ry configuration is 8 MB of DRAM; our test unit came with 16 MB, and it can be expanded up to 40 MB with dual in-line memory modules (DIMMs).
The system comes with a quad-speed CD-ROM drive built in (it's swappable with the included 3 1/2-inch floppy drive), a lithium-ion battery, a 1.2-GB EIDE hard drive, IBM's Mwave digital signal processing (DSP) system (which gives you a 28.8-Kbps fax modem with telephony features), and hardware-assisted, full-screen MPEG-2 video playback (half-horizontal resolution). The system has two PC Card slots.
When you press back the two locking buttons on the side of the unit and lift up the front of the keyboard, you get a lesson in laptop packaging. Take away the CD-ROM drive, battery, hard drive, and Mwave subsystems, and you're left with a package about 2 by
1/2 by 6 inches in size: That's the entire CPU, chip set, graphics controller, and I/O circuitry. With all these neat things, the ThinkPad is no lightweight at 7.4 pounds, but it's not a backbreaker, either.
Good Design, Bad Design
The ThinkPad 760CD
is a curious mixture of thoughtful design and sometimes-awkward implementation. Our test system came with Windows 95 installed (OS/2 Warp is another option), but we still had to do a fair amount of configuration work. For example, the parallel and serial ports came turned off, which made initial attempts to use an external mouse frustrating. (Restarting Windows 95 became an all-too-common experience.)
The DSP-based 28.8-Kbps fax modem provides telephony functions and can detect incoming activity to awaken the 760CD from sleep mode, but again, the modem (and MPEG decoding) had to be specifically enabled in software. This isn't a machine we'd recommend to a novice.
Physically, the ThinkPad is well made. T
he keyboard elevates at the rear for a different typing angle or totally lifts up at the front to reveal the battery, hard drive, and what IBM calls the "ultrabay." This bay normally contains the CD-ROM drive, but it can instead hold the floppy drive, an extra battery, or a second hard drive.
That's a lot of flexibility, but the implementation of these exchangeable parts is awkward. You remove any of the existing installed batteries or drives by pulling up on flexible blue plastic tabs at each device's rear. Presumably strong enough for the job, they don't inspire confidence, and slippery hands complicate the task.
Worse is the bezel that you must install when you exchange the CD-ROM for the floppy drive. The bezel covers an opening in the front of the ThinkPad, but you cannot put it into place unless you first remove the battery--something the instructions don't mention. There are actually two different bezels included with the computer, one for the floppy drive and one for the battery or hard
drive, and they're an outright nuisance. We ended up omitting the bezel, which meant the floppy drive wasn't held in place as firmly as it should have been.
Frankly, the bezels seem like just more fiddly little plastic bits to get in the way, to lose, or to break. The creative folks at IBM who dreamed up the Butterfly's expanding keyboard can surely come up with a better solution to plugging a hole. In this regard, Toshiba laptops do a much better job of dealing with peripheral drives.
Considerably more thought went into the power-supply brick. To reduce weight and bulk, the AC power cable is only 6 inches long. The length is in the thin cable that carries the DC to the computer. The brick has a molded ramp where the cable exits so that it won't take a sharp bend, as well as a socket to hold the other end of the cable when you're packing it. You simply wrap the cable around the brick and then plug the end into the top. But now there's slack in the cable and it will unwind, right? No, IBM has tho
ughtfully attached a Velcro strap that lets you tighten and neaten things up.
A Multimedia Standout
With MPEG playback, on-screen video quality was excellent and smooth. We also enjoyed the internal quad-speed CD-ROM drive. You can play audio CDs using the front-panel button, and a sliding control lets you adjust the volume through headphones (not included) or the two front-mounted stereo speakers, which sound about as tinny as you'd expect with 1-inch transducers. The drive also reads Kodak Photo CDs and plays Philips CD Interactive (CD-I) game and instructional discs.
The test unit came with Windows 95, including the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Network. Additional bundled software included Asymetrix Compel PE and Mind Path multimedia presentation software; a FaxWorks faxing package; TranXit file transfer software, which can use serial, parallel, or the built-in (two-port) infrared links; Digital Video Producer, for capturing video; a Video CD-I player; and a
group of Lotus applications, including ScreenCam, cc:Mail Mobile, and Lotus Organizer 2.0.
On the Road Again
The unit's full-size notebook keyboard is good, though not remarkably so. The built-in TrackPoint III pointing device is by far the nicest implementation of this type we've yet encountered. It's reasonably fast and accurate yet unintrusive. Both mouse buttons, located at the base of the keyboard, can be physically locked in place to make drag operations easier.
In tests with BYTE's Thumper 2, a robotic device that simulates actual use, the ThinkPad's lithium-ion battery lasted 3.0 hours with the CD-ROM drive inactive. Heavy CD use would cut this time drastically. (With a freshly charged battery, the ThinkPad's battery-gauge program indicated that we had 2 hours, 30 minutes of processing time.)
IBM's literature claims battery life ranges from 3 to 9 hours, presumably with all power-saving options adjusted to their most economical (and most intrusive) settings. I
nstalling a second battery doubles the run time. Nickel-metal-hydride batteries are also available.
This well-equipped machine is for the power user who wants to consolidate his or her activities into one computer. To measure performance, we ran
Windows 95 application test scripts
(Microsoft Excel 7 and Word 7) developed by NSTL. When compared to a similarly configured 90-MHz Dell Dimension XPS P90 desktop system, the ThinkPad performed only two-thirds as fast due to a slower graphics subsystem, a bottleneck with most portables.
Gimme, I Wanna
It's not easy being a BYTE reviewer. Although we get to play with the latest tools, we have to deal with products that are sometimes mysterious and dumb.
The ThinkPad 760CD is neither of those. It's a very nice unit. About the worst thing we can say of the 760CD is that, compared to the competition, it's somewhat overpriced. But the display really changes the way you think about a laptop. I don't want to
give it back to IBM.
PRODUCT INFORMATION
ThinkPad 760CD............................$8134
(with 90-MHz Pentium, 256-KB L2 cache,
16 MB of RAM, 12.1-inch active-matrix
color display, 1.2-GB EIDE hard drive,
and quad-speed CD-ROM drive)
IBM Personal Computer Co.
Research Triangle Park, NC
Phone: (800) 426-2968 or (919) 517-1950
Fax: (919) 517-1101
Internet:
http://www.pc.ibm.com
Circle 1106 on Inquiry Card.
Big, Bright, and Beautiful
