ThinkPad R51 1829 - Pentium M 715 1.5 GHz - 15" TFT > Reviews > It's a workers laptop

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Average
Look & Feel	Satisfactory
Comfort & Portability	Satisfactory
Robustness & Durability	Excellent
Value For Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Tough  -  Hard Disk Protector  -  Rapid Restore
Disadvantages:	A bit on the heavy side  -  not the cheapest

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I've had an R51 for about a year now and it still looks the same as the day I got it. I have had several Acer's an HP and experience with SONY's and they have all fallen down on build quality. Not so the R51.

As with most IBM products it is not the aesthetically pleasing, it looks like a big black slab of plastic. There are no curvy lines or shiny chrome finishes but it is Ronseal. It does exactly what it says on the tin. The case is solid, the screen hinges are strong and metal on both the body and screen and the hard disk turns itself off if you drop it (before it hits the floor) by way of a built in motion sensor that you can bring up on screen and it will mirror the current angle of the laptop in a nice on screen display.

The built in touch pad has lots of functionality including all the usual customizable tap zones, drag and drop , double click etc.. but personally I always disable them, (on any laptop) as I tend to find that I catch them with the palms of my hands as I type sending the mouse whizzing across the screen and selecting another window, and as I am a "look at the keyboard" typist I tend not to notice until I am tens of words along which can be very annoying. Instead I either plug in a USB mouse (only 2 USB ports unfortunately) or use the nipple mouse that is situated in between the G H & B keys. This is a good position for it as your thumb can easily reach the three buttons at the top of the touchpad. The center button is programmable as either a hold and scroll, scroll lock or can be used to turn on the software controlled magnifying glass which magnifies an area about an 1 1/2" square that you can then move around the screen with the mouse. The keyboard works quite well and the keys have a nice solid feel to them but there is no Windows key. Personally it doesn't bother me as I always pull the windows key off of my desktop keyboard at home as I am forever catching it when I go to press Ctrl.

There are lots of other great features on it as well, the most useful of which I have found to be the rescue and recovery software (and access connection, see below). Working in an IT support environment I am constantly installing, uninstalling and testing different bits of software which means I often have to reload it. The preloaded IBM Rescue and Recovery software can be configured to take automatic backups and prompts you if the laptop was off when it was scheduled to run. I back mine up to my pc indoors once a week (it does an incremental backup so you don't have lots of big backup files laying around) and you can restore to any previously backed up point or browse the backup and just restore certain files. On top of that is the big blue access IBM button just above the keyboard. From in here you can select to have the laptop set back to factory defaults. I.e how it was when you got it out of the box. I tend to do this restore once it becomes obvious the OS has taken as much abuse as I can give it and then restore my important files from the backup.

The built in security chip, once enabled, overlays your standard windows logon with its own. You can set a nice long passphrase which ties itself in with the security chip which means that once setup you can stop even the administrators from logging in to your laptop, although I would reccomend you set up at least two users who have access in case you forget your passphrase.

The other great bit of software is the IBM access connections. This allows you to setup different profiles according to location, so for example, I have setup one for work, one for home and one for home wireless. Within each profile I can specify different IP addresses (static or DHCP), whether to have the wireless enabled or not, a default printer, a default home page and whether to go out directly to the internet or through a proxy server and a whole host of other little settings too. It does have automatic location switching as well but I had to turn that off as I found it would automatically switch if it picked up a wireless network at the office whilst pugged in to the office wired network and all my network apps would freeze and have to be restarted. Instead I just press fn F5 and I get a nice window come up, I choose where I am and it reconfigures everything for me. Fantastic.

There is also a bit of software that you can download, that I keep on my USB key, that will examine your laptop and then go off to the IBM website and download and install all the latest drivers and software updates for your particular machine. I always use this just after a reload to make sure I am fully up to date. It just saves so much time. No more "have I got the latest this" or "do i need to update that". Just click the shortcut and you get a box come up that says you need this,this.this and that. You say OK and off it goes and gets it all and updates it whilst you get on with something else like a nice cup of coffee.

Then theres the night light built in to the lid of the case. It's only small, and it's a kind of dim orange when illuminated. When I first saw saw it I thought it was going to be a complete waste of time and kind of forgot about it. I mean surely the light from the screen will be enough, but one night I was sitting in bed, connected to the internet through the extremly good wireless antenna that;s built into the side of the case.... somewhere... and I happened upon a website that was fairly dark and I was struggling to see the keys. I'll just give it a try... WOW, not a dazzling halogen admittedly but a faint orange glow that illuminated the keys enough to be seen without drawing your attention away from the screen. perfect!!!

The laptop came pre-installed with windows XP Pro, IBM Record Now CD burning software ( I have since purchased Nero Premium) and all of the other IBM specific software I have mentioned as well.

Is it fast I hear you cry, not particularly, but then I have yet to find a laptop that performs as well as a desktop, I would certainly say it was a good average for the processor. It is a lot better since I put the extra 512MB of RAM in it.

Tip: When considering a laptop your money is ALWAYS better spent on extra memory as opposed to the equivelent cost spent on a faster processor.

I did have an issue with the original hard disk that developed some bad sectors but I rang IBM and they sent me a link to a bit of software which I ran and sent them the results. They confirmed the drive had a problem and shipped me a new one straight away. I was back up and running in two days and it was nice not to have to send it off and wait two weeks whilst the trainees used it for a big LAN game of Half Life or something.

Anyway to sum up, a robust, well thought out, extremely functional workhorse thats a little expensive and not that great to look at. Can they have it back? Only if they've got a team of olympic wrestlers and a crowbar.