Thinkpads Forum

T500 is released but current T61 offers are appealing pricewise.

Is the T61 an overall excellent choice or would you suggest to stay clear and go with the latest model?

Your feedback would be much appreciated.

ibmguy wrote:...Is the T61 an overall excellent choice or would you suggest to stay clear and go with the latest model?...

yes.

(what kind of answer do you expect if you don't state your requirements? E.g., if you want a blu-ray burner in the unit, then the new models are the only way to go. Otherwise the T61 might be fine for you as well.)

basketb wrote:

ibmguy wrote:...Is the T61 an overall excellent choice or would you suggest to stay clear and go with the latest model?...

yes.

(what kind of answer do you expect if you don't state your requirements? E.g., if you want a blu-ray burner in the unit, then the new models are the only way to go. Otherwise the T61 might be fine for you as well.)

My T40 with 14.1 SXGA+ TFT died a GPU death recently.

I am familiar with the T60 at work. How does the T61 compare in terms of build quality, screen quality and noise from fan and HD?

On the Lenovo outlet they have T61s with:

Intel® Core™2 Duo processor T8300
NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M (128MB Open GL)
14.1 SXGA+ TFT

versus

Intel® Core™2 Duo processor T9300
nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M
14.1 SXGA+ TFT

MY requirements are web, photography, videos, Second Life, some games, development.

Which of the two machines would you pick and why?

Disk and memory are easily upgraded.

I'd appreciate the suggestions from the community as I am not familiar with the T61 but I know I don't want a T400 because of the lower resolution screen. I looked at a T61 widescreen 1280×800 and found it lacking compared to my old SXGA+ display.

Thank you.

Please see my response in your other thread.

I just bought one of the T61p that were locally on special at Lenovo. Cannot custom configure it down under but it gets pretty close to what I required.

There was a long saga going on with the NVidia 570M GPu overheating and shutting the machine down. Some reports are that it was just a batch of wrongly manufactured GPU's.

However the last few months this issue seems to have settled down and no abnoraml noises are being heard about this any longer.

I prefer to buy towards the end of the lifecycle reason being that a firm is not knowingly going to manufacture an item with faulty parts - warranty repairs cost more than manufacturing it in the first place.

I have little qualms about the overheating issue - I am not playing games but there are times I need super graphic performance, it comes in bursts.

I reckon it is good value for money - especially if I perceive that Lenovo is slowly starting to target more the consumer market than the Thinkpad niche market caring for the road warriors. (None of the newer models I have seen locally appeal to me.)

Marinus

vital-analitix wrote:I just bought one of the T61p that were locally on special at Lenovo. Cannot custom configure it down under but it gets pretty close to what I required.

There was a long saga going on with the NVidia 570M GPu overheating and shutting the machine down. Some reports are that it was just a batch of wrongly manufactured GPU's.

However the last few months this issue seems to have settled down and no abnoraml noises are being heard about this any longer.

I prefer to buy towards the end of the lifecycle reason being that a firm is not knowingly going to manufacture an item with faulty parts - warranty repairs cost more than manufacturing it in the first place.

I have little qualms about the overheating issue - I am not playing games but there are times I need super graphic performance, it comes in bursts.

I reckon it is good value for money - especially if I perceive that Lenovo is slowly starting to target more the consumer market than the Thinkpad niche market caring for the road warriors. (None of the newer models I have seen locally appeal to me.)

Marinus

I agree about value for money and thet Lenovo is targeting more the consumer market.

When do you find you need super graphics performance?

Thanks.

I trade the futures markets and once a month, when the Non Farm Payroll figures are released, I can get 150 - 225 trades / second coming in immediately after the announcement. Each requiring a screen refresh. (one other noteworthy item: on the A31 I loaded some software from Intel which enabled some special caching - a database rebuild would take 4 - 5 minutes, now it takes ~ 30 minutes. I have approx 1 B (yes that is a B) database read-write activities per hour......)

On the Thinkpad's A31's (that have been retired now) CPU would go 100%. I did upgrade the CPU to the 2.4 Ghz P4 and that improved CPU performance , dropping it to approx 85%.

I basically "cooked" those two machines - temperature was normally around 70 ~75 C... I gave them to a friend and two years later his kids (who are at varsity) are still daily using them for their assignments and have not missed a beat.

Next moved to the Z61m and CPU runs at 40 - 60 % and there is an annoying screen flicker on those news announcements. Soon disappears but it is very distracting just when I need all the concentration on the market activity.

Marinus