Lenovo ThinkPad T41

5owners with an opinion

80%of verdicts positive

0/1positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and build quality.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 20 yearsStill going

My IBM ThinkPad T41 is about 20 years old and just won't stop. When it does, maybe I'll think about a Lenovo.

Doesn’t like it

I have a small collection of period-correct laptops running various Windows versions. Some of them represent history we love to look back on (a Compaq with an AMD K5 running Windows 95), others... not so much (a centrino T41 Thinkpad running Vista SP1). My opinion of XP is a little more mixed than yours. XP was great, but I maintain that 7 is actually the high water mark for Windows' usability. There's a lot of stuff you take for granted nowadays that XP never had. Dragging a window to the side of the screen to snap it to one half of the screen. You probably do that a lot now, but XP doesn't do that. XP has no search function in the Start menu. Hell, I don't recall Vista having that, either. Explorer (the file browser, not the browser browser) in XP is far more simplistic than you remember it. Again, limitations mostly come down to search and quality-of-life stuff that we now take for granted. Snipping tool. Being able to smack Print Screen and quickly crop and annotate a screenshot is awesome. XP doesn't do that OOTB. Greenshot really was the freeware gem you remember it being, to be fair. XP does get a lot of things right. Highly legible and consistent UI elements with clear visual feedback and color coding. Control Panel being a unified portal for all Windows settings. Fast user switching was a big innovation vs previous Windows versions. No ads (besides mostly benign MSN promos), no online accounts, no cloudshit. I encourage anyone reading this to go grab an old laptop…

Likes it

So I checked the T41, and it was just a dead power adapter. After making a new one from a spare DC-DC converter, the laptop itself still seems to work. Cleaning it up might be a next step. :)

Likes it

I'm using an Apple MacBook Air M1 (2020) with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD and a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD at the same time. As an intense power user, I care less about budget and more about the quality of the machine I use. I ordered myself the MacBook at work and privately purchased the X1 to put Ubuntu Linux on it (curious about the M1 and having had a great experience with each of a range of past ThinkPads - X61s, X220, X230, T41). Both machines are very light, and not very rugged (for ruggedness, go for a Dell Latitude E6400 XFR or E7450). Both fell one time each, the X1 had no visible marks, but the MacBook Air now has a visible dent just above the logo. Thankfully, both machines remain fully operable. The X1 is great for Linux, and that's my preferred platform. I'm biased towards that because it's not proprietary, but not out of purely ideological reasons, I just want to make sure the platform continues to exist. Thankfully, the Mac also has a Unix under the hood, alas often things are in weird locations or not installed at all, so I feel less "at home" on MacOS X. Also, having been a dual Linux/Mac OS X user since 2008, I find the usability of Mac OS is decaying - many things are hidden in non-obvious places. For example, it's not helpful if scrollbars are hidden and you have to exactly hover over where they ought to be in order to make them visible first - when you are on a call and need to pull up some data quickly, this is distracting. The Mac…

Likes it

Linux worked out of the box (Ubuntu LTS or Lubuntu) with: - Lenovo ThinkPad T41 - Lenovo ThinkPad X61s - LenovWo ThinkPad X220 - Lenovo ThinkPad X230 - Lenovo ThinkPad X1 - DELL Latitude E7762 - DELL Latitude E7480 - Apple iMac 27" Problems encountered: - The touchpad on the Lenovo ThinkPad 240 mad random jumps, not sure if this is a Linux issue since I never tried Windows (I usually wipe it right after unpacking). - Couldn't install any Linux flavour on the Microsoft Surface 3 laptop. It was painful to get rid of Windows and UEFI boot, and apparently a kernel patch is needed to go further (according to Microsoft support, who didn't provide said patch). Does anyone here have that patch BTW? Generally speaking it is getting harder and harder to install Linux, due to Microsofts efforts to make PCs "more secure" (which - oops - prevents the installation of competitors' OSes, how convenient).

Likes it

Hrm. I dunno. I recently picked up a couple of old laptops to goof around on (a 2003 Thinkpad T41 and a 2005 iBook G4) and both of them (laptops!) have keyboards that are so much better than my modern keyboards that I was sort of taken aback. I think we’ve slowly been fed worse and worse keyboards for so long that we don’t realize what we’ve actually lost. I’d say the difference is more tangible than a $250 gold-coated cable.

Likes itDoesn’t say they own it

Looks interesting, especially the frankenstein model in the ThinkPad T41 chassis as that has a lovely keyboard and display aspect ratio. However I think the biggest problem to tackle here is not the hardware but the software. If it runs for example some kind of regular Linux distribution or Android it won't be very usable as they're just not designed for e-ink. If on the other hand it runs something custom, it would need to be able to sync documents to the exact syncing setup that I currently use for me to consider buying it (and of course also the exact syncing setup of any other potential buyer, of which there are probably close to infinite, especially in the kind of circles that this device appeals to in the first place).