Revisiting an old friend... (Z61t questions)

[sysiphus]

My mother still has her Z61t...and loves it. Though the low-res screen drives me batty, I can see why she loves it. Here's the problem: the optical drive simply doesn't work. Or rather, something with regard to the interface doesn't work (I can swap various working drives in, but they're never recognized in her machine...not in BIOS, not in the OS. Can't boot from CD, can't see a CD in any OS, can't see it in the BIOS boot menu. Really, it's not the end of the world (installed Win7 64 Ultimate via USB just fine), but I'd love to be able to make it perfect for her. Aside from a little keyboard wear, this computer looks/feels like it's brand new out of the box, and I'd love to complete the experience. Any ideas for how to fix this?

Also, on a more general note, any idea why the Z61s are so scarce? It seems like they command an amazing price premium over a specs-comparable T-series.

[dsvochak]

Re optical drive: May be a registry problem. See this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982116

The machines are “scarce” as they weren’t sold for a long period of time and weren’t all that popular when they were available.

[dr_st]

Also, on a more general note, any idea why the Z61s are so scarce? It seems like they command an amazing price premium over a specs-comparable T-series.

Because very few of them were ever made, compared to the specs-comparable T-series.

A pity really - I love the Z61t.

[Mike Blake]

Searching the net for info on my Z61t when I bought it, I found that some years ago a large number were sold off by Lenovo brand new for $500. Sounds like they wanted to get rid of them.

I got mine cheap because it's probably even rarer: a CTO assembled without the standard metal casing. Then again, a lot of the model/types I see listed by folks are CTOs, so maybe this was a common maneuver to save some bucks by buyers.

[schen]

Searching the net for info on my Z61t when I bought it, I found that some years ago a large number were sold off by Lenovo brand new for $500. Sounds like they wanted to get rid of them.

I got mine cheap because it's probably even rarer: a CTO assembled without the standard metal casing. Then again, a lot of the model/types I see listed by folks are CTOs, so maybe this was a common maneuver to save some bucks by buyers.

"CTO" means Customer To Order. Quite often these are sold as a large group to some customer who wants something spec'd a particular way. An example is our work machines that our IT folks in their infinite wisdom specified 512Mb of RAM and 40Gb HDDs on R60s, so Lenovo built them that way. They may have had some CTOs that were part of a large order and there were extras or "overruns".

[Mike Blake]

Oh, I'm fully aware of what CTO means...that's what I meant by people ordering them without the metal covers to be cheap would make more CTO types available around the market.

What hadn't occurred to me until you pointed it out was how corporations like to be cheap and order specific configurations from Lenovo. I did support for a corporation that was strictly IBM for their desktops and retail systems, and none of them (though custom-specced) had a CTO or anything like it in their model/type numbers, so this might be more of a Lenovo thing?

At any rate, I was thinking of individuals being the main placers of CTO machine orders until you enlightened me.

[ajkula66]

"CTO" goes back to at least A31/p, which is 2002 and way before Lenovo days...

[dr_st]

The interesting thing is that there's CTO and then there's CTO.

For example, look at my sig. The corporate T60 1952-F76 is a special customized order by the company where I work. Usually when there is a large batch of machines customized, IBM/Lenovo would not just mark them a "CTO", but issue a special 3-character "type", which you can look up on their website, and see all the details. However, it will not be found in the Tabook, nor in any official reference sheet, US or worldwide - these contain only preconfigured models (types ending with U for US, and G for global).

You are probably right that individuals are the main placers of "true" CTO orders, the kind where the machine will be actually marked as "CTO".