Laptop Review: Lenovo ThinkPad L412

Green really seems to be the color of the moment, with more and more products being promoted not only for their performance and features but for their environmental friendliness as well. Lenovo has been a champion of the trend, as we saw in our review of the ThinkVision L2251x monitor and its reusable shopping bag. And now comes the 14-inch ThinkPad L412, which Lenovo bills as the greenest enterprise laptop to date -- made from materials with up to 30 percent post-consumer content, delivered in 100-percent recyclable packaging, and bristling with power-management options that let you monitor and control how much energy the notebook consumes.

Meanwhile, IT managers who don't care how many plastic water bottles and foam coffee cups it saves can appreciate the ThinkPad L series' being priced and positioned as an entry-to-mainstream choice below the mainstream-to-premium ThinkPad T series.

Weighing 5.2 pounds and measuring 9.2 by 13.5 by 1.4 inches, it's a little heavier and thicker than the model T410 we reviewed in March. And with prices starting at $599, climbing to $824 for our test configuration, it's hundreds of dollars cheaper.

The difference means you won't get all the deluxe ThinkPad features such as "roll cage" construction (though you will get Lenovo's Active Protection System for the hard disk). But you get features like the admired ThinkPad keyboard, a high-resolution (1,600 by 1,200) webcam, and Lenovo's Enhanced Experience for Windows 7 (tweaks that provide fractionally faster startup and shutdown times).

What's Under the Hood?

Targeting enterprise users looking to get solid performance without breaking the bank, the L412 we reviewed was built around the Intel Core i3-350M processor and an HM55 chipset, though buyers will be able to select from a variety of "Arrandale" Core i3 and Core i5 processors in configuring their own L412s or the 15-inch L512.

The available CPUs, one should be aware, are dual-core processors that are essentially successors to the earlier Core 2 Duo chips. So caches are smaller and clock speeds and performance are lower than with Intel's quad-core "Clarksfield" processors. At the same time, though, these CPUs draw less power and include integrated graphics, allowing for a more cost-effective and energy-efficient mobile solution.

That integrated graphics solution is Intel's GMA HD, with a discrete ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5145 adapter listed as an option in Lenovo's documentation (although it has yet to appear in the company's online configurators). The LED-backlit 1,366 by 768 anti-glare display, meanwhile, is clear and crisp, though not the brightest we've seen -- at its brightest setting, it was just how we like it, but others, we imagine, might prefer it to be even brighter.

Predictably enough, neither the processor nor the integrated graphics set any benchmarking records. In Cinebench 11.5's CPU test, the L412 rendered the sample image in 3 minutes and 50 seconds, and its PCMark Vantage score of 4,270 was similarly ho-hum. The integrated graphics are even less inspired, posting a 3DMark06 score of 1,593 and going through Cinebench's OpenGL test at only 1.2 frames per second. But no one's going to buy the L412 as a gaming machine, so its office productivity-oriented graphics performance is likely to be considered forgivable.

More seriously, our battery drain test came up well short of the eight hours that the L412 is claimed to be capable of: With mixed use alternating between Web surfing, software installing, DVD movie watching, and benchmarking, we averaged right around the two-hour mark. But we have no doubt that dimming the display, skipping disk- and CPU-intensive tasks, and using the power management controls (including a "Battery Stretcher" option that lets you turn off features such as the wireless radio) would all result in much longer battery life.

As far as memory goes, the unit we received came equipped with 3GB of DDR3 DRAM. A little less than that, 2.43GB, was usable by the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Professional that came loaded onto the system (a $30 step up from the standard Home Premium). Choosing to go with the 64-bit version of the OS will allow you to make use of the full 8GB that the system can be upgraded to.

That operating system (and very little else, we're happy to say) came loaded onto a 250GB, 5,400-rpm hard drive, with about 10GB of that space set aside in a partition that contains the system recovery software. Also included are Lenovo Think and ThinkVantage utilities that let you quickly access the system's various capabilities and diagnose potential issues. Bloatware, as with other ThinkPads we've reviewed, was pleasantly light. A trial of Microsoft Office was there to be found, along with installers for Norton Internet Security and Skype. But by and large, the system was fairly bloatware-free.

For optical media, the L412 came equipped with a "multi burner" that can read and write to all popular CD and DVD formats. Also included, furthermore, is a 7-in-1 flash memory-card reader and a mini dock expansion slot.

As far as wired connections go, the L412 offers four USB 2.0 ports, one of which is powered and one of which doubles as an eSATA port, along with a digital headphone/microphone combo jack and a Gigabit Ethernet port. Wireless networking capabilities, meanwhile, are handled by an Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200 AGN adapter. A WiMAX adapter is also available as an option, though it wasn't included in our review unit.

In outputting to an external display users can make use of either the L412's VGA port or the included DisplayPort. Neither a DVI nor an HDMI port is present, which seems like a bit of an omission, though not a particularly huge one.

Moving from outputs to inputs, the comfortably sized keyboard also housed a TrackPoint stick that users can elect to use instead of (or in addition to) the touchpad that sits below it. Power and volume buttons (along with a shortcut button for the ThinkVantage utility), meanwhile, were placed to the left and right of the keyboard without it feeling at all cramped as a result. And as an added security feature, the L412 we reviewed also came with a fingerprint reader that can be set up using the Think utility.

And finally, the L412 also came equipped with that high-res webcam that lets mobile users videoconference on-the-go. The camera is touted as being "low-light sensitive," and indeed it performed fairly well in a less than ideally lit room.

Closing Thoughts

In reviewing the ThinkPad L412, we couldn't help feeling that while there wasn't much one could say is wrong with it, neither was there much to make it stand out from the bunch. It's not the most portable 14-inch notebook we've come across, but it isn't the bulkiest, either. And if the L412 isn't the most fully featured notebook we've reviewed, neither is it the least.

At the end of the day, Lenovo has put together a notebook that is worth looking at, particularly for the enterprise looking to deploy a quality laptop at a price well south of more glamorous ThinkPads. If not a game-changer, it's a capable player in the game.