Lenovo ThinkPad T61

The laptop's two most interesting features are the ThinkVantage Active Protection System that protects your hard drive, and Rescue and Recovery for back-ups and file restoration. Both features centre on the Hitachi Travelstar 120GB SATA hard drive which has about 100GB of capacity once a hidden partition is taken into account.

The Active Protection System monitors your hard drive and shuts it down if an imminent problem is detected. You can adjust the sensitivity of the software and tell it to ignore repetitive impulses that indicate a train or car journey. Come the time you drop your laptop or catch it a hefty blow you can hope that the system will shut your drive down to increase its chances of surviving the experience. We have to confess that our testing didn’t include a dozen drop tests, just to see what would happen, although it was tempting.

Rescue and Recovery is a back-up utility that allows you to perform a schedule of full and incremental back-ups but the clever part comes when you hit a problem. When you turn the laptop on, just after POST, you can use the ThinkVantage button to call up a recovery console. Once the console is open you can select which files you wish to restore, or you can restore from a previous back-up, or you can restore the system to the original factory condition.