Silent thinkpad with APM support?

[pau]

Hi,

I have spent quite a long time in the X forum and after asking and asking, I bought an x31 and it was very nice. Unfortunately a couple of things were broken and I sent it back and I got my money back. That was the first bad news.

The second is that the resolution is ugly, ugly, ugly... I am used to an FJS with 1280x768 in 10.2" and in comparison the x31 resolution was looking cheap.

I asked in the X forums which thinkpad has a decent resolution without being too heavy (say 14" or similar for the screen maximum) and has APM support?

This is crucial for me because of my OS, which do not support ACPI yet.

tomh009 was of big help all the time and told me that

Your best bet would probably be a T41 or T42 with SXGA+ (1400x1050) resolution. 14.1" display, 5.0 lbs with a 6-cell battery (a bit less if you take out the optical UltraBay drive and put in a travel spacer).

T43 is a bit special with its checks for hard disks etc. but a T41/T42 have the Pentium M already and support 2 GB of memory. Now, you really should check in the T4x forums for best choices (probably Radeon 7500 graphics) for low heat/fan noise ... personally I would guess at a T41 with the Banias CPU, which you might be able to nicely undervolt to further reduce heat.

To sum up:

I need

1) APM support
2) Something extremely quit, because I am usually in meetings
3) A _long_ battery life (from 4 hours onwards would be perfect)
4) Something not too heavy (around 2kg)

Your thoughts?

Thanks in advance

Pau

[Harryc]

I suggest a T41 just like tomh009, but I'd get one like in my sig with a Radeon 9000. By the way, you keep saying 'APM support'. All recent generation Thinkpads support APM. If you disable ACPI they will default to APM in your OS.

[pau]

Thanks for the advice!

By the way, you keep saying 'APM support'. All recent generation Thinkpads support APM. If you disable ACPI they will default to APM in your OS.

I don't think you're right. All new x60, x61... are acpi- only machines.. This is my main problem and I have spent some time looking at that issue and there's no way the recent models support APM...

[pau]

Excuse me, I forgot to ask...

This T41 is as quit as the x31-x40 etc are? That would be great.

And what about the battery life? I am going to buy a second-hand laptop, so that it will have gone through some cycles... How long can you use yours (writing text, maybe compiling from time to time something but not huge CPU usage)?

BTW I have a t43p lying around in my office... are the batteries compatible? Can I use the t43p battery with the t41?

Thanks!

[Harryc]

Well, the T4X series and prior definitely does support APM, I never looked into X61's.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/APM_vs._ACPI

You mentioned (4) hours battery time, I don't think you'll see that on a 6 cell battery(maybe 2.5 to 3 hours tops on a new battery), but you will on a 9 cell, but that adds weight. The T43P battery would work in a T41. Quietness, it has an internal fan that runs constantly, but if you turn on speedstep it will be very quiet at the lower CPU frequency settings. If you run full CPU utilization for an extended period you will hear the fan, but it will be less noisy than a T43 which is notorious for a noisy fan.

[pau]

Thanks for the link. I new thinkwiki but I didn't come to the idea to look for that table.

Excuse my ignorance, but what does 9 cell mean? I understand units as V, AH etc but I don't know what 6, 7, 9 cell mean.

The battery of the t43p is 10.8V and 7.2AH. Is it a 9 or a 7 cell battery?

Regarding the fan noise of the t43p: It is the reason #1 why I don't use it. It spins basically all the time and it's too noisy.

The X31 was just silent...

[SHoTTa35]

to get more watts you need more cells, think of it like a regular AA battery you put in your digital camera. The battery you mentioned is a 9 cell battery. The 6 cell is 51.83Whrs and the 9 cell is 77.85Whrs or something like that.

[Harryc]

You're basically looking for the Holy Grail of laptops ... quiet, high resolution, light weight, and long battery life. Thinkpads with the higher resolutions were built with higher end GPU's which run hot, so extra cooling is needed. . Extra cooling requires a fan, which produces noise. Longer battery run times require heavier batteries. All of this is very elementary, and perhaps the Thinkpads are not for you. If you find the Holy Grail, let us know because a million other laptop users are looking for it too. Build quality is often a heavily weighted factor in deciding on a Thinkpad, and it may be a tradeoff in the buying decision process for some of the items mentioned above. Yeah my T41 makes some fan noise from time to time, but it's built like a tank, is lightweight, has a great display, and is highly (and easily) upgradeable.

[pau]

yes... I know.

It's such a pity that the small X do not come with 1280x800... at least. Once you get used to it you find 1024x768 on a 12" very ugly

But I HAVE to get used to the thinkpads because my OS is OpenBSD and if you have a look here

http://www.openbsd.org/i386-laptop.html

you'll see that it's as if the thinkpads were built for OpenBSD

The T41 is looking fine and I'll be happy with 3 hours of battery. The battery is showing 2h30 in the big t43p (2.66 GHz and 15"), so that I guess I can get 3h out of it in the T41.

I am only concerned about the fan noise. I was amazed to see how quit the x31 is... the t43p is "incredibly noisy" (for my taste), though

[Harryc]

Go listen to a T41 in operation somewhere. It is a very common model. Some shop near you is bound to have one.

[tomh009]

I suggest a T41 just like tomh009, but I'd get one like in my sig with a Radeon 9000. By the way, you keep saying 'APM support'. All recent generation Thinkpads support APM. If you disable ACPI they will default to APM in your OS.

Harry, you know T41s much better than I do ... is the heat and power consumption of the Radeon 7500 and 9000 roughly the same? On the newer T60/T61 the discrete graphics (and especially Nvidia) use a lot more power (which means more heat, and thus more fan noise) than the integrated graphics.

[Harryc]

Harry, you know T41s much better than I do ... is the heat and power consumption of the Radeon 7500 and 9000 roughly the same?

Power consumption is (I think) about the same. The reason I recommended a Radeon 9000 model is because it has the long fan and it supports DX8.1. The long fan is rumored to be less noisy in some T4X hardware applications and to reduce heat by 2 or 3 *C. The problem with the OP's APM situation is that APM will kill battery life compared to ACPI. ATI PowerPlay helps but you need to run ACPI for that. Also he's running BSD, The 9000 is better supported by ATI/AMD in the later xorg releases. ATI dropped driver support for the 7500 mobility with xorg 7.2.
See the bottom of this link - Thinkpads supported(and not) by fglrx.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Fglrx

See the below link for battery life comparisons, ACPI vs. APM.

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~vbraun/comput ... power.html

[tomh009]

Power consumption is (I think) about the same. The reason I recommended a Radeon 9000 model is because it has the long fan and it supports DX8.1. The long fan is rumored to be less noisy in some T4X hardware applications and to reduce heat by 2 or 3 *C.

Ah, the long fan -- that makes a lot of sense now. Thanks!

[pau]

Hi,

it's nice to see that I am talking to experts!

You seem to know everything about the thinkpads

Also he's running BSD, The 9000 is better supported by ATI/AMD in the later xorg releases. ATI dropped driver support for the 7500 mobility with xorg 7.2.

Yes, I'm running BSD but OpenBSD and Theo would never accept an opaque binary (the driver) in the OS without source code, so that there is no 3D acceleration at all for OpenBSD. What I mean is that I will not have this kind of problem because, as a matter of fact, for me "ATI doesn't exist"... and the X version OpenBSD has is also very "special"...

Anyway, again thank you, I am learning a lot from you.

I am having problems in finding a thinkpad t41 with SXGA+ here in Germany... on the other hand, I see some t42 and some of them have sxga+... Is there any important difference among the two models?

Unfortunately I cannot just go to the shop on the corner because it is not that easy to find second-hand thinkpads in the street here, in Berlin... so that I do not have any chance to see a t41 in "action"

[Harryc]

The T42 would have a Radeon 9600 and a Dothan Pentium M processor. Other than that they are very similar

[tomh009]

I am having problems in finding a thinkpad t41 with SXGA+ here in Germany... on the other hand, I see some t42 and some of them have sxga+... Is there any important difference among the two models?

Maybe expand your search to other EU countries? You will need to change the keyboard but it's easy and fairly inexpensive.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... 0137056499

I think either T41 or T42 would work -- or even a T40.

[pau]

Hey Tom,

again you helping me

Actually I just had totally ignored other EU countries because Germany is in ebay by far the best choice. I was already lloking in ebay.com (US). If you cannot find it in ebay.de you´ ll not find it in another EU country in 99% of the cases... but for this one!

Regarding the keyboard, actually I am looking for a US layout because it's the most comfortable one with latex...

Ahem... another silly question: how do you change the keyboard? I am a bit afraid of doing it... can I damage something?

[pau]

ok, I have now the following offer:

- T40P 1,6 GHz
- 160 GB hard disc 5400 rpm
- 2 GB RAM
- Intel wlan b.g
- DVD writer
- 1 year warranty
- I can give it back in 30 days if I don't like it
--> Price: 740 euro ( ~ 1020 $)

Maybe I can get it for 960$, though (700 euro)

what do you think? what's your opinion?

[tomh009]

If you have used a screwdriver before, you can change the keyboard in 5-10 minutes ...

I don't really know the T40p, though, so someone else will need to offer an opinion on that one.

[pau]

Unfortunately I do not have any shop close to my place where I can check out the T41...

I am just asking again here because I am fed up of spinning fans. I have had two Fujitsu Siemens and the fans were basically _all_ the time on.

Last week I tried a thinkpad x31 and it was amazing, I just could hear the fans from time to time for some seconds, after 1-2 minutes of heavy CPU usage. Otherwise it was SILENT. The x31 is very nice but I don't like the display. Then I also tried a thinkpad T43p 15" and it was close to the fujitsu siemens...

and I wonder about the T41 14", that's why I am bothering you again. Is it as I described it for the x31, that the fan kicks in after heavy CPU and otherwise it is silent?

That's my last question, I swear...

[Harryc]

As I mentioned previously, it has an internal fan that runs constantly, but if you turn on speedstep it will be very quiet at the lower CPU frequency settings. If you run full CPU utilization for an extended period you will hear the fan, but it will be less noisy than a T43 which is notorious for a noisy fan. I don't know how a T41 fan would sound running BSD, never did it ...

[whizkid]

I'll sell you my 750P, which has no fan, for $50. If you get a new battery, it can run 12 hours on one charge. With the right software, you can spin down the hard drive and there's no sound at all.

On second thought, I'm not selling it. I got a 750C on eBay for $5, but the color screen really drains the battery. The 750 and 750P have a 16-level grayscale passive matrix, 640x480 screen that just sips on the battery. It also has a small standby battery so you can switch main batteries during suspend.

It ran Win95 OK, with just 20MB RAM (now has 36!), but I'm trying to get Linux to run on it. (www.rule-project.org)

[pau]

Hi,

I was lying ... here you are yet other three questions:

Is the optical device exchangeable between the T40 and T43p?

And the RAM memory? Ca I use the T43p on a T40?

And the keyboard?

thanks!

[Harryc]

Optical drive and keyboard should be no problem. RAM is not ok. The T40 takes PC-2100 while the T43/P takes PC2-4200.

[Temetka]

As mentioned the T43 is a special member of the T4x line.

Basically all T4x models from the base T40 to a T42p have interchangeable parts (HD, Optical drives, RAM [DDR266/333], Screens, cables, inverters, etc.).

For *nix support I would not use a T43 because of the PATA/SATA bridge chip, some wifi issues. However RAM is much cheaper for the T43 series of machines because it is DDR2. The T40 - T42P use DDR1 which is expensive. A couple of months ago I purchased 2 1GB PC2700 DDR sticks from Fry's Electronic at $80 each. The DDR sticks were going for $55 and they also had rebates on them as well.

I have run SuSE 10.2, Fedora 7, Ubuntu and NetBSD on my T41p. None of them caused me any major headaches as far as APM is concerned and they all ran nice and quiet once the speedstep had been turned on.

The only issue I ever encountered was linux not seeing my second HD even though I installed via a USB DVD drive. That took a simple hack of the /etc/fstab file and some chown magic to get it to work. NetBSD was the hardest for me to get up and running, mainly due to my own lack of knowledge about how BSD likes to do things as opposed to SuSE or Fedora.

Harry's OpenSuSE Forum was great in helping me with the second HD issue and offers support for *nix of all flavors.

It is my opinion that a T41 or T42 would work just fine for OpenBSD and you would come close to waht you are looking for in terms of weight, resolution, battery life (with the 9-cell battery) and performance. These machines are truly awesome portable little workstations and as such are naturals for running a Linux / Unix environment on them.

Good luck with your purchasing decision and let us know what you get.

If you require further *nix help or have more questions about the Thinkpad or laptops in general I and many others are standing ready to assist you.

[pau]

Hello,

thanks to Temetka and Harryc and tomh009 and and and!

This is a very nice forum.

Temetka has almost convinced me totally. The only reason that stops me now from buying a T41 is that the prices here in Germany are too inflated and I get mad when I compare them to what you can get in the usa (about 40% cheaper!)

In any case, I am trying to convince my boss to support me economically and he'll tell me in a couple of days The bad point is that he probably will want to buy a new product and not a second-hand laptop, so that I will miss my APM support in the T60... even if I am not that sure

Harryc, you have a T60, right? Coul you make me an enormous favour? Could you download the latest iso of OpenBSD (it's 5MB) and boot from it? You will not have to install anything (choose "shell"), just tell me the output of

Code: Select all

dmesg | grep -i apm

It will not touch your hard disc. This way I can know whether it's an APM machine or not

You can download the iso image from here

ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.1/i386/cd41.iso

If you do not waht to, I will perfectly understand it, of course!!

Thanks

Pau

[Harryc]

Sure, no problem.

[Harryc]

I booted up to 'shell'. On the way to shell I noticed a boot error - "APM connect error". Then at shell your command yielded no results. When I did a "dmesg | grep -i acpi" it produced a few lines of messages.

[pau]

APM connect error??

mmmh...

can you give it another try and then choose shell and type

Code: Select all

zzz

or

Code: Select all

apm -S

and tell me the result? Does it suspend? You could also simply close the lid and see whether it suspends. Does it "wake up" properly?

I would be very interested in the dmesg output...

Actually you can save it if you have a usb key or external disc or floppy (??)

In the shell you type

Code: Select all

dmesg > DMESG.txt

or whatever you want to call it and then insert the usb key and

Code: Select all

mount /dev/sd0i /mnt

and then

Code: Select all

cp DMESG.txt /mnt

and unmount the device

Code: Select all

umount /mnt

And later gently post here DMESG.txt

[tomh009]

This from a T61:

Code: Select all

OpenBSD 4.1 (RAMDISK_CD) #248: Sat Mar 10 19:32:46 MST 2007
    deraadt@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/RAMDISK_CD
cpu0: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz ("GenuineIntel" 686-class) 2.20 GHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,SBF,SSE3,MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,EST,TM2,CX16,xTPR
real mem  = 3202633728 (3127572K)
avail mem = 2932101120 (2863380K)
using 4278 buffers containing 160256000 bytes (156500K) of memory
mainbus0 (root)
bios0 at mainbus0: AT/286+ BIOS, date 05/14/07, BIOS32 rev. 0 @ 0xfdc60, SMBIOS rev. 2.4 @ 0xe0010 (73 entries)
bios0: LENOVO 766313U
pcibios0 at bios0: rev 3.0 @ 0xfdbf0/0x410
pcibios0: PCI IRQ Routing Table rev 1.0 @ 0xfde40/368 (21 entries)
pcibios0: bad IRQ table checksum
pcibios0: PCI BIOS has 21 Interrupt Routing table entries
pcibios0: no compatible PCI ICU found
pcibios0: Warning, unable to fix up PCI interrupt routing
pcibios0: PCI bus #22 is the last bus
bios0: ROM list: 0xc0000/0xf000 0xcf000/0x1000 0xd0000/0x1000 0xe0000/0x10000!
acpi at mainbus0 not configured
cpu0 at mainbus0
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1 (no bios)
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 vendor "Intel", unknown product 0x2a00 rev 0x0c
ppb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0 vendor "Intel", unknown product 0x2a01 rev 0x0c
pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
(...)

If you need the complete one, PM me and I'll email it to you.