Thinkpads Forum

What do you think of this setup?
T410
WXGA+
i5-520m
4gb ddr3 (1 dimm)
Intel HD graphics
Finger print Reader
Webcam
320gb 5400rpm
6 cell
Intel Centrino 6300

Total of $1029
What do you think? Good deal? Thanks!

What's your goal? It might help if you said something about what you want or need. If you can live the the i3 the T410i can be configured exactly the same for less. Unless you've got a need to run the CPU at high capacity often, the i5 probably offers little marginal value.

FredGarvin wrote:What's your goal? It might help if you said something about what you want or need. If you can live the the i3 the T410i can be configured exactly the same for less. Unless you've got a need to run the CPU at high capacity often, the i5 probably offers little marginal value.

My goals to use it for the next 4 years through college as a business major. Battery life is important but not enough that i'd take a huge 9 cell and have no outlets near me.

I don't want i3 because I feel as if it'll be outdated sooner than i5

LodenCorp wrote:My goals to use it for the next 4 years through college as a business major. Battery life is important but not enough that i'd take a huge 9 cell and have no outlets near me.

I think you'll be very happy with it. My only question is, why the T410 rather than an X201, which, at 12" will fit on your classroom desk a lot easier and leave you some room for other things.

Upgrading the hard drive from the manufacturer is never cost effective. I'd take the cheapest drive they give you and put it on ebay. Get whatever size you want in 7200rpm from newegg and use that.

Because it's too small, I want a 14 inch.

I would upgrade the hard drive but 7200rpm would consume 10-20 more minutes of my battery and also, I don't want more rpm. I want a machine that's quiet. I don't really need 7200rpm anyways.

vinuneuro wrote:Upgrading the hard drive from the manufacturer is never cost effective. I'd take the cheapest drive they give you and put it on ebay. Get whatever size you want in 7200rpm from newegg and use that.

You can't slap just any old hard drive (or any non-Lenovo part) into a ThinkPad. If it isn't "ThinkPad Branded" it will be rejected by the BIOS. It might work but you'll get constant error messages on every boot unless you hack the BIOS ROM. Another consideration is that doing that could void your warranty.

Try putting an Intel Wi-Fi card into your ThinkPad that doesn't have a Lenovo part number. Your computer won't even boot until you take it out. It may be the exact same card that Lenovo offers, but it's not the "ThinkPad Branded" one with a ThinkPad FRU part number. So, you're outta luck. In my opinion, this is the only down-side to ThinkPads: they're very fussy about what parts you can put in them. This is intentional, for security, warranty and business reasons. (And, I'm sure, for Lenovo's profit margin.) Parts for ThinkPads have to pass high Quality Control specs.

But Lenovo parts are available from many places besides Lenovo. I just bought a 90-Watt power adapter (FRU 40Y7659) that Lenovo sells for $60. I got it for $30 off of the local Craigslist. Good as new, rarely used by original owner. You can also find ThinkPad parts all over the web... lots of places specialize in them.

raydabruce wrote: You can't slap just any old hard drive (or any non-Lenovo part) into a ThinkPad. If it isn't "ThinkPad Branded" it will be rejected by the BIOS. It might work but you'll get constant error messages on every boot unless you hack the BIOS ROM. Another consideration is that doing that could void your warranty.

Try putting an Intel Wi-Fi card into your ThinkPad that doesn't have a Lenovo part number. Your computer won't even boot until you take it out. It may be the exact same card that Lenovo offers, but it's not the "ThinkPad Branded" one with a ThinkPad FRU part number. So, you're outta luck. In my opinion, this is the only down-side to ThinkPads: they're very fussy about what parts you can put in them. This is intentional, for security, warranty and business reasons. (And, I'm sure, for Lenovo's profit margin.) Parts for ThinkPads have to pass high Quality Control specs.

But Lenovo parts are available from many places besides Lenovo. I just bought a 90-Watt power adapter (FRU 40Y7659) that Lenovo sells for $60. I got it for $30 off of the local Craigslist. Good as new, rarely used by original owner. You can also find ThinkPad parts all over the web... lots of places specialize in them.

That doesn't apply to the hard drive or ram. I ran about six different non-oem hdd's in my T60 and a non-oem Fujitsu in the T400 I sold today. And will be using a non-oem WD drive in the T400 that arrives tomorrow.

LodenCorp wrote:I don't want i3 because I feel as if it'll be outdated sooner than i5

Any CPU you buy today whether it's an i3 or i5 will be old in four years. That's the nature of technology. Most notebook usage isn't very CPU intensive. Internet, playing media or typing up a word document won't push the CPU to where you'd notice a difference. In essence you'd be paying more for an i5 while it would offer you little to no benefit.

resale value would be higher. It's not as slow as the i3.
i3 is basically core 2 duo stepped up a little

True, but if you're paying more for it, what's the diff? If you want an i5 by all means go for it. I'm just trying to give you the benefit of my experience. The choice is always yours.

FredGarvin wrote:True, but if you're paying more for it, what's the diff? If you want an i5 by all means go for it. I'm just trying to give you the benefit of my experience. The choice is always yours.

I just don't want to spend money on such a good laptop and get an i3. If I'm paying that much, I might as well throw in a little over $100 for an i5. Getting an i3 wouldn't really be an improvement over my last laptop and I feel if I ever needed to use an i5, I don't want to regret getting the latter.

vinuneuro wrote:Upgrading the hard drive from the manufacturer is never cost effective. I'd take the cheapest drive they give you and put it on ebay. Get whatever size you want in 7200rpm from newegg and use that.

I wouldn't trust the cheapest Seagate on eBay, might be a dead drive after all.

Then again I went with the EPP route, as long as the drive is a WD Scorpio Black (First choice) or Hitachi 7k500 (Second choice) I can't see what would be "inferior" about it making it a monkey model compared to a retail drive offering.

To Loden: Good price, I would of upgraded to the i5-540m personally for 50 dollars to get a little more crunch power but hey, I'm just one of those people.

I own a ThinkPad with an i5-520m and one with the i7-620m and I do notice the difference in responsiveness between the two. The i7 has more cache and a higher clockspeed. I wouldn't buy any laptop with an i3... most of those are just re-branded Core2 Duos. Intel even admits this. The "Core i" comes from the new chipset and the memory controller being on the same die.

vinuneuro wrote:That doesn't apply to the hard drive or ram. I ran about six different non-oem hdd's in my T60 and a non-oem Fujitsu in the T400 I sold today. And will be using a non-oem WD drive in the T400 that arrives tomorrow.

I guess I was thinking of the time I tried to put an aftermarket HDD in a T43. It wouldn't take it. BIOSes "whitelists" must have changed.

Hope you will enjoy your new T410

I use i7-620M which has 2.67 GHz, 4 GB RAM on Win7 32-bit English.

Run Antivirus, Firewall, and X1 Desktop Search (for office productivity)...

By running any 4th major CPU-taxing application, I regularly see my CPU kicking into Turbo boost regularly while on power mains...

Of course, if you're not running any major CPU-taxing application, i3 or i5 would serve you fine in 1-3 year time frame... (probably enough to get you through your studies)...

Enjoy your new Thinkpad

Thanks w0qj. I want to use virus protection but worried it will kill my battery. Is Microsoft Security Essentials good?

I'm worried how long it will take to ship. It says ship out on the 28th but I hear people say that it ships out much earlier and that's just the max estimate. Just impatient.

raydabruce wrote:I own a ThinkPad with an i5-520m and one with the i7-620m and I do notice the difference in responsiveness between the two. The i7 has more cache and a higher clockspeed. I wouldn't buy any laptop with an i3... most of those are just re-branded Core2 Duos. Intel even admits this. The "Core i" comes from the new chipset and the memory controller being on the same die.

That's interesting, responsiveness is almost always more related to the hard drive than the CPU. If you're just going on the internet, typing up a word document or listening to some music, the i7 will be no faster than a i3 or a Pentium M for that matter.

Myth, if that was true then my desktop would have no reason to have an i7-920m with four HDDs, because a single SSD would replace it with a Pentium 3.

Of course that would defeat any logic behind why my desktop runs so fast with its Raptor, RE3 and two Caviar Blacks with a distributed pagefile and 3GB of RAM on 7-32 would it? Especially if I can still get system responsiveness when my free RAM is depleted by several instances of Freearc and 7zip on maximum and ultra yet I can still use the computer.

Odd.

But hey, a lot of funny things are said about harddrives by futurists who try to spread the message of replacing all things that spin in their computer. Or the marketing companies behind SSDs.

Technically browsing the internet on an i7 versus a Pentium 3 "today" will be a lot different with all those flash ads bringing your system down. (Why, ask someone using a Thinkpad 600X versus a modern Thinkpad, see what they think about those ads.) You could also make an argument for OpenOffice being less efficient and running faster on modern systems for loading (Hey, instructional cycles, if your harddrive is able to read at over 25mb/s and the files are arranged in sequence, it is no longer the weakpoint. Just like system boots are not "only" harddrive dependent!)

Just trying to prove a point most people don't think about!

FredGarvin wrote: That's interesting, responsiveness is almost always more related to the hard drive than the CPU. If you're just going on the internet, typing up a word document or listening to some music, the i7 will be no faster than a i3 or a Pentium M for that matter.

I agree Fred.

I've used many of the older T and R series Thinkpads with Pentium M's. They were very responsive (with careful attention to what was installed) and took care of my web browsing and word processing needs extremely well! The OS choices also made a difference from my experiences also. An area where an updated processor- for my uses- is noticeable is with video transcoding. My T400 does this far faster than my older R51e (PM 1.86 dothan and 2gb DDR2 RAM) ever could!

Adding SSD to my T400 also greatly increases its overall responsiveness for sure also

Firefox takes over two minutes on my T43 to load 50 tabs up, whereas on my T410 or desktop it takes between 10-20 seconds (Connection dependent at this point, need to wait for response from server...) to load the same 50 tabs up.

Then again, I've watched people's systems chug to load IE up because they had 30% fragmentation on their harddrive. It takes me some undiscernable amount of time between clicking and my session manager dialogue popping up (Did time it once on my desktop when it had XP, takes about 1 3/10ths of a second, but I don't think that is of any scientific validity is it.)

Win7 is nice with the preemptive loading of frequently used programs into free RAM (And unloading as needed when something else needs that RAM!)

Navck wrote:my desktop runs so fast with its Raptor, RE3 and two Caviar Blacks with a distributed pagefile and 3GB of RAM on 7-32

Do you want a cookie or something?

This is a comparison of notebooks not desktops, which the last time I checked, you can't put a Raptor and two Caviar Blacks in a notebook. Your reply isn't really a response to what I said, which is for typical notebook usage Internet, media and some office, the CPU isn't really taxed that much. The performance difference isn't that great for most people. Now, there clearly are some cases where a multi-core CPU offers a significant advantage like coding video, 3D modeling or crunching databases, but that's not typical notebook usage. The Pentium M will chug a bit on flash, but most people don't spend all day on Hulu or have 50 FF tabs open. You should be running flashblock anyway as flash hits your battery hard.

If the Pentium M is so bad, why are so many people here and elsewhere using T4x, X3x or R5x machines as daily drivers? Because it's good enough. If you want to benchmark all day then the i5 or i7 probably is faster, but I would say most people wouldn't notice.

Navck wrote: I wouldn't trust the cheapest Seagate on eBay, might be a dead drive after all.

Then again I went with the EPP route, as long as the drive is a WD Scorpio Black (First choice) or Hitachi 7k500 (Second choice) I can't see what would be "inferior" about it making it a monkey model compared to a retail drive offering.

To Loden: Good price, I would of upgraded to the i5-540m personally for 50 dollars to get a little more crunch power but hey, I'm just one of those people.

No I said you could've put the oem hard drive on ebay and gotten the better hard drive from newegg. The 320gb 5400rpm hdd upgrade is ~$30. The net difference in what I suggested would've been less than that to get a Scorpio Black. You'll most likely get a Scorpio Blue or Fujitsu equivalent.

I can't believe it's already shipped and it was even customized. amazing

LodenCorp wrote:I can't believe it's already shipped and it was even customized. amazing

Don't get your hopes up too high. It could get stuck in Customs for days, like mine did. There's nothing the shipper can do about it if Customs picks the container that your box is in to inspect.

And/Or UPS might think its hilarious to ship it back and forth a few times while it goes through customs. (Experienced this for my T410 shipment.)

Do you guys want to explain what you mean custom? I have no clue what you two are talking about.

Thanks, ouch I hope it doesn't delay me. We'll just wait and see. It says UPS ground is 3-5 days. So In what cases would it ever be 3-4 days? I can't track the distance since I don't know where it's dropped after China