Lenovo T420

Lenovo T420

Change comes slowly to the venerable ThinkPad T series, but when it does, it’s usually worth waiting for. The Lenovo ThinkPad T420—the bread and butter of the ThinkPad line—may look the same as the T410 it replaces, but important changes under the hood make this system even better. You get improved performance, thanks to Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPU platform, stellar battery life, enhanced Lenovo utilities, and unique videoconferencing abilities. Those changes are all on top of the already-excellent ThinkPad T architecture.

For business users in search of a 14-inch laptop to flog as a daily workhorse, there’s a lot to recommend in the ThinkPad T420. And while the $1,264 for our tested configuration certainly isn’t cheap when compared against consumer machines with similar base components, you get your money’s worth in other ways. We should note that if you configure this particular system on Lenovo's site, you'll see it has an "original" price of a whopping $2,005, with the much lower price presented "after discounts." Lenovo assures us, however, that the price for this particular model will not exceed $1,264. This is a common practice among notebook manufacturers, and the higher price was never an actual price for the system.

Base models of the ThinkPad T420 start at prices much lower than our test unit, at "original" prices of around $1,300 and "after discount" prices below $800. With these cheaper models, though, you miss out on a lot of performance and business-focused features. With the entry-point ThinkPad T420 model, you get a 2.3GHz Core i3-2350M processor, a lower-resolution screen (1,366x768), integrated graphics, no fingerprint reader, a smaller hard drive (320GB), a smaller battery, and no Bluetooth. Lenovo leaves the Webcam in by default, but if you're really watching your pennies, you can save $30 there and go without.

For a real business PC workhorse, though—one that balances weight, screen size, performance, premium security features, and price exceptionally well—the test configuration we looked at, or one close to it, is where the real value lies in this line. Here's why.

Lenovo T420

Lenovo T420

Lenovo T420

Lenovo T420

Lenovo T420

Lenovo T420

Lenovo T420

Lenovo T420

Lenovo T420