Thinkpads Forum

Build quality

Nothing much to report here; solid like my T42p. Some minor body flex with substantial pressure. You can tell the stiffness is inside and there's a plastic shell around it. There are places where the plastic shell deflects slightly before hitting the internal skeleton. Lid flex, despite the extra inches, is about equal to all the Thinkpads I've owned in the past. Every thing assembles and disassembles cleanly. There's blue threadlock on every screw.

In short, it feels like a ThinkPad with the i's dotted and the t's crossed. I wouldn't hesitate to pick it up by any corner when opened though that's easier said than done; I don't think I actually *can*.

At work, we're using some perfectly awful Acer 17" 'mobile workstations' that just ooze 'cheap'. You rest your hands on them and they sag and creak. You have to push down on both corners of the lid to latch them closed, etc. The W701 feels like a block of steel compared to it.

Also, unlike the pretty but easily dented/scratched/bent aluminum macs, this thing will still look solid and badass in ten years.

Size

It's got to be said-- this thing is awkwardly large. The screen size may only be 17", but it's proportioned more like a 19-20" notebook. I bought two carry bags; one sold by Lenovo for '17" notebooks' and another for '17" and larger notebooks' and the W701 doesn't even come close to fitting in either.







My T42p, the biggest and baddest of all Thinkpads when I bought it, weighs 6.15 lbs, the W701 weighs 8.60 lbs. The 230W power brick is another 2.1 lbs. One review I'd read earlier starts by mentioning the power brick alone weighs more than six iPhones, two HDV camcorders, or Sony X505 notebook. It is in fact large (pictured above resting on the T42p).

The thing about it that actually feels weird is not that it is big, but that it's proportioned as if it was smaller. It really does seem like my T42p was simply loaded into Photoshop and scaled up by 20% except for the keyboard.



This leads to the first minor issue; the T42p is a good thickness for typing on. The extra 1/4" of thickness and 3/4" further back the keyboard is on the W701 makes typing on a standard 28" desk surface awkward. I have to sit higher, or hold my shoulders up to avoid typing with my wrists bent.

Keyboard



Much sadness! Despite the PSREF only listing the old, stiff-backed keyboards, my W701 arrived with the thin, springy 'full of holes' keyboard common to all the new models. Popping the keyboard off for inspection, it's clear there's a stiffener frame under it. Despite the stiffener, there's still more flex than on my T42p, The keyboard does't sit quite flush against the frame, so some locations are noisy (the left trackpad button has a loud 'clock' when pressed).

Oh well. That's what eBay is for. I have a verified old solid-backed replacment on the way. The bigger issue may just be that it needs to be more solidly mounted into place so that the case around it actually holds it solidly to the frame.

Stylus well

All the reviews I've seen of the W700 and early W701 complained about the Wacom stylus being hard to get in and out. I haven't had any trouble with it at all. Stows cleanly with a solid click, pops out without fuss.

Speakers

Much maligned, and I don't actually see why. They don't and can't compare to external speakers. They're a step up from the speakers on any notebook I've owned. I'd take them over the sound from my wife's 17" Macbook Pro, or my older Thinkpads, or the PowerBook Titanium I owned in a moment of weakness a decade or so back.

Fan / Heat

The fans are both very quiet compared to my T42p. When either fan is idling, it is inaudible at normal sitting distance in a quiet house at night. I have to put my hand over the vent to feel if warm air is coming out.

This is an 820M model with the FX2800, so not the hottest possible options. In both Linux and Win 7, the processor fan does not appear to run at all when the machine is idling. It also consistently turns off once the machine returns to idle.

For comparison purposes, the fan in my T42p (2.1GHz Pentium M) runs continuously, even when idling. The W701's fan is a lower pitched sound than the T42p and obviously never runs as fast. The W701 under load with all four cores running flat out is about as loud as the T42p idling, but lower pitched. The bottom of the machine becomes mildly warm.

The GPU fan tends not to run when Windows is idling, and runs at the lowest setting when Linux is idling (the Linux drivers are brand new and acknowledged to have lousy power-saving as yet).

In short-- cooling appears to be on the wonderful side of overkill.

Screen

Oddly small for the notebook, if you can call a 17" screen small. It somehow harkens back to the early ThinkPads when the screens, as big as they were for the time, didn't fill the lid. It has a very 700C feel to it. If Lenovo had gone 4:3, they could have fit a full 19" panel in the existing lid.

The screen is bright and sharp, no dead pixels (you'd think that wouldn't be a worry anymore, but just last month at work I opened up a new batch of notebooks from a competing cheaper brand and several had bad pixels).





With both backlights cranked, 'black' on the W701 is slightly lighter than black on the T42p FlexView panel. The Flexview is nowhere as bright when white. The W701's black is slightly blue-green. The Flexview's black is slightly blue. The W701 screen is clearly much higher contrast.

Near-black levels do not appear to be spacially dithered at all. Just as good as the S-IPS FlexView here.

Smooth gradients are excellent for an 8-bit screen, even after calibration. You have to look very hard to see any banding at all. On gradients, the screen is noticably superior to the S-IPS FlexView.

The W701 has some minor high-frequency dither, less than on other panels I've considered to be excellent. The panel appears to be completely immune to pixel-walk/dither flicker as tested using the lagom.nl test patterns. Again, every bit as solid as the FlexView.

There is no power supply whine or backlight flicker at any brightness level. The backlight does not appear to be dimmed by pulsing, of if it is, it's a high enough frequency I can't detect it at all. My HDV vidcam also does not show any flicker when recording the screen.

That said, the TN screen has the standard TN viewing angle weaknessses. While good for a TN screen it cannot compare to the FlexView. The screen shifts toward red at the top/right and toward green at the bottom/left. Though far worse than S-IPS in this regard and easy to detect, the shift is not egregious.

Without calibration, the color temperature wanders noticably with luma like on most wide-gamut TN screens (greys are too blue, white is too orange and overdriven). Calibration effectively and completely eliminates the issue. The one thing I'd always loved about FlexView was that grey was dead accurate grey; not blue-gray, not yellow-gray, just gray, regardless of 10% or 90%. Color calibration 95% achieves that on the TN.

The last thing worth commenting on is the RGB LED backlight. I notice it. You can tell it's being edge-lit from the bottom as the component colors are not perfectly mixed there. About the bottom inch of the screen has a slight 'here's where a red LED is, here's where a green is, etc' pattern. I only notice it if the background is set to full white, and I possibly spotted it only because I work with RGB LED lighting, and I know how freaking hard it is to get a perfect diffuse white out of of discrete, widely spaced color LEDs. It is subtle enough I can't
actually get a picture of it.

The other odd aspect of the RGB backlight is that you can tell it's not a phosphor-- it is pumping three hard, pure colors. I wear glasses and the chromatic aberration is more jarring with the RGB light source. On a phosphor screen, you get a soft reddish tint or soft bluish tint on edges when not looking ahead through the center of the glasses. With an RGB backlight, you get perfect colored edges.

Thank you for taking the time to write such a thorough review! Really nice and informative!

I too think Lenovo engineers could have cut something off the lid frame. It just appears unnnecessarily big...

Nice spiel. Could you elaborate a bit on the keyboard issue compared to older keyboards, and also what type to shop for as a replacement(and, I suppose, where to get one and $$$ involved?) I've not dealt w/keyboards, didn't know they were interchangeable with other model Tpads.

So it turns out the "backlight controls don't work after suspend" problem the W510 folks are complaining about hits the W701 too. In both Linux and Windows, the backlight brightness controls don't work anymore after suspend or hibernate. it is 100% reliable. Only a reboot brings it back.

It seems the W510 users have been complaining about this since day 1 and Lenovo has not yet acknowledged the problem. We need to make sure they understand this is a real issue.

Could it be a driver issue?

Excellent write up!

My 701 just arrived this morning. After a few hours of time with it, I decided I cannot live with the compromised keyboard and deck height of the palm rest. Lenovo has turned a 17" notebook into a behemoth machine. Why they chose to use such a convoluted keyboard arrangement is beyond me. It's the worst ThinkPad keyboard I've ever experienced. I'm sure they have good reasons for the way it's designed, but it certainly doesn't work for me. The overall design is rather puzzling. As nicely as they package their T series, someone was sleeping when they approved this huge box. I could go on and on about a wide variety of issues, but I won't bore you...

Mines going back.

Cheers...

AMATX wrote:Nice spiel. Could you elaborate a bit on the keyboard issue compared to older keyboards, and also what type to shop for as a replacement(and, I suppose, where to get one and $$$ involved?) I've not dealt w/keyboards, didn't know they were interchangeable with other model Tpads.

Quite a few people who touch type (I don't personally) have complained that the new lightweight keyboards Lenovo is using increase typing error rate because they're flexy, smooshy, inconsistently noisy, and not as good for speed typing. I object to the noisiness and the odd feel; there's a weird creakiness to the new keyboards.

Older 'solid backed' FRU replacements that are a stiffer build can be had for $30-$90 depending on where you get them and how lucky you are. I just ordered a T60 42T3109 keyboard from an eBay seller for $60. You can also call up IBM and have the send you one for about the same cost.

Marin85 wrote:I too think Lenovo engineers could have cut something off the lid frame. It just appears unnnecessarily big...

Yeah, the whole notebook has a decidedly 'f*** it' approach to space management. There's some charm to that. Still... I'd take 1" off all sides *or* 1/4" thinner *or* the keyboard 1" farther forward with the Wacom completely replacing the trackpad, which I have turned off anyway. If Lenovo released that next week, I'd buy it all over again. But that's dreamin'.

Marin85 wrote:Could it be a driver issue?

Not likely... the problem is identical in Windows and Linux. In Linux I have the luxury of the kernel source and had the ACPI driver spit out the BIOS calls and results. The kernel is submitting proper backlight requests to the BIOS and the BIOS is responding with success codes, so the BIOS *thinks* it's controlling the backlight.

There's a backlight interface exposed by the nVidia hardware; this interface works both before and after suspend, My guess is that the BIOS is trying to glue the classic Thinkpad backlight interface to the new nVidia hardware, and the glue blows up after resume.

archer6 wrote:Excellent write up!

My 701 just arrived this morning. After a few hours of time with it, I decided I cannot live with the compromised keyboard and deck height of the palm rest. Lenovo has turned a 17" notebook into a behemoth machine.

The keyboard is an easy fix-- though I agree it's a sin we have to fix it.

I figured out it's not the deck height as much as it is the keyboard being just a bit higher and bit farther back. My wrists hit the front lip of the machine in a way they wouldn't if the machine was thinner or the keyboard was farther forward. I'm actually getting used to it (at my main desk, I just pop my chair up an inch higher).

archer6 wrote: Why they chose to use such a convoluted keyboard arrangement is beyond me. It's the worst ThinkPad keyboard I've ever experienced. I'm sure they have good reasons for the way it's designed, but it certainly doesn't work for me. The overall design is rather puzzling.

It's the same keyboard layout used in all the full-sized machines since the T60. I have a T60 keyboard on its way to replace this creaky thing.

archer6 wrote: As nicely as they package their T series, someone was sleeping when they approved this huge box. I could go on and on about a wide variety of issues, but I won't bore you...

Mines going back.

Cheers...

Yeah, not for everyone. I'm deciding I like it. 4:3 would have been better, Wacom *instead* of trackpad would have been better, etc... Styling and size-wise, it's an anti-Mac and that appeals to me for a bunch of reasons.

I have a 'good' keyboard coming, and the BIOS bug will get sorted (and if it doesn't, Linux already has a grip on a workaround-- just talk to the nVidia backlight directly and skip the BIOS.) If that's all that's wrong with a machine bought the day they were released, I'm pretty happy.

Nice writeup.

The physical layout of the keyboard, screen, etc., is identical to the W700, so no surprises there.

Regarding replacing the trackpad with the Wacom tablet, that would force you to use the pen for everything, meaning you'd have to put it down to type, then pick it up again to move the mouse, which would be a major pain for touch typists. I suppose that if you were to instead take off a shoe, then grasp the pen with your toes... hmm. But the pen is certainly useful for graphics tasks.

I haven't had any issues with the W700's keyboard, although I only occasionally use it with a regular desk. I created a custom laptop table from off-the-shelf parts (~$70-100) which floats above your chair/couch/bed without requiring any physical support or legs beneath the desk itself. It rolls/pivots on casters that are off to the side (so they can't get tangled up with your chair/couch/bed or your legs). It's inclined 15-20 degrees toward the user (with click-stops for different inclination angles), with adjustable height, plus a horizontal side-table for holding papers, or a reading stand, netbook, etc. Anyway, it's better than having the W70X crush your legs!

BTW, Xiphmont, if you play MP3 audio files on the W701 (no video files, just plain audio files), do you get any stuttering/breakup/clicks/pops in the sound, say every 30 seconds or so under Windows 7?

Also, if you shut down the laptop from Windows 7, but leave it plugged into AC power with the lid/display UP (and with a fully-charged battery installed), do you feel any heat over the course of say a half-hour above the rear corners of the laptop's base?

And have you gotten the tablet and color-calibrator to work under Linux?

Thanks, and good luck!

QFoam wrote: Regarding replacing the trackpad with the Wacom tablet, that would force you to use the pen for everything, meaning you'd have to put it down to type, then pick it up again to move the mouse, which would be a major pain for touch typists. I suppose that if you were to instead take off a shoe, then grasp the pen with your toes... hmm. But the pen is certainly useful for graphics tasks.

Just the trackpad, not the trackpoint. I have the trackpad turned off anyway.

QFoam wrote: BTW, Xiphmont, if you play MP3 audio files on the W701 (no video files, just plain audio files), do you get any stuttering/breakup/clicks/pops in the sound, say every 30 seconds or so under Windows 7?

Haven't noticed; I'll try it.

QFoam wrote: Also, if you shut down the laptop from Windows 7, but leave it plugged into AC power with the lid/display UP (and with a fully-charged battery installed), do you feel any heat over the course of say a half-hour above the rear corners of the laptop's base?

I've noticed no heat when plugged in, charged and off, either lid open or closed. I'll check more closely, but my recollection is 'stone cold when off'.

QFoam wrote: And have you gotten the tablet and color-calibrator to work under Linux?

I'm running a stock Fedora 13 Beta install. Tablet works out of the box. Calibrator does not; Linux has hardware calibrator support now, but the Thinkpad's calibrator is not a stock Huey Pro and the Huey Pro driver is not working with it. I don't have any leads on that right now, but the ICC profile generated by Huey Pro in Windows does work in Linux just fine. Just import the ICC profile and it works. That's good enough for me since I plan to keep Windows 7 around.

I have found that Huey is guessing a little low on display gamma (it's set to 2.2, actual is closer to 2.0-2.1). Otherwise, no complaints.

Hi xiphmont,

Nice review, my W701 ships on the 21 of May. I was wondering about that keyboard
My W700 had that same flex problem. Is the display panel Samsung or LG.



Thank You,

What a nice review. The W700 is the "beast" of the "Shaq" of all Thinkpads. lol.

xiphmont wrote:Smooth gradients are excellent for an 8-bit screen, even after calibration.

There are no true 8-bit TN panels. It is just 6-bit panel with better (not that annoying) dithering.

Hi xiphmont,

Speaking of display panels, have you checked the version number of Monitor Information File?


Thank You,

Manuel_A wrote:Hi xiphmont,

Speaking of display panels, have you checked the version number of Monitor Information File?

I haven't... is there a reason I should? I'm not using a prepackaged ICC, I'm using the results of HueyPro calibration. Does the INF package hold anything else I should be looking at?

Nicely written article! Once again I am convinced that "they" will have to pry my three T60s and one R52 from "my cold dead hands" before I give them up to something "modern".

Windows 7 coupled with a solid state hard drive makes a T60 a wonderfully fast machine.

mgo wrote:Nicely written article! Once again I am convinced that "they" will have to pry my three T60s and one R52 from "my cold dead hands" before I give them up to something "modern".

Windows 7 coupled with a solid state hard drive makes a T60 a wonderfully fast machine.

I can sort of understand that... I actually think the T42 was the pinnacle before things went downhill for a while, tho no denying the T60s were alot faster and stuck around alot longer.

As good as the FlexViews screens are, they don't last forever. My T42p's is almost dead, and even brand new I almost sent the machine back as unusably dim in normal office lighting. It is nearly invisible in a corner cube with windows letting natural light in, so as nice as FlexView's viewing angle is, the low brightness almost broke it for me, After six years it's only usable in soft lighting and now it also has the classic GPU solder unseating problem, so I'd have to have it reflowed to keep using it.

As for the W701 being awkwardly large, heck yeah, I knew that when I was getting it. It just seems odd not to have gone to a physically larger screen as the space is there. It would be even better to have S-IPS, but I have to admit there are a few things this screen does even better than FlexViews did. The lack of pretty much any banding at all is phenomenal. And let's not even get started on speed. The big reason I stopped carrying my T42p around was it was just too slow to do any work on that wasn't mostly writing. Codec development (my day job)? Fuggedaboutit. I'd much rather carry this behemoth to work in a coffeeshop (and plan to :-) The extra size means nothing really-- If four pounds mattered, I'd go on a diet.

The bulk is... bulky but also satisfying. When I compared it to the original 700C I didn't mean it in a bad way, mostly an informative way. I really do like the unbusy, straightforward styling. After having it for a week now, only the screen not being bigger than it is strikes me as slightly out of place. My typing is back to comfortable, I've gotten used to the keyboard placement. I'm getting used to using the Wacom in GIMP and Inkscape. POST to login in 20 seconds is nice too!

Hi xiphmont,

POST to login in 20 seconds is nice too!

Are you using your fingerprint reader to boot-up your system?

20 seconds is Sweet

I'd much rather carry this behemoth to work in a coffeeshop

Don’t leave it unintended, of course you know that...

Manuel_A wrote:Hi xiphmont,
Are you using your fingerprint reader to boot-up your system?

Yessir.

That said, I do alot of work with my hands and the skin on my fingers takes alot of mechanical and chemical abuse. The T42p would occasionally go for weeks without being able to read my fingerprints. I hope the W701 has better luck in the long run, or I'll just have to go to password again.

Don’t leave it unintended, of course you know that...

[censored] straight. Or are you just suggesting I have to be extra vigilant if I see you coming...?

xiphmont wrote:

That said, I do alot of work with my hands and the skin on my fingers takes alot of mechanical and chemical abuse. The T42p would occasionally go for weeks without being able to read my fingerprints. I hope the W701 has better luck in the long run, or I'll just have to go to password again.

I here you on that,

I used a friend’s fingernail file. One day she asked me what I was doing with her nail file, and I told her I was filing my finger and she slapped me in the back of my head. So that didn’t work, and I had to buy her a new fingernail file… lol

xiphmont wrote:

*****Expletives removed by Moderator***** straight. Or are you just suggesting I have to be extra vigilant if I see you coming...?

I missed the first part of that, but I can read in-between the lines,

And no I will be the One asking you why is your W701 so much slower than mine… lol

I am chomping at the bit waiting for my W701 to arrive…

Thanks for a great and in-depth review, xiphmont, especially as far as the screen is concerned. Did you ever have a W700 that you could compare it to? The very first pic makes it look like a 4:3 aspect ratio until you enlarge it.

You're describing a lot of the issues that I had with the W700, and I'm starting to wonder if I should re-buy one of those, especially now that they have become super cheap, even with the highest-end T9900 on the dual-core side, and the QX9300 for the fastest quad. The screen was also blindingly bright with the 2 CCFL's, and as you noted, the calibrator definitely was very useful. How often do you find that you need to calibrate your display to keep it at acceptable levels?

POST to login in 20 is nice. Do you have an SSD? If not, you owe it to yourself to get one to complement this uber-machine.

Crunch wrote:Thanks for a great and in-depth review, xiphmont, especially as far as the screen is concerned. Did you ever have a W700 that you could compare it to? The very first pic makes it look like a 4:3 aspect ratio until you enlarge it.

No, I never had a W700, though I nearly bought one at last year's 4th of July sale. Decided to wait for Clarksfield as my Nehalem desktop was just so fantastically good.

Crunch wrote: You're describing a lot of the issues that I had with the W700, and I'm starting to wonder if I should re-buy one of those, especially now that they have become super cheap, even with the highest-end T9900 on the dual-core side, and the QX9300 for the fastest quad. The screen was also blindingly bright with the 2 CCFL's, and as you noted,

At least one person on the forum here has complained that the CCFLs on the W700 dim very quickly compared to other brands (ie, Apple). That was one of the things that prompted me to wait for RGB-LED backlighting. Over the past ten years, I've trashed a total of seven mid-high-end LCD screens on my own dime due to the backlights wearing out, and I'm sick of it. (I actually managed to painstakingly repair a few by soldering in new CCFLs, but I've also botched it a few times and destroyed the panel).

Crunch wrote: the calibrator definitely was very useful. How often do you find that you need to calibrate your display to keep it at acceptable levels?

I haven't recalibrated yet. With teh RGB-LED backlight, I don't expect I'll need to very often. Unless something is very weird, this backlight shouldn't wear out.

Crunch wrote: POST to login in 20 is nice. Do you have an SSD? If not, you owe it to yourself to get one to complement this uber-machine.

Dual Vertex LE in a RAID-0, serial numbers 15 and 25! Partly went with Sandforce as the controller is smart enough to barely need TRIM and Linux MDRAID doesn't have TRIM passthrough yet even though ext4 does have support. Anandtech's testing indicates the Intel and Sandforce drives barely slow down over time without TRIM in RAID configs, and the support is coming soon anyway.

I see you went for 920XM, let us know about that I was veeeery tempted, then tempted by the cheap ES chips on eBay, then saw several careful comparisons that indicated the ES chips were not as good as the release versions (the binning was too aggressive, and they're not stable at normal Tj) and then decided I'd be first in line for a 940XM in Q3

Good luck on getting it quickly-- I literally waited for mine since last July!

Manuel_A wrote: My W700 had that same flex problem. Is the display panel Samsung or LG.

I haven't opened the lid, and I don't know how to check otherwise. Do you know?

QFoam wrote: Also, if you shut down the laptop from Windows 7, but leave it plugged into AC power with the lid/display UP (and with a fully-charged battery installed), do you feel any heat over the course of say a half-hour above the rear corners of the laptop's base?

I finally checked this carefully. No heat-- stone cold.

Hi xiphmont,

I haven't opened the lid, and I don't know how to check otherwise. Do you know?

I use PC Wizard 2010.1.94


This will give you more information about your system then you want to know.
Check it out...





I hope this helps,

xiphmont wrote: At least one person on the forum here has complained that the CCFLs on the W700 dim very quickly compared to [LED-backlit displays of] other brands (ie, Apple). That was one of the things that prompted me to wait for RGB-LED backlighting.

I've seen that report as well. I've been using my W700 10-12 hours a day for about a year and a half, and notice that recalibrating the screen does make useful changes after going 2-3 months without doing so. (Note that recalibration works much better if you wait for the display to warm up for 10-15 minutes rather than doing it during startup, although there should be little or no warm-up period for LED-backlit displays.) So the display is changing in some noticeable way during that time period. But I see nothing like a 1/3 dropoff in brightness that the other user mentioned. I haven't measured it, but the display is still uncomfortably bright to use above 90% brightness, whereas that may have been 85% a year and a half ago.

I conserve the display's backlight by having it shut off after 10 minutes of inactivity, and always turn it to minimum brightness if I'm not planning to use if for a few minutes. I also have a heavily used 12-year-old laptop which still has a bright fluorescent-backlit display, so this routine must be working. And whenever I walk into an Apple store, the MacBook Pro displays always look dull and lifeless, even with their brightness turned up to the max, compared to my year-and-a-half-old W700. So YMMV. Some people use screensavers with fluorescent-backlit displays, and screensavers are worse than useless with LCD displays and are the quickest way to age your backlight.

xiphmont wrote: I'm running a stock Fedora 13 Beta install. Tablet works out of the box... but the ICC profile generated by Huey Pro in Windows does work in Linux just fine....

[if you shut down the laptop... do you feel any heat over the course of say a half-hour above the rear corners of the laptop's base?] - I finally checked this carefully. No heat-- stone cold.

Xiphmont, thanks for the info on using the tablet and color-calibrator under Linux. Plus it's good to hear that you're not seeing the overheating-when-turned-off problem that has affected some of the other recently-released ThinkPads.

Given that you created Ogg, you've probably played some audio files on the machine. The reason I've asked whether audio-only files play smoothly is that there's been a nasty bug in the Powermizer section of NVIDIA's video card drivers. It causes the graphics processor to cycle between different clock rates, and under Windows 7 produces terrible latencies in the process, which produce disruption in playback of audio-only files in particular. This has affected high-end laptops from a number of manufacturers, including the W700. NVIDIA has said that their new drivers released with the new machines should fix the problem, so I'm interested to see if this is the case with the W701. If so, then these new drivers may additionally fix the problem on the W700.

Note that the latency problem is OS-specific, and does not affect Vista, only Windows 7. And I realize that your W701 doesn't have the 3800M, so your results aren't necessarily indicative of what will happen with the 3700M/3800M. But it would be interesting to know whether you're experiencing any issues with audio-only playback.

Thanks!

QFoam wrote: Given that you created Ogg, you've probably played some audio files on the machine. The reason I've asked whether audio-only files play smoothly is that there's been a nasty bug in the Powermizer section of NVIDIA's video card drivers. It causes the graphics processor to cycle between different clock rates, and under Windows 7 produces terrible latencies in the process, which produce disruption in playback of audio-only files in particular. This has affected high-end laptops from a number of manufacturers, including the W700. NVIDIA has said that their new drivers released with the new machines should fix the problem, so I'm interested to see if this is the case with the W701. If so, then these new drivers may additionally fix the problem on the W700.

Note that the latency problem is OS-specific, and does not affect Vista, only Windows 7. And I realize that your W701 doesn't have the 3800M, so your results aren't necessarily indicative of what will happen with the 3700M/3800M. But it would be interesting to know whether you're experiencing any issues with audio-only playback.

Thanks!

Funny thing--- I hear the various windows desktop noises stutter now and then, especially the screen calibration sounds. But I've not yet heard any music playback skip, hiccup or stutter playing back audio-only Oggs from my library in WMP with the Ogg directshow filters. I've not yet tried to stress the machine in any real way-- been hamstrung with minor but annoying Linux bugs (I work for redHat, so I'm kinda expected to report everything I find).

xiphmont wrote: Funny thing--- I hear the various windows desktop noises stutter now and then, especially the screen calibration sounds. But I've not yet heard any music playback skip, hiccup or stutter playing back audio-only Oggs from my library in WMP with the Ogg directshow filters.

Interesting. I'm running Vista 64 on my W700 and experience no hiccups in any of the system sounds or the screen calibration sounds (or in any other sound). So something slightly funny is going on.

Anyway, here's the latest on the latency issue with Powermizer in the thread at NVIDIA.

External WUXGA monitors are so cheap now, I just use one of those and disable the laptop display.

Works great in a main locale(home or work), and preserves the laptop display for use in actual portable situations.

i just ordered a replacement WUXGA LCD for my w700ds. My brightness have halved in about 15 months and my old macbook 4.1 17" looks crystal clear next to it.

ebay - $80 plus shipping - and claims to be Lenovo part. If not im upgrading to a w701...

But I did wonder what components I need to plug the LED screen in my W700.... You dont need the inverter - but is there an additional LED control board that replaces the inverter?

Buying my first computer EVER! Will it be Lenovo W701 or Dell Covet?

Hi All. Thanks so much for the detailed description of the new W701 that started this string and everyone's inputs that followed. I need some help. Although I have been computing forever, I've always had a laptop provided through work. When I branched out on my own as a consultant, I borrowed a Dell, which is now somewhat out of date and totally out of warranty. Everyone should have the adult experience of stressing over a computer purchase at least once in their lifetime, should they not?

As I sifted through all the available information, it came down to the two heavy-duty machines mentioned above. I'm buying a system to last me (along with multiple future revisions of Adobe creative suite) for at least 4 years. Although there are a good number of rave user reviews on the Covet (yes, I'm willing to pay a premium for orange) I couldn't find anything on the W701, but love the idea of the integrated wacom tablet. AND, as I know that so much of what makes or breaks true happiness with one's laptop has to do with touch and feel, I want to put nose prints on one before making a decision. I know the Dell precision keyboard, but have never touched a thinkpad.

So, I joined this user forum to see what else I could find out and if there was a way to actually see and touch one of these things. Aside from any advice that you may have for me, which would be totally welcome and appreciated, is there anyone in or near San Francisco, CA that has one of these puppies? Perhaps I could treat you to a cup of coffee and check out your W701?

Thanks!

@ laptop4me: I am in the exact same boat as you (though I would not go for the Covet version since it is a glossy screen). I do have a Thinkpad T60p so originally Lenovo and W701 was a no brainer but due to the delays in releasing it I had a chance to read up on latest (small) issues with Lenovo so opened it up to other companies and that is how now I am still deciding between W701 and M6500. Compared to M6500 there is so little about W701 on the web which could be a good or a bad thing. M6500 has been out for more then 6 months so a lot of the teething issues have been worked out but I still want to believe in Lenovo. However at $5k for a laptop I will need a little more than faith so I am still searching. Keep us posted of your decision.

@ xiphmont: now that you had it for a "while" can you post some updated opinions? Any issues, whether you got used to the size and keyboard and whatever else you think would matter.