IBM R40

What's Not: Printed documentation is limited to one slim troubleshooting manual. The R40 boasts IBM's nicely designed press-and-hold volume controls, but not the loud, rich sound to match; the low-volume audio will suit only unfussy music-CD listeners.

What Else: Although a bit thick at 1.7 inches, the R40 is fairly easy to carry at 6.7 pounds (not counting the power adapter). It wears the ThinkPad uniform of no-nonsense black gussied up with a beveled front, a blue Enter key, and a bright-red eraserhead.

Our midlevel configuration of the R40 came with a fair assortment of connections, including a parallel port, two USB ports, and a FireWire port, but no TV-out. You get IBM's unique ThinkLight, a small LED in the lid that illuminates the keyboard somewhat in dark rooms. There's also IBM's cool window magnifier: Pressing the spacebar while holding the Fn key maximizes the active window to fill the screen, giving you a handy way to instantly magnify your work.

The R40's user-replaceable components, including the hard drive, are easy to access; its end piece is the removable audio port cover. But both RAM slots in our unit were filled, so adding more would require discarding at least 256MB of memory first, and IBM doesn't offer a configuration that uses a single 512MB DIMM.

Our unit lacked an 802.11b wireless network adapter (a $99 add-on), but dual-band 802.11a/b antennas were built in. The R40 works with two optional docking stations, IBM's basic $179 Port Replicator II, which adds legacy ports and gigabit ethernet, and the $229 Mini Dock, which also adds its own power adapter, a four-port USB 2.0 hub, and a key lock. Like most newer ThinkPads, this model has IBM's hardware-based Embedded Security System 2, which works with downloadable IBM client security software to encrypt data. IBM claims that this is a stronger security scheme than software alone.

In our speed tests, the R40 produced the sort of performance expected from a 1.3-GHz/400-MHz Pentium M-equipped notebook, turning in a PC WorldBench 4 score of 118--only about 5 percent behind the average for Pentium M notebooks with the faster 1.6-GHz/600-MHz processor.