With the Bluetooth interface, the bR301 can be used for iOS/Apple, Android or Windows mobile devices. These readers fit perfectly into mobile usage scenarios, where smart cards are required and convenience is a plus. When we implemented a balanced power plan, a medium brightness level for the screen and only used the notebook for Web browsing and word processing, it lasted over six hours. The Feitian Bluetooth smart card readers bR301 are the perfect add-ons to bring PKI security to any mobile device. This is a great result for a big, 15.6in notebook with a bright, high-resolution screen. In our standard battery rundown test, in which we disable power management, enable Wi-Fi, maximise screen brightness and loop an Xvid-encoded video, the ThinkPad T510 lasted 3hr 48min.

With a 9-cell battery, which costs $40 more than the 6-cell battery, you can get plenty of life away from a power outlet. But this isn't a gaming notebook so the biggest benefit of the dedicated card is that graphics tasks can be offloaded to it and the overall system performance increased. You'll even be able to run car racing and sports games (such as NBA2K11).

It's not spectacular, but it's indicative of a card that can run some games such as WoW and StarCraft2. In 3Dmark06, Optimus switched to the NVIDIA card and the notebook achieved a score of 3671. Optimus is meant to automatically switch between the integrated Intel HD graphics and the discrete 512MB NVIDIA NVS 3100m graphics depending on the application that's being used. We didn't have to fiddle around with the graphics card's options in order to get the notebook to use the built-in Intel graphics while running Windows Media Player (like we did on the MSI FX600), and that's the way it's supposed to be. We've got a love-hate relationship with Optimus because it works well on some notebooks and not so well on others. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the ThinkPad T510's configuration is NVIDIA's Optimus technology. This recorded an average transfer rate of 30.72 megabytes per second in our tests, which is a speedy result and better than the 7200rpm drive in the HP ProBook 6550b. Our test unit also featured a 7200rpm, 320GB Seagate Momentus hard drive. Our test notebook came with 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM and the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, but you can only buy the ThinkPad T510 with 3GB or more of RAM. In our video encoding test, where we use AutoGordianKnot to transcode a DVD file to a 1.5GB Xvid file, the ThinkPad took just 1hr 1min. In our Blender 3D rendering and iTunes MP3 encoding tests, the ThinkPad recorded 49sec and 54sec respectively - quick results, as we expected. It's great for multitasking and it will handle not only office tasks, but also more demanding ones such as video compression - and it will do so with ease. Speedy performance is delivered by the Intel Core i7-620M CPU, which runs at 2.66GHz and has two cores plus Hyper-Threading.

Install smart card reader thinkpad t510