My Experience with Lenovo Thinkpad T440p as my new Work-Horse!

It's the year of the horse here in Singapore, 2014... Well, at least I am entering into one in this coming year soon at the writing of this post. :)

I got a new work-horse in the horse year. Ha-ha-ha!

I was expecting a blow-me-away experience with fascination and wonder with the notebook, instead, I got more disappointment than joy at most cases. I believe this has to do with Windows 8 integration with Lenovo and not all Think-Family's fault, but nonetheless, it's a painful and not-so-enjoyable ride of the new 'horse'. 

I got the P series of the Thinkpad 440, supposedly the P series is meant to be a more powerful system as compared the "S" - slim, or the vanilla "nothing" - Thinkpad T440. I got mine with a HD+ screen (1600x900), 8-GB DDR3 memory, 1-TB disk, Core i7-4600M... What a powerful machine it is in contrast to all my other older machines I've used before!

I love the speed, look and usual ThinkPad beauties, unfortunately, the difference between the T430 (and before) were so vastly difference that I am contemplating if I should have purchased the T430 instead of this model.

Here are why:

1. lack of a wifi on/off button, basically the FN key button doesn't work well with Windows 8 at the moment
2. Fn key auto activated.. well as thinkpad engineer users, we use the F1-12 keys for different needs (refresh, close apps, etc), and setting it primarily as functions makes a lot of inconvenience.
3. the missing right and left clicks are a big no-no as the single touchpad, albeit more sensitive and smarter, still creates a double finger tracking issue at times with mouse going opposite directions when 2 fingers are resting on the pad
4. the missing light from the top of the screen.. I miss that.. I really liked that LED shining down from the top of the screen to the keyboard instead of the back-lit keyboard
5. no HDMI port.. oh man, why mini-display port and not simply a full HDMI port?
6. no HDD status LED. oh dear, there's no way I can figure if my disk is busy or it's not.
7. the stock power adapter is so bulky and heavy!
8. the stock HDD comes with a Western Digital 1-TB disk... oh man, I have had so many WD failures that I am a WesterDigiPhobic now...

These are just some of the painful experiences I've encountered with the notebook thus far. I do hope the list doesn't increase, but I'll update whenever I can, should I encounter more issues with it.

Other than that, the things I still love about this work-horse are:

1. The keyboard is lovely
2. The 4x USB ports are PERFECT
3. The adapter head that's inter-flip is cool and useful
4. The water-spill proof keyboard is a great addition to the feature-set
5. The screen is so-so-so-so very beautiful, crisp matte sharp-screen
6. The system is super-duper-fast! With whatever that I have thrown at it.

more to come I hope...

I will be changing the hard-disk to a Hybrid soon, let's see if there's any significant performance improvement!