Thinkpads Forum

I have a choice of the following setups

Setup A
T60p
Motion LE 1600

Setup B
HP 8240
HP tc4400

Purpose
Business - Training, General Work & Presentations to Clients / Vendors
It will need 2-3 years of usage, especially the notebook.

I need a mobile 'powerhouse' as I will being to travel more frequently and need the business to be more portable. I will be doing as much programming work as I know how to build a company website.

The tablet will be used for notes, readings, client and vendor forms, and to also do light graphics work. The tablet is definitely used more frequently during meetings and so forth...

Thoughts?

You've asked the question to the most biased audience in the world.

If you

1. Want respect from your business audience,
2. Want to impress or clients and vendors with your intelligence, wisdom and good taste,
3. Have any dignity for yourself,

Get the Thinkpad. Otherwise, get the HP.

For many of the same reasons as listed above, I would get the Thinkpad setup; I used to have an HP as well as an HP business line system for awhile, they couldn't measure up to the Thinkpad in terms of durability, quality, robustness, and performance. That is saying alot since one of the HPs, a ze5170, was a 2.0GHz system and performed like it had only 300Mhz (I kid thee not) whilst my 2.0GHz T43 gets over three times the battery life the HP did with no performance hit whatsoever. Also, the keyboards on the Thinkpads are far superior to the ones on the HPs (HP needs to seriously fix that).

sbc wrote:It will need 2-3 years of usage, especially the notebook.
Thoughts?

Based on your requirements, the choices are:

A) Get the HP and perhaps save some money up front, at least until you take it out of the box. Then your most likely experience may be:

1) Utter frustration working with an inferior, noisey keyboard.
2) Random crashes in the middle of a presentation or other mission critical task.
3) Suddenly experiencing the "quality HP tech support experience".
4) Realizing that perhaps it was a mistake to trust in HP laptops.
5) Well.... you get the picture.

B) Get the ThinkPad. Then your most likely experience is that you will get your work done easily. Enjoy reliability, and have time for a life...

I do not want to go into ranting at all; but here is the experience I got with "HP Support"

I first got a letter saying that the battery in the ze5170 was being re-called; the HP battery in it stopped holding a charge months before the letter and the system-wide HP battery recall went out. I sent in the dead battery, what is now a year or so ago, and didn't get the replacement at all. When I called, nobody could find the battery or my previous support tickets; emails didn't help either as I kept getting handed off to different people who then responded to the email. Next up; the memory; HP also had a recall on the memory that was in my system. I was informed, however, that even though it was a system-wide recall, as far as the HP laptops went, my model wasn't affected. So then I had to put up with the HP booting, randomly crashing, etc...Only when I ran extensive memtests did I discover that the two HP OEM memory modules were problematic. I raised another call to HP only to find out that the rep started denying that I had any claim to either new memory or a refund whatsoever despite me pointing to articles that said HP would recall the modules. He hung up on me.

To recap; within 3 years of me getting the ze5170 (with a BIOS on it that was already 1 year old with no new re-vision in sight on their support page for it to this very day)...It had gone through having the battery fail, having problems with the memory during boot, having the HDD and GPU overheat due to bad cooling (it had 3 fans, but the GPU was half-connected by a silicon pad) and finally refused to recognize a new HDD because the BIOS was older than the ze5170 off the shelf. The keyboard was amazingly difficult to take out (required 1/2 disassembley of the ze5170, unlike the 3-4 screws on a Thinkpad) and was far flimsier than the keyboards on my Thinkpads.

That is a massive difference from any of my Thinkpads, and even older Compaqs and Omnibooks I have.

RonS wrote:You've asked the question to the most biased audience in the world.

If you

1. Want respect from your business audience,
2. Want to impress or clients and vendors with your intelligence, wisdom and good taste,
3. Have any dignity for yourself,

Get the Thinkpad. Otherwise, get the HP.

But then again, if you're working with an audience who's going to be more focussed on your computer rather than your work, would you really want to work with them?

And if you're really tying your "dignity" with what sort of computer you own, would you really want to be you?

pundit wrote:

RonS wrote:You've asked the question to the most biased audience in the world.

If you

1. Want respect from your business audience,
2. Want to impress or clients and vendors with your intelligence, wisdom and good taste,
3. Have any dignity for yourself,

Get the Thinkpad. Otherwise, get the HP.

But then again, if you're working with an audience who's going to be more focussed on your computer rather than your work, would you really want to work with them?

And if you're really tying your "dignity" with what sort of computer you own, would you really want to be you?

Well, would you rather arrive at a fancy party in a sleek Porsche/BMW/Benz or in an Ford Taurus? There is nothing wrong with getting a system that has professional performance and is known for business whilst maintaining an executive look. Wouldn't want to wander into a board meeting dressed in a t-shirt and sandals, would we (unless, of course, you were the CEO )?

With the Thinkpads, performance and image are intertwined. If I were an exec going to the customer, I want something that will perform great *and* look great. Not either performance or looks alone will make a big an impact as both in such a situation.

As for dignity? Well, I don't know about everybody else, but I feel it beneath mine to go out and get a system that doesn't fit the job or to "cheap out" to save some bucks and get a square peg (Setup 2) to fit a round hole when I could have gotten the correct "round peg" (Setup 1) that would have lasted much longer and have an overall lower TCO.

christopher_wolf wrote:I used to have an HP as well as an HP business line system for awhile, they couldn't measure up to the Thinkpad in terms of durability, quality, robustness, and performance.

Some of the new HP stuff is not bad. Most of the new nc series are almost as good as ThinkPads. The chasis is not quite as sturdy and the keyboard not quite as good, but IMO they are probably good enough for all but the most discriminating notebook user.

That is saying alot since one of the HPs, a ze5170, was a 2.0GHz system and performed like it had only 300Mhz (I kid thee not) whilst my 2.0GHz T43 gets over three times the battery life the HP did with no performance hit whatsoever.

That's not a fair comparison. The ze5170 is a consumer grade desktop replacement using a Pentium 4 processor. Any computer with a 2 GHz Pentium 4 inside will run much hotter and slower than a 2 GHz Dothan Pentium M, regardless of manufacturer. The Pentium M in your T43 is roughly as fast as a 3 GHz Pentium 4.

Also, the keyboards on the Thinkpads are far superior to the ones on the HPs (HP needs to seriously fix that).

I agree, as far as the consumer line are concerned. I've evaluated both the nc6230 and the nc6220 however and the keyboards were very solid.

Overall, my guess is that the T60p is a sturdier, easier to use machine. But the HP 8240 is IMO likely to be a decent machine. It comes down to whether you are willing to spend the $ for the extra "class" of the ThinkPad.

I tried one of their "Business" notebooks out at the time (a bit later on from when I got the ze5170) as well, and nx5000 if I remember correctly; and nothing much changed. The fan wasn't as annoying, but that was only because the ze5170 had three (and still managed to do a bad job of cooling the GPU) and the audio quality decreased somewhat; understandable considering that it was a "business notebook." Battery life better, but not exceptional; especially for the performance I expected to get out of it. The keyboard wasn't bad, but I strongly disliked the fact that it still felt spongy and it was more involved to replace than my Thinkpad was. It felt about the same as my Compaq 1900 Presario (that has lasted since 2000 by the way), but I didn't trust it to last as long as I wanted without the nx either turning into a money pit or simply snapping the hinges on the LCD lid (as the Compaq 1900 had done).

Spending more money after the ze5170 popped its clogs defeated the whole purpose of it anyway; neither the ze or the nx was a good deal unless you wanted to get a quick and easy system, in which case Dell would serve you far better than HP and for far less. The Dell M60, as much of a Dell it was, still outlasted and performed better @1.3GHz than the HP @ 2.0GHz. I know they had different chipsets, but considering the huge performance difference between the two, it cannot be explained away on that alone; a 30 second difference on the same compile job run on the two systems maybe, but not a glaring difference of 3-5 minute lag holding the ze5170 back whilst the 1.3GHz M60 finished the job in a minute...That was ridiculous and so was the bad support I got and, until recently with several desktops (one of which was a Xeon that blew its power supply twice), continued to get.

So I went back to my Thinkpads and PowerBooks and have been happy ever since.

christopher_wolf wrote:So I went back to my Thinkpads and PowerBooks and have been happy ever since.

So very, very true...

Thankfully Lenovo kept the valuable ThinkPad brand name.

Apple blew it by disposing of the valuable PowerBook brand name.

I think my choice will be with the T60p (and Motion LE1600). I am hoping the upfront cost with IBM will pay off in the long run in regards to limited repair issues.

I appreciate everyone's take.

Now my next concern is how Zooms handles sales. I truly hoped that I miscontrued the salesmen position in regards to customer service if the machine is not up to par in quality standards. He almost made it seem like if you don't like it that is your fault. Errr, I truly hope I took his disposition out of context.

christopher_wolf wrote:I tried one of their "Business" notebooks out at the time (a bit later on from when I got the ze5170) as well, and nx5000 if I remember correctly; and nothing much changed.

The nx5000 is an older generation of HP. The nx series is generally larger and less portable than the nc series.

a 30 second difference on the same compile job run on the two systems maybe, but not a glaring difference of 3-5 minute lag holding the ze5170 back whilst the 1.3GHz M60 finished the job in a minute...That was ridiculous

Maybe it was a software problem (bad drivers, spyware, preinstalled HP junk running in the background). A 2 GHz Pentium 4 will perform comparatively poorly relative to a Pentium M, especially on integer and branch heavy compiler applications, but I don't think it is that slow!

I assure you, there were no software problems with either besides the [censored] drivers being out of date on both of the HPs I tried; they were all updated (but very painfully mind you). Being able to do quick builds of large amounts of code was, and still is,quite essential to what I do. I do undergo the same cleaning routines on my T43. The difference? My T43 is still snappier than any of them even during a full system defragment. Boot defrag, reg clean, removing bad DLLs, you name it and I did it on the ze5170 and the M60, and still that difference remained.

On my T43, I have been going from impressed state to impressed state; not one BSOD, not one problem with the IBM/ThinkVantage utilities, and not even one system lockup or crash of a program save the time it takes some browsers to load media have occured and programs that weren't optimally implemented on my T43 since I bought it. Uncomprised system performance, minimal delay per additional task, efficient I/O operations, and amazing number of connectivity features. That is what I got with my T43.

On the ze5170; a BSOD and a half a day was not uncommon, neither was waiting anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes (I kid thee not) whilst it sat there and thrashed the HDD like there was no tomorrow. It couldn't hibernate out-of-the-box, as I later found out, and my only fall-back, suspend, ceased to work at all a little after that. Mainly because the drivers, slowly, got upgraded while the BIOS was stuck in the past by about 2 years at that point with no upgrade in sight. Trying to return it to HP under the cheapo warranty, that quickly expired, was a no-go and then I was stuck with it. "Dammned Nightmare" is a phrase that, I think, described that situation well.

If that was what the nx line was like (or even if it was just an incremental improvement over it), I am not going to expect too much of the nc line either in terms of comparing it with my Thinkpad; I will see if I can try out an HP nc again over the weekend; but I don't doubt that little has changed. If it was just portability and size and they didn't put a decent backing in for the keyboard, instead of the plastic and glue they seemed to use before and *did* use on the ze5170, as well as not paying more attention to the heat issues, then it will still be SSDM (Same, err, stuff; different model) as far as I am concerned. HP should have stuck with the OmniBook; the one I still have runs just fine and has only had 1-2 problems...After they stopped that Omnibook line, they slid.

Looking over them, all I can see is that, if you end up paying a ton of money, then you will get a loaded system that has all the features...but no guarantee of durability; if I was going to pay that much, I rather fork it over for a Thinkpad.

Unsuprisingly, that is *exactly* what I did.

A friend and I have been using an HP DV1000 notebook last year and while they are reasonably priced notebooks with nice features, quality is lacking. We had it serviced about 3 times within a year so it shows how unreliable it is as a primary PC. The good part is that HP service is quite good here in Asia.

Actually, I was a desktop guy and didn't really understand the "business" notebook concept before .

My T60 seems much more robust than my old PC and these 3 months has been quite productive. Some things had to be compromised like memery card reader, good speakers, and glossy screen but as long as my T60 doesn't give me headaches, I'm a happy customer.

K. Eng wrote:

Also, the keyboards on the Thinkpads are far superior to the ones on the HPs (HP needs to seriously fix that).

I agree, as far as the consumer line are concerned. I've evaluated both the nc6230 and the nc6220 however and the keyboards were very solid.

My GF has just got a new HP nc6220 from work. While the keyboard may be solid, IMHO they are difficult to type on and the surface treatment is unpleasant. I believe the reason for the former is the key-top strike area design. The strike area on the top of the keys is not as large as on the ThinkPads -- the tops are slim little rectangles instead of full-sized squares. I found this extremely annoying when I used her machine for a little bit.

My 2c.

pundit wrote:

RonS wrote:You've asked the question to the most biased audience in the world.[...]
3. Have any dignity for yourself,

Get the Thinkpad. Otherwise, get the HP.

And if you're really tying your "dignity" with what sort of computer you own, would you really want to be you?

Now, now 'Pundy of the Macs'.

I'm quite sure that Ron meant this as tongue-in-cheek -- it lacks the emoticon to cement the interpretation, though I think his prefacing statement qualifies it somewhat.

I personally found it quite an amusing comment when I first read it.

astro wrote:Now, now 'Pundy of the Macs'.

Excellent, I am elated someone caught the ironic-humour in what I was saying.

(For the others: People, my 'would you really want to be you?' comment was in itself a tongue-in-cheek reference to me picking an Apple computer over a ThinkPad almost purely for aesthetic reasons; not much unlike Ron's "dignity" argument.)

pundit wrote:

astro wrote:Now, now 'Pundy of the Macs'.

Excellent, I am elated someone caught the ironic-humour in what I was saying.

(For the others: People, my 'would you really want to be you?' comment was in itself a tongue-in-cheek reference to me picking an Apple computer over a ThinkPad almost purely for aesthetic reasons; not much unlike Ron's "dignity" argument.)

Brilliant.... flippin' brilliant...don't stop now, lets keep this terrific humor going...

Yes, more irony is what we need! (I was trying to not mention the MBP because of this very reason)

Please, no more irony, or ironc attempts at irony, about anything Mac for me. I have gone through enough of that for 3 years; it gets old, fast....And now with the MacBook Pros, it is about to get even more so. Not even on an *IBM* forum can I get away from it, or so it would seem. Such "ironic" things have spawned some of the most tearfully and exuberantly boring conversations in the history of computing, "PC vs. Mac on the philosophical level", "what is computing?" etc; those, of course, getting tied for 1st place in that category by any speech named "Free as in Speech Versus Free as in Beer; Software in Modern Times." or a variation thereof.

Besides, I already have the ability to use OS X and not roast my lap or getting forced to pay for another hardware upgrade in a year; so it's all good.

EDIT: My friend who got a 17" MBP now complains of that familiar whining noise from the CPU that, at least on his system, doesn't go away...I guess I should pay more for that as a feature.