Laptops Arena

When it comes to Lenovo laptops, we think that the ThinkPads are some of the greatest laptops made by this manufacturer. A ThinkPad T500 notebook review will reveal some interesting aspects about this $1135 laptop. The ThinkPad T500 runs on a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 processor and 2 GB of DDR3 RAM. The storage capacity of the hard disk is 160 GB and for the graphics card you can choose between the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500 or the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 with 256 MB of video memory.

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The keyboard on the ThinkPad T500 is awesome as it feels pleasant to the touch and offers great response and positive feedback. There is a slight flex noticed in the keyboard are but there is nothing to be worried about. The TrackPoint is easier to use than the touchpad which is a bit too small for our taste. The 15.4 inch display has a native resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels and it has a CCFL backlit display.

The colors are sharp and vibrating and they do not have that washed and faded aspect even you turn the display brightness all the way up to the maximum level. The levels of brightness are acceptable. There is a matte covering to the display and the horizontal viewing angles are above average. The speakers on the ThinkPad T500 are located right above the keyboard but the quality of the sound is not that great.

No ThinkPad T500 notebook review can be complete without referring to the selection of ports and features. The unit hosts a total of 3 USB ports, an Express Card slot, a display port, a VGA out, an Ethernet jack, a PCMCIA port, a FireWire port, a 4-in-1 media card reader and the regular headphones out and microphone in jacks. There is absolutely nothing to complain about the heat and noise chapter. The laptop manages to stay really quiet under mainstream usage. You will never hear the fans except for the cases when you work in a very quiet environment.

The laptop remains pretty cool to the touch even after a couple of hours of word processing.  The performance of the battery life is above the average of the 15 inch category. With the display brightness set at the medium level, and surfing the internet via a wireless connection plus doing some word processing, the 9 cell battery managed to keep the laptop up and running for 7 hours and 30 minutes. This is quite an amazing score for a 15 inch laptop.

The laptop does offer good balance between power and price as it is a good notebook for both personal and professional use. The battery life is amazing and no one ever expected to get such good performance out of a 15 inch laptop. The built in construction of the unit is very solid as there in no flex registered in almost any parts.  Ok, so there is no FireWire, no HDMI and no eSATA port; does that really bother you.