HP’s touchpad dilemma, we often dinged
  
  Dell for finicky or undersized touchpads and mushy, hard to use mouse buttons. This was a particular problem on
  
  the Inspiron 11z and the Mini 10 series.

Best Rated Notebooks

• Dell XPS Studio 16
  
• dell inspiron 1545 battery
  
• Dell Studio 14z ($749.00)

Worst Rated Notebooks

• Dell Inspiron 11z ($683.00)
  
• Dell Latitude XT2 ($1,959.00)

Review Report Card

So far we’ve reviewed 13 Dell notebooks this year. Of those, 38.5% earned a rating a1175 of 3.5 and 4 stars (5 systems each). Only one

earned the low rating of 2.5 (Inspiron 11z) and two systems received 3 stars. Out of the 13, we awarded two

systems the LAPTOP Editor’s Choice.

Tech Support and Reliability

Unfortunately, Dell apple a1185 earned a grade of

C- in our Tech Support Showdown. According to a study by SquareTrade, Dell laptops have a failure rate of

about 18 percent over a 3 year lifespan, which is about average.

Overall, the Dell brand can be counted on for good design and performance, though it isn’t often that the

company turns out a notebook that we truly get excited about. (The Adamo XPS and Latitude Z both look very

cool, but we have yet to review either system.) We’re also looking forward to testing the Vostro V12, Dell’s

ultrathin but affordable small business laptop. We’re hoping that more future notebooks will couple the high-end

ideals showcased in the Adamo line with the solid performance and value the brand has become known for.

Now It’s Your Turn

Do you own a Dell laptop? Owned one in the recent past? What does Dell get right and where does it need

improvement? Tell us how you’d rate Dell notebooks and why