Thinkpads Forum

So I've waited longer than I've ever waited to upgrade my laptop. I usually do it every 2.5 years or so, but I've had my T60p for 5 years! I really will miss it, but after test driving a T410i today at the local laptop shop I decided that it's time. I have not been following the Thinkpad lines as I usually do so I'd like some input from T410/510 crowd. I checked the battery and looks like my T60p batter will go to waste most likely as the 410 I saw used AnoTher different battery interface (super annoying!). Not sure if the port replicators will work, but at least the power supplies appear to have stayed the same. Anywho, I'd like a 15 inch screen, at least an i3 processor, 4GB RAM, a 250+ GB SSD, and potentially a premium graphics card, but this is not a requirement.

What do you recommend? What can I get if anything for 1500-2000? Last time I pimped out my T60p it was over 2600. Not looking to spend that again. I use my laptop for email, programming, some GIS, some CAD, and a very little gaming.

Thanks in advance
Joe

If you want a premium graphics card perhaps you should be looking at the W510 instead of the T510. The T510s GPU isn't that great. In fact it's slightly worse than the T500s. The W510 has a quad core, which usually run hotter and have less battery life.

As was mentioned, dual core W510 exist now, but with the same FX GPU, so may be a good choice.

If you hurry this may still be there. They sell first come first serve. And it shows only 1 available.

http://outlet.lenovo.com/laptops/thinkp ... 1bx26.html

...Well I just noticed it was 14" but keep looking and you can get a good deal. Just make sure you click NEW to view only the new laptops.

Here is W510's cheap...

http://outlet.lenovo.com/laptops/thinkp ... ondition=3

If you have a 15" T60, then the battery will be compatible with a T500.

The T510 is a 16:9 screen, which probably isn't desirable for coding but is conducive to gaming and movies.
The T410 is a 16:10 screen, which is closer to the 4:3 ratio, but still classified as widescreen.
However, the T400, T500, W500 are all 16:10.

So true I love my 16:10.

There are ten left of these. No switchable graphics but still a nice 1280x800.

It also has the low heat 25w T9400 chip like mine. I was playing a few games for about an hour without using my cooling tray and the CPU only got to 60c with is low. With my cooling tray just idle and surfing it stayed at 30c.

Turbo (performance mode) takes the 2.53 to 2.66. Oh I may mention that the above gaming was on the OC'd 2.66 too.

But for $820, you could put money into a SSD and memory.

LOL...It would help if I post the link huh?
http://outlet.lenovo.com/laptops/thinkp ... 4144u.html

MrPeter1985 wrote:So true I love my 16:10.

There are ten left of these. No switchable graphics but still a nice 1280x800.

It also has the low heat 25w T9400 chip like mine. I was playing a few games for about an hour without using my cooling tray and the CPU only got to 60c with is low. With my cooling tray just idle and surfing it stayed at 30c.

Turbo (performance mode) takes the 2.53 to 2.66. Oh I may mention that the above gaming was on the OC'd 2.66 too.

But for $820, you could put money into a SSD and memory.

LOL...It would help if I post the link huh?
http://outlet.lenovo.com/laptops/thinkp ... 4144u.html

So just to make sure I'm following:

T400/T500 - older models, all 16:10
T410/T510 - newer models, some T410s are 16:10 and all T510's are 16:9, right?

Are there really any major benefits to the T410/T510 versus the T400/T500 that would be worth giving up the 16:10 for 16:9?

Colonel O'Neill wrote:If you have a 15" T60, then the battery will be compatible with a T500.

If you have any T60, the battery will be compatible with a T500.

dr_st wrote:If you have any T60, the battery will be compatible with a T500.

My bad; I was thinking T60 batteries will not fit in a 14" T400 but stated the contrapositive with the sizes on the wrong generation.

The T410/T510 series have more power, and only you can decide if the power is necessary. All T410's are still 16:10, but the LCD panel lottery might still have some mediocre ones.

Sorry for being a bit thick but what does, "my bad" mean in normal English?

killer wrote:Sorry for being a bit thick but what does, "my bad" mean in normal English?

It means "Sorry, my mistake"

Blimey, I'd never have worked that one out!

The only thing I have to add is consider a solid state drive! You don't have to buy the super expensive ones from Lenovo, you can add one after the fact - but honestly - SSD's are the only major innovation that has happened since you purchased your T60.

Eh. My dad's T60 was perfectly fine with it's stock 80GB 5400RPM drive. I passed on my 250GB 5400RPM drive to him after getting a 320GB Scorpio Black and he hasn't had any trouble with it at all. (The fan started to grind, but that was fixed with a few drops of gear lubricant.) Besides, SSD's are way too expensive for such a small capacity, not to mention the inherent problems that have yet to be resolved. Magnetic media is tried and true; an ancient 2GB drive from 1997 still had no bad sectors last time I checked it.

If you have the ATI GPU, it'll probably run hot like my dads, so you can consider swapping out the thermal paste. I've swapped mine for MX-2, and my dad for MX-3. I haven't seen much of a difference, but his GPU temps went significantly down.

If you buy a name brand drive like Intel, there are no problems to be worked out. We have over a dozen of them in operation at our business, some for pushing 2 years now, and have not had a single issue.

Yes, mechanical drives 'work' fine, but once you've used a computer, especially a laptop that is strangled by the inherent compromise of a 2.5" drive, you'll never want to look back. Using even completely modern laptops with 7200 rpm drives is painful in comparison to one with a SSD. Disk access is the primary bottleneck in modern computers. Almost every computer has more cpu, more ram, and more graphics power than is necessary. A SSD is the best performance upgrade most users can buy today. Nothing else even comes close.

If the space is an issue for you, most Lenovo's can use a 2nd drive in the cd bay - putting that space to far better use than the rarely used optical drive. Then you can have the speed for day to day use, plus all the storage space you could ask for.

Well using the UltraBay is still having to pay about $130 more for a big platter drive plus the $200 for an SSD drive. As for your claim that there are no further inherent problems with SSDs (even Intel), I challenge you to install, update, driver, and install quotidian software on a copy of Windows 7 nine times within one week on it. I don't care about my startup speeds as much as you seem to; my resumes from hibernate are approximately 15 seconds, and that's good enough for me. Loading Word in half a second versus two isn't a big deal. So you should pick between a platter drive and an SSD based on your priorities. I like my massive capacity and lower cost per GB.

Also, running an SSD and HDD would nullify the power-saving argument for it, yes?

There really is no power savings to be had with a ssd, or it is very minimal.

I don't really care if the drive might be able to be forced into a degraded mode by doing some unique test that has no bearing on real world usage. Half of the intel drives we have in service are on XP with no trim, some for over a year, and I periodically check their performance. So far it is indistinguishable from new. Furthermore, if you run the special drive clearing software from intel when you do a major reinstall (and takes about 2 minutes), the drive will once again be like new. The 300 and 600 gb intel drives will be available soon, rendering the storage issue null for many people. If you haven't tried it, you won't believe me no matter what I say, but I encourage you to get past the $/GB block and think of it as a performance upgrade the same way a CPU or graphics card would be. People spend a couple hundred dollars on those upgrades all the time and see very little for it. The ssd will blow your socks off.

I just did that last week because some random software which I have yet to isolate caused my battery life to tank horribly. (5h30 on fresh install to 3h00 after)

I have used a friend's laptop with an SSD in it, and I didn't really feel the difference in actual usage. Of course boot was significantly faster, but I don't absolutely demand that, although it was nice. It was some ASUS ultraportable with Optimus whose model I can't remember at the moment. I tend to leave my computer running continuously and my programs running continuously (I hibernate, which is generally a bad idea for SSDs, LOL New MBA.) so cutting an extra minute to load stuff once in a while when I reboot isn't a priority.

Personally, a RAM cache would be better; I allocate 1GB of my system RAM to cache frequently accessed smaller (<16MB) files. HDD sequential read speeds are 90MB/s, which means a moment (1024MB/90MBps = 12s) of a sequential read permits the interception of smaller file reads and redirection thusly to RAM.

Remember that due to the price skimming nature of technological products, those 300GB and 600GB drive prices will be sky-high.

Basically, if all I'm doing is taking notes in a lecture, working with some office documents, listening to music, or watching an occasional movie, I really don't need an SSD, do I? How much disk access can there be while I'm typing on Word, surfing on Firefox and listening to Winamp? Doubt it'd be enough to have the HDD be a bottleneck.

As for gaming, most games try to precache as much as possible into RAM; in which case CPU/GPU will be the primary bottleneck again.

Oh no, more SSD propaganda, time to rise to the defense of "evil, slow, outdated and dumb" harddrives. You know, because people think NAND can be built to the atomic level of precision (Gee, lith process says 22nm, doesn't look like individual atoms to me.)

NAND inherently will wear out, no matter how you can pretend it can't. Zhenya, why don't you look at your Intel toolbox and the wear %? It is there for a reason. Intel admits that in server type scenarios, MLC SSDs *can* die pretty fast unless you give yourself a nice big reserved zone. Or perhaps the SSDs in those systems only see hyper casual use, like "grandma wants her Opera to load faster for her bank statements?"

Degraded mode? Wow, I guess all servers and any form of serious computing has no relevance to life, lets use the scatternet that dispenses with those "evil" ISPs and those "vile" servers that sit on those unfair gigabit and faster lines?


Seriously, SSDs are not infinite endurance, they will die and depending on how seriously your system has to access the disk, it just means how fast they'll die. NAND is inherently flawed for that, you cannot "magic" that away or something, smaller lith processes means you get less write endurance. As for the range? "Weeks to a few years."

And you know what? All the serious professionals in data forensics and recovery would agree with me on this too.

Special software? You mean a secure erase, right? Because that really seems to be the proper name for it. It also seems to be also available for, gasp, harddrives. Just with SSDs the controller might actually respect that and cleanse all the cells instead of taking its time doing wear levelling.

PS: "Defragmentation is evil, the harddrive should automatically be good for me."
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db ... 2035#comic

Again, all I can say is once you've tried it and spent some time with it, its hard to go back. Hibernate is not problem for a ssd, (all I do as well except for system updates) and it will hibernate and resume in ~1/4 of the time you are used to. With mechanical drives we became so accustomed to small pauses in responsiveness that when they are gone, it's just a 'wow, thats what a computer should feel like' epiphany - immediate response times every time. The 300gb intel drive should be at the price of the 160, and I'd expect the 160 to become the new 80 and so on.

Navck, I have had this conversation with you before, and I'll just say that your opinion is well outside the mainstream experience of every user I have actually set up with a ssd. Our previous conversations can be found in the archives for those who have any interest. I'll leave it at that.

zhenya wrote:it will hibernate and resume in ~1/4 of the time you are used to.

Don't SSD's have about 120MB/s of sequential read speeds? My Scorpio Black hits 93MB/s on CrystalDiskMark... Somehow those fractions don't come near 1/4. (I'm mathematically inclined. )

zhenya wrote:With mechanical drives we became so accustomed to small pauses in responsiveness that when they are gone

Agreed, although those pauses can be minimized by proper disk maintenance, but only so far. I have a 1GB RAM cache which effectively negates 90% of that phenomenon. RAM access is faster than SSD access, so I suppose I can call my current setup an 320GBHDD+1GBRAMCache hybrid drive.

Zhenya, I like to argue with the kids who tell me I have this inferior "spinning object that Apple intends to do away with."
They seem extremely mainstream, so mainstream that they're at the bleeding edge of 400 dollar SSDs from OCZ to Intel from late 09. They're so mainstream they'll actually challenge me to "see who has a faster booting system."
Perhaps all the random junk they have to load at startup actually, gasp, makes the CPU bottleneck?

Do you like making your SSDs die? Then turn on system restore too, set it 20% of your drive space. Come on, it'll be a real fun learning experience with "hibernating on a SSD" with all that wear acceleration!

Oh and I suspend my system, which takes this 1/<very large number> fraction of the time that SSDs *and* HDDs take to hibernate. I guess we should all walk around with RAMdisks right? Those 1,000mb/s rates look *amazing* with unlimited write endurance.

Why don't you do me a favor and take a snapshot of the wear % from the Intel SSD toolkit? It does report the wear level, it'd be helpful if you told everyone what you did every day too.

What system pauses, Win7 inherently reads data off the drive and caches it on the RAM, I've watched my drive light solid on then blink rapidly for a few seconds before stopping... Oh wait, still not done with those processor cycles. Gosh, three seconds! I'm entitled to my game loading NOW! I must chant a curse at WD, HGST and STX for not making my system magical. Hopefully they will proceed to make the MagicDrive(TM) that makes all the data *occur* in my system without my CPU, drive controllers, Southbridge, RAM.. bottlenecking it

Aka. Thread is way off topic.

You can keep ranting all you like, tell people it's propaganda, whatever. The reality is that these 'problems' you invent just aren't, even for power users. Forums like this are filled with posts every day telling people to spend more money on faster processors or video cards they will never use, when the one thing that will actually make an instant improvement in how their machine feels often goes unsaid. Thats not propaganda, it's sound advice.

Fwiw, system restore is on every one of our machines by group policy; even the ones that have had ssd's in them for two years. The sky still isn't falling... (and you know what? If one of these drives did suddenly fail, we'd restore from backup exactly the same way we always have, and then buy them another ssd. Hasn't been an issue yet, but every drive is prone to failure, and good ssd's aren't failing at anywhere near the rate that we would need to become alarmed - in fact they aren't failing at all!)

Post the wear level status from the Intel SSD Toolbox.
Also why would those machines have system restore turned on, I mean at an enterprise level, system restore doesn't make too much sense...

As with me not being like, mainstream and stuff, I don't know, kids running around with their 2k "ultimate gaming lapto---notebook" seems to be a fairly representative crowd of the "I am a casual poweruser."

GPU? Ha, last time I checked DXVA *does* use GPUs. I also do see my cores hitting 100% when I do music reencoding... Does that mean I need a SSD or a faster CPU? I don't see that much in disk activity when that happens.

As for propaganda? All hail the glorious harddrive, for it is the incarnation of unholy evilness and I represent the users that appreciate being able to buy 1.5TB for 70 dollars.

Here, have a SMART value you can look for:
"E9 (233) Media wear out indictor" (Spelling? Ask the the internet and Intel.)

Hold on... Let's take this logically

Zhenya:
P) Intel drives have no controller issues.
Q) Your SSD's (presumably earlier-gen) are at least 2 years old and have no issues.

I propose:
R) Early gen SSDs have known controller issues; why else would Intel issue a revision?

So,

If R is true, then P and Q are false. (R ⊃ (¬P ∧ ¬Q))

In light of R I introduce:
P') Recent Intel drives have no controller issues.

If P' and R, then Q is false. ((P' ∧ R) ⊃ ¬Q)

I are confused.

The only issue I can recall offhand was a bug with the first shipment of G2 drives. By and large shipments were stopped before delivery to consumers and a firmware fix was made available. There have also been firmware updates to improve performance. We never ended up with any of the affected drives, and I still always verify the firmware revision of any drive I deploy.

zhenya, you can say anything you like about the drives but it would help prove what you say by showing me a snapshot from the Intel SSD Toolbox indicating the wear level on the drives. It only takes a few seconds, which is still a lot less time than writing these posts.

Unless you really can't show me one of those pictures and want to plead the fifth amendment.

I'm currently away from the office without my laptop. Nevertheless, as you have to backup every drive no matter the format, I still fail to see why it matters. If it fails, we replace the drive and restore, same as if a mechanical drive dies. Two years in, it's not an issue. The performance improvements would be worth it even if it was.

Navck wrote: Here, have a SMART value you can look for:
"E9 (233) Media wear out indictor" (Spelling? Ask the the internet and Intel.)

From my primary machine's main drive:
It's done slightly under 1TB of writes, and reports 1059 power-on hours.

Anything else I can help with?