The black chassis which IBM has maintained over the years still holds in the A20m. Its a hefty beast weighing in at 3kg with the CD/DVD-ROM drive. The clamshell has two hinges that open a rather largish lid and screen. The model tested here boasts a 14.1in TFT; there is also another model with a 15in TFT. There is a full keyboard with a trackpoint as the built-in pointing device and a generous palm rest.

The floppy drive sits on the left side with some audio ports and an access hatch for the hard disk; the right side holds the optical drive bay - in this case a DVD-ROM, and two x Type II PCMCIA CardBus slots. On the back of the unit are the usual ports for serial, parallel, external monitor, built-in RJ-11 and RJ-45 ports for modem and Ethernet networking, a single USB and PS/2 port. Underneath are some hatches for the battery, docking, memory expansion and a proprietary expansion slot where the combo Ethernet and modem card are held.

IBM has used the 700MHz Pentium III with SpeedStep technology in this model. The BIOS reflects this with a number of running options for the CPU allowing the user to determine how quickly the system runs. Features characteristic of this range of notebooks include several Wake-On-LAN, infrared port and display settings. The hard disk used is a 10Gb IBM drive and the slimline DVD-ROM is from LG. As with most other notebooks in the lineup ATI has supplied its Mobility chipset to power the graphics.
While the A20m we tested was delivered with Windows 2000 Professional installed, there is also the option for Windows 98 SE or Windows 95. For consistencys sake, we tested the A20m on Windows 98 SE along with all the other notebooks on test this month. Other software in the bundle includes ConfigSafe, which safeguards the systems configuration by allowing the user to take snapshots of the hard disk for restoration in the event of any catastrophe; PC Doctor diagnostics; and a host of IBM-specific utilities and diagnostics.

The ThinkPad A20m is a genuine desktop replacement, designed to be nominally portable yet fully featured with the integrated networking and modem. It performed in the middle of the range across all of the PC Authority Benchmarks and at the asking price of $5,699 represents good value for the features in the box.