One month and one day later -- new T60 but wrong hard drive

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Badger · #1 Post by **Badger** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:09 am

My 2613EAU finally arrived, I orded on June 24, shipped July 19 and arrived July 25. 14.1" T60 and 1.83ghz, with the Atheros wireless card and 512 mb ram (I ordered two sticks of 1gb Gskill from newegg to upgrade myself.)

I ordered a 100gb 7200rpm drive but they sent me the 5400gb 80gb drive instead. And no... it's not that some drive space is being used by the recovery partition or anything -- the model number of the disk drive Windows reports is the Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00.

I called them but they were closed. Hopefully they'll send me the right drive and let me do the transplant myself and send this one back to them.

Anyway, I have the NMB keyboard which is nice -- I dont have any prior Thinkpad experience to compare it to any other type. It clicks but it is quiet and feels fine. I dont have any complaints with it. I also have the TMD lcd. It's okay -- it really isn't as bright or vibrant as I had hoped. It's brightest setting when plugged in is pretty good. I have found one dead, black pixel pretty much in the middle of the screen though. Haven't looked for others yet.

I also opted for the Atheros wireless card based on the good reviews here and sure am glad that I did. It has awesome reception. I'm about 30' feet away from the router through three or four walls with 100% signal strength. At another house the router is on the second story and I went to the basement, pretty much directly below where the router would be, and also had 100% reception through two floors and kitchen counters and tables and whatnot.

So far I'm loving the fingerprint deal and thinkpad software. Very easy to use. My bluetooth Logitech V270 also connected and works well, although it works better on some surfaces than others -- still experimenting.

Also, I'm somewhat of a quiet computer freak coming from the land of desktops. The T60 isn't silent, or really dead quiet, but it's quiet enough and not irritating. I haven't really played with any fan control utilities yet. It does run cool though. My girlfriend's MacBook Pro does run considerably hotter doing similiar tasks.

That's it for now, more later.

jjesusfreak01 · #2 Post by **jjesusfreak01** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:21 am

The trackpoint software is evil and causes a pixel to display miscolored randomly around the screen. Hit the trackpoint scroll button, and see what happens to the pixel.

Badger · #3 Post by **Badger** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:28 am

lol k sorry everybody, it wasn't even the trackpoint software but a piece of debris that I had to brush off (i tried blowing earlier). so far on a quick inspection no dead pixels but i'll try looking at it closer with different colors later.

christopher_wolf · #4 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:53 am

jjesusfreak01 wrote:The trackpoint software is evil

No, no not quite.

Badger wrote:lol k sorry everybody, it wasn't even the trackpoint software but a piece of debris that I had to brush off (i tried blowing earlier). so far on a quick inspection no dead pixels but i'll try looking at it closer with different colors later.

*sigh*

jagged · #5 Post by **jagged** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 5:45 am

I'm curious, how can you tell if your HD is 5400 or 7200RPM ?

ramian · #6 Post by **ramian** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 6:47 am

If you search for the model number of the harddrive, you will get to the product page where you will find out its specifications.
e.g. searching for Badger's HDD HTS541080G9SA00 gets you to the following page:
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib. ... star_5K100

cheers!

Badger · #7 Post by **Badger** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 11:38 pm

I couldn't get ahold of IBM sales before they closed, I had to work all day so hopefully I can get the HD problem taken care of tommorow morning. I did try calling a few numbers and was rerouted quite a few times only to find out that it was the sales department I should be looking for and that they close at 8 pm.

The screen is the one thing I have to complain about the most. It's not bad at all when it's plugged in and on the brightest setting, but once you unplug it, even if it's still on the brightest setting, it dims about one "green bar" or however you want to describe it. Maxing out the brightness on battery just isn't the same as on AC. It's just too dim. Viewing angles also get terrible the dimmer the screen gets. Only when it's plugged in and at its brightest possible are viewing angles okay.

The fan quiets down the best when the power setting is on Power Source Optimized. It seems to never vary its speed when it's on any other profile, even a customized one. I've also installed Notebook Hardware Control and have been playing around with that. Still looking for some way to manually control fan speed like Speedfan.

I did upgrade the memory from the stock 512mb to the 2x1gb Gskill sticks I got off newegg. The upgrade was so so easy. I thought I must have been forgetting something -- but all 2 gigs are there and so far after 10 minutes no lockups! of course, I'll have to continue to test under 3D situations to see if I encounter that problem like others have.

I love this keyboard though, it's a lot better than the Macbook's spaced out and wobbly keys that I was using a few days ago. Also, on the V270, it doesn't work well on the laminated wood surface I have but works great on a pant leg, marble kitchen counter, and mouse pad.

christopher_wolf · #8 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 11:54 pm

Badger wrote:The screen is the one thing I have to complain about the most. It's not bad at all when it's plugged in and on the brightest setting, but once you unplug it, even if it's still on the brightest setting, it dims about one "green bar" or however you want to describe it. Maxing out the brightness on battery just isn't the same as on AC. It's just too dim. Viewing angles also get terrible the dimmer the screen gets. Only when it's plugged in and at its brightest possible are viewing angles okay.

That is a setting in the BIOS, by the way.

Badger · #9 Post by **Badger** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 11:59 pm

I saw that but the warning for that setting scared me

Badger · #10 Post by **Badger** » Fri Jul 28, 2006 10:49 am

I was finally able to talk to Lenovo after exhausting a plethora of telephone number options. I had to open a case with tech support, explain the problem, and then call sales. Sales wanted me to send back the entire laptop! I would have been okay with this if I knew I wouldn't have to wait another month, if I knew I would receive either a Hydis or Samsung screen (the sales rep didn't know there were different manufacturers, so I didn't have much confidence I'd get what I wanted), and if I knew it would come with the Atheros wireless -- no longer an option to order according to the rep/website.

So I was definitely willing to live with the screen if I could avoid those other two issues. I asked him again if there was any, any, way possible to just have the correct harddrive shipped to me and I ship the old one back. He said he would talk to his superior and I was on hold for a couple minutes. He came back to say he would send the case to the shipping department to see if they could send me the correct drive in exchange for this one, and to call back on Monday or Tuesday of next week.

I just called the Lenovo rebate center and explained the problem of why I may not be able to mail off the form before July 31st -- they're very understanding people

and said to just include a letter detailing the issue.

Otherwise I'm pretty happy with my computer. Just that one $120 difference that has me concerned

I will say this though, I hated the default Lenovo/Thinkpad Windows theme that came with the computer -- fonts are huge and funny text and icons spaced all over the place. Yeah, that got changed in a hurry.

Razorback · #11 Post by **Razorback** » Fri Jul 28, 2006 12:47 pm

Badger,

If you want a bright screen in battery mode, go to Thinkpad Configuration > LCD and change the "Brightness when running on batteries" to High.

Of course this will decrease your battery life, but it gives you the same brightness as when you are plugged in.

-G

Badger · #12 Post by **Badger** » Fri Jul 28, 2006 1:13 pm

Thanks Razorback. I did that, only I went through the BIOS as christopher_wolf mentioned. Even on the brightest setting the viewing angles are really bad, like on a dark background I can just nod my head up and down a few centimeters and see the top and bottom change from black to washed out gray.

Also, I noticed that my bottom corners of the screen are darker than the rest as some people have reported here. It's just the bottom corners, especially the right one because I can notice it more when the task bar is grey. On the left corner there's the green start button.

Badger · #13 Post by **Badger** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 12:33 pm

An update:

Today's Tuesday so I called back and the rep said that the shipping department did review the case. I checked my online order status for my original T60 order and noticed at the bottom that a new 100gb hard drive was being sent to me with an estimated ship date of 8/21. The rep then wanted to arrange for a pickup of my hard drive tommorow but I gawked and asked if I could wait to send it back once the corect one comes so I dont have a hard drive-less computer for 20 days and he agreed and said that wouldn't be far.

Now he's suppose to be calling me back to make sure they can do that.

So anyway... I'm still enjoying this machine. With the 6 cell battery and the ultrabay battery both at 100% full charge and the screen dim and other energy saving stuff enabled it reports 5 and a half hours remaining. It also plays CS:S pretty well on medium settings, even at 1400x1050. The BIOS update to 1.09a really helps the fan, too, it's quiter than before with 1.07 and I don't think I'll need to use TPfancontrol anymore.

Badger · #14 Post by **Badger** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 2:00 pm

The 7200rpm, 100gig Hitachi hard drive arrived from IBM today. It wasn't estimated to ship until 8/21. I popped it in and used the Recovery CDs I burned earlier on the old drive to get it up and running. So far, so good.

I figured that since I have both drives for the time being that I'll compare a 5400 rpm drive to a 7200 rpm drive. Keep in mind that the 7200 rpm drive is a fresh "Lenovo" Windows install, with factory anti-virus uninstalled, google desktop/toolbar uninstalled, picasa uninstalled, no system updates installed, and not yet defragmented. The 5400rpm drive is a week old "Lenovo" Windows install, with all the previously mentioned junkware uninstalled, all system updates installed in addition to a few other programs (Steam, Office), and has been defragmented.

Both drives have had their AAM set to 128 (the "quiet" setting). You can't see it in this screenshot, but I ran HDTach on the 7200 rpm drive with AAM set to 254 (max performance) and 128 (max quiet) and the results were nearly identical -- there is, effectively, zero performance loss when AAM is set to to 128. The noise difference is, however, noticable

One month and one day later -- new T60 but wrong hard drive

One month and one day later -- new T60 but wrong hard drive

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