For those of you not in the know my older laptop died, actually one day it started refusing to even turn off and that was it. It was a Dell 5150, my dad had the exact same model and it died of the same exact symptoms. I’ll never buy a dell ever again.
At first I was going to buy a laptop that I could get like TODAY, but after some persuasion from my friend Jorge I’ve decided not to buy a new macbook (thank you Jorge). I’ve looked online at a bunch of laptops, but I couldn’t find a perfect one… till I found the Thinkpad z61t… only one problem I had to wait a month to get it and one of the people at my school pulled some strings called up Lenovo and preordered a model that didn’t exist yet (thanks). Well my laptop came in this pas Thursday… and to my knowledge you still can’t get it from Lenovo. The model number of my z61t is: 9442-89U (with 3 yr warranty).
The good
This machine rocks, this is most solidly build laptop I’ve owned, everything about it just seams solid. The LCD screen rocks, it’s very very bright, it’s even comfortable to look at outside when I’m chilling on my deck (the pictures on the bottom of this post don’t do it justice). And of course everything looks awesome with the nice titanium screen lid. Of course I had to get the high resolution version (1440×900), it’s nice to have that much real estate on such a little machine (14″ wide screen). The weight of this machine (with titanium and with the little battery) is something like 4.5 pounds, once the bigger 7-cell battery comes out it’ll be around 5 pounds. It really looks a lot heavier, only once you pick it up you being to wonder how did IBM pack so much quality in a such a little & light box.
The laptop is really, really fast (esp considering the fact I got 2gigs of memory in a dual channel configuration). Everything is really zippy, and the drive although (only) 5200 does feel considerably faster then one in my old laptop (maybe it’s the IDE->SATA upgrade). The thumb scanner is really neat (guide on how to set it up in Linux is on ThinkWiki). Another thing worthy of mention is the ThinkLight that comes with this guy I had a opportunity to use a couple times at night, plus Gain has a cool plugin to flash the ThinkLight when you get a new message. And to top of the package, is the awesome Thinkpad keyboard. It took about a day to get use to it (from the older Dell keyboard) but now I have to say it is the most comfortable laptop keyboard I’ve used. Tho, if you use vim, make sure you remap your F1 key to Esc in vim… you’ll see what I mean.
The bad
Well the one bad thing I found so far is… the Thinkpad/Lenovo service. I’ve read so many good things about Lenovo service online, didn’t turn out to be so far. First, they shipped it to wrong place (school) instead of to my house. Second, I ordered it with the bigger 7-cell battery… I got a 4-cell battery in the mail. When we called em up, they refused to acknowledge that I ordered a 7-cell, wouldn’t even let me pay the difference to get a 7-cell, so i order another 7-cell batter and i had to pay full price for it… sigh; wouldn’t even let me exchange my 4-cell battery for a 3-cell bay. I was really disappointed. And guess, what my 7-cell battery while in the process of being shipped from Honhkong with UPS express got held up by FDA, cause you know Lenovo tries to smuggle food with my battery. One would think that was the end, but then it got lost on the way to MI from the sorting center god knows whenever. Then it got found somewhere in KA, turns out it bounced 4 times between sorting centers in KA and AR (this part is really not Lenovo’s fault). UPDATE: Lenovo solves the situation read all about it here.
Linux
I’ve never even booted Windows on this laptop, first boot put a Ubuntu Dapper CD and the rest is history; I’m sure it runs fine in windows. Most everything works fine… 3 things that don’t work fine, the built in little cam (couldn’t find a 3rd party driver online), the SD card slot (actually there is a tifm driver on berlios but you need kernel 2.6.17, and it caused oops for me on umounts), and ACPI sleep isn’t there yet, it goes to sleep but dosen’t wake up a majority of the time (Linux sata ich7 issue) because the kernel dosen’t wait for sata drives to wake backup and when the ext3 module tries to access the drive the kernel says: BAI!!!! Btw, To get laptop mode on the built in sata drive you’re going to need kernel 2.6.17 at least, so it dosen’t chew thought your battery.
The pics
For your enjoyment here are some pix:
Conclusion
To say that Lenovo service was less then stellar would be a understatement, but as far as the laptop it self is concerned I can’t really find short coming to this Thinkpad (esp, once everything in Linux is fixed up, which will be really soon now TM). After using this machine for almost of for a week, I can honestly say I love it and I’m glad I got it.
P.S: Drapes updates coming soon.
18 Comments
what is the “travel weight” (take out the cd drive) w/ the smaller battery
Very good reading. Peace until next time.
WaltDe
I’d like to see what we can do about the battery you had to purchase. Email me so I can get some more information.
I love this machine as well … How did you get wireless to work?
Well depends what distro your using, for me in dapper (and edgy) the wireless just works out of the box using the ipw3945 drive that comes with the restriced-modules package. I’m using it along with network manager as well.
In other distros you might have to find info on installing the intel ipw3945 drive, which is availbe from: http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/
That’s it. I’m buying one. Thanks for the write up and ThinkWiki is an excellent resource as well.
Nice article along with good photos. I made up my mind to get a z61t. However, I am confused as to get a titanium cover ar classic black.
How do you like your titanium cover?
I like the cover, no regrets. However, I don’t know if I’d do it again with titanium next time, save some (however minuscule) weight.
Man i am in such stress how in heavens did you get the 1280×800 resolution work.
God bless.
Carlos,
My screen is 1440×900 and it work just out of the box in dapper. But if your resoltion (1280×800) dosen’t work you install the 915resolutions package then adding /etc/default/915resolution put your res in, make sure it matches in your xorg.conf file and you should be in business.
Hi,
Ordered my z61t with Core2Duo 7200 yesterday 11/14/2006. Damn, the estimated ship date is 12/14/2006. Cant’ wait to see it. Do they really take a month to ship the configured notebooks? How long did yours take to be shipped?
It took me a while (around a month) to get my z61t but I had it ordered before it was officially announced (through school) and it was still about month before it was being sold to the general public.
I am contemplating buying a Thinkpad (and, of course, install Linux on it, most probably Ubuntu after Novell signed a pact with the devil), but I am confused about the differences between the Z-series and the T-series. For one thing, the T-series models all seem to lack firewire, while the Z-series do come with firewire. Are there any other differences? However, the T-series seems to be more popular and I cannot understand why. Which of the two is Linux easier to install on?
I surfed the thinkwiki.org web site, but I found no answer.
I recently won one of these from them and was wondering how hard it is to set it up - do you just open it up and go? I know it sounds a little simple, but I have never had a laptop before or really used one.
It is supposed to ship out next week and I am really excited.
Any advice - suggestions would be great.
I just ordered one today… have you tried Edgy on it yet? Any better luck with the suspend?
growll…
trying not to touch the windows partision…
now i’m in a middle of trying to install mandrake 2007 on it
hope all will be good…
I gotta say I totally disagree with this review. The laptop is OK… A pretty standard bunch of features for the price point. Believe it or not you can actually get better laptops with more features at the pp. But the worst thing about this laptop is the battery. It is a total piece of crap. Maybe manages to last an hour with Vista, and a little longer if you use Linux or a Hacked copy of OS X, which I ran initially on it. Windows XP manages to squeeze about 80 minutes out of the batter after 6 months of use. Totally pathetic. My girlfriend who has a G4 Powerbook running OS X has a battery running time of 3 hours to my 60 minutes. Unf-ing believable. And OS X seems to run faster than Vista or XP on this titanium brick. Not that it is that heavy, but lets be honest if you don’t have the battery time, that is all a laptop is really good for….
I just found out that BJ Wholesale Club sells Thinkpad z61t 9440-A23 for $699 after $100 instant rebate and $80 mail-in rebate. It contains Core Duo 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB HDD. Definitely, I will install Ubuntu 7.10 over Windows Vista (I dislike bloating, slow Micro$oft Vista Windows) if I purchase it. Right now I use Ubuntu 7.10 in my 6.5 year old Toshiba laptop and love this operating system.
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