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.
