Thinkpads Forum

FredGarvin wrote:Interesting, if you go by the benchmarks, XP usually scores better.

Depending on which benchmarks. Benchmarks depend a lot on specific configuration, drivers, etc. You can find benchmakrs where XP/Vista/7 each beat the competition.

But benchmarks in general don't mean much. What matters for the average users is the responsiveness of the system. When preparing for Win7, Microsoft learned from the various complaints of users on the responsiveness of Vista, and conducted lots of research, and performance tracking in typical real-life scenarios to optimize it for Win7. These things probably do make some difference.

Then again, whenever most users say "I installed X and immediately noticed a tremendous improvement over Y", they usually don't account for differences between a freshly installed OS and a OS that has been somewhat bogged down by a history of software/hardware installation/deinstallation. Typically, a fresh installation will perform faster.

Spec-wise, the best T6x is this:

T60 or T60p 15.0" 4:3 chassis
IDTech IAQX10N display (and SXGA+/UXGA inverter)
T61p 14.1" 4:3 motherboard and heatsink
2.66 GHz Penryn (IIRC, the 2.8 takes too much power) Core 2 Duo
8 GiB RAM
640 GB 5400 *OR* 500 GB 7200 RPM HDD *OR* the biggest SSD you can shove in there
Some A/B/G/N card
Turbo memory, maybe? Or WWAN, whichever's most important. (And, no TM if you want a non-Vista/7 OS
9-cell
Blu-ray burner

For better reliability, run a V5250 T60p mobo and heatsink, use a 2.33 Merom, 4 gigs (slightly faster than 3, and allows a fun BIOS hack) RAM, no turbo memory, and a BIOS hack to allow another 256 megs of RAM to be visible. (It's being worked on, IIRC.)

For portability, swap it all for a 14.1" 4:3 chassis (either T60/p or T61/p) and run that modded Sharp UXGA panel from that Dell.

Of course, I (unknowingly, until I booted the system) swapped a V5250 board into my V5200 system. Yay, free upgrade! Of course, I need the nVidia chip to drive my T221 at full resolution, but... hey...

Oh, and I found that my GPU temps fell a couple degrees, despite the faster and hotter GPU. It's amazing what cleaning the 1/8" of thermal compound Lenovo caked on, and applying some AS5, will do.

whats the point of putting blue ray on a not so good screen? i really don't understand the manufacturers, I mean seriously, they come up with the entire HD thing and HD is this and that but they put on laptops worst and worst screens.

Well, if nothing else, you don't have to buy media twice, if you buy the media for a normal BluRay player.

And, pretty much everything I've seen with BR drives is 1920x1080 or better on the LCD. Granted, it's crappy TN panels, but expecting anything better in 2009, unfortunately, is pointless, unless you get a W700 or 17" MacBook Pro.

Note that the best and reliable best configs both have 2048x1536 IPS panels. They're slow response time and dim, but other than that, they're excellent. It's only the portable best and portable reliable best configs that have 1600x1200 TN panels, and that's the best there is - the lower resolution panels are TN, too.

Not to mention, you can also use it to just store data. Much better than DVD for that.