With the ThinkPad T420, the name has changed, but the design remains the same: It’s the same squared-off, matte-black ThinkPad chassis you’d expect. We understand that you don’t mess with a classic, but we can’t help but steal furtive glances at the more au courant laser-etched metal chassis of the HP Envy 14 and others, and wonder what a ThinkPad might achieve given an extreme makeover.
What the ThinkPad T420 lacks in curb appeal is more than compensated for in the internal design. That basic-black chassis is mostly made out of a magnesium alloy for added strength with minimal weight. As with other T-series ThinkPads before it, the T420 features Lenovo’s roll cage: an internal carbon-fiber skeleton that protects the components within from flex. The T420 has also passed eight U.S. military testing specifications ("Mil-Spec," for short), including those for humidity extremes (up to 98 percent), low/high temperature, sand resistance, high-altitude operation, vibration, and mechanical shock. And as before, the keyboard is spill-resistant, with drainage holes on the bottom of the chassis to quickly route spills—up to 4 ounces of fluid, according to Lenovo—out of the machine.
At 4.8 pounds and 1.2 inches thick, the ThinkPad T420 is on the bulky side for a machine at this weight, but it’s still easy to tote around the office and zip into a laptop bag for travel. That said, if you need a 14-inch-screened machine for frequent road trips, you might want to pay the premium for the lighter (3.9-pound) and thinner (0.9-inch-thick) ThinkPad T420s.
While the ThinkPad T420 looks nearly identical to the T410 it replaces, it is not a carbon copy. With the T420, Lenovo has moved to an imperceptibly smaller 14-inch screen, versus the 14.1-inch LCD on the older model. The new panel has an aspect ratio of 16-to-9 (versus 16-to-10 for the 14.1-inch panel), which means the screen resolution matches common HD-resolution specifications, at the expense of a bit of vertical height.
The T420 is not as slender as the T420s, but it still fits comfortably in the thin-and-light category. The left edge sports a VGA connector, a LAN jack, a DisplayPort connector and a USB port.
The edges of the machine contain a good selection of ports. VGA and DisplayPort connectors, for exporting the onscreen image to an external display, are on the laptop's left edge, accompanied by a USB 2.0 port and an Ethernet jack. The right edge houses a headset jack, another USB 2.0 port, an eSATA/USB combo port for connecting external high-speed drives, a memory-card reader, and an ExpressCard/34 slot for popping in expansion devices.
The right edge is also home to a modular-device swappable bay (an "UltraBay," in Lenovo-speak). Most of the time, this bay will hold your laptop's optical drive, but it can also accept a second hard drive or battery. These swap-in accessories are added-cost options.
Hiding around back is a FireWire connector and a third USB 2.0 port. This USB port is the “always on” type, which you can use for charging smartphones and other USB-connected devices when the laptop is off or in sleep mode. Note that the ThinkPad T420 lacks the faster USB 3.0 ports that are becoming common on high-end notebooks. Also, if you need to connect to an external display via HDMI (many HDTVs rely on these, for example), you’ll need to use a DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter.
The right edge of the ThinkPad T420 houses the removable optical drive, memory card and ExpressCard slots, a classic USB port and an eSATA/USB combo port.
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