The X61 touch screen can distinguish a point contact, which is rather neat

There's the integrated Tablet support for one thing, as well as support for a TPM 1.2 module and fingerprint reader for added security. Lenovo has also worked to improve the usability of its excellent software package with ThinkVantage System Update 3. It connects to the Great Server In The Sky to check for updates and then installs them within Windows.

There's none of that DOS nonsense that ThinkPad users of old remember, but the system isn't perfect. Connecting to the server can take a while and downloads can be quite erratic, so we suffered some anxiety when we saw there were three critical updates of which the largest was Rescue and Recovery 4.0 for Windows Vista v1.01 (why not v4.01?) which weighed in at 572MB.

In the event, it took 20 minutes to download and install 45MB of important updates while the enormous critical update happened in just a few minutes, which suggests that it was actually far smaller than 572MB. Although we were unimpressed by the speed of the hardware, we had no such problems with the quality of the X61.

The chassis is made from a magnesium alloy, so it's reasonably light at 2.02kg, yet it is very stiff and resistant to distortion - you can press hard on the lid without distorting the picture. The keyboard, mouse buttons and TrackPoint all live up to ThinkPad expectations and there are a number of handy features including function keys to change screen brightness or to enable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.