Moving on from Thinkpads for nw

[Temetka]

Well all,

It has been a wonderful journey in Thinkpad land so far. I have learned a lot about what I consider to be the best line of laptops on the planet. Ranging from ancient pre-Pentium machines, to i7 beasts and everything in between. I have personally owned all the Thinkpads in my signature and a few that aren't listed.

So why then am I moving on to another manufacturer? Hear me out.

I got a free Dell. Not just any Dell, but a really nice one that smokes my old T61 which I just gave to a good friend of mine.

It's a Dell Precision M4500.

Specs:

Quad Core i5
4GB DDR3 <-- Soon to be 16GB
500GB Seagate HD
Nvidia Quadro FX 880M 1GB
WWAN (which I won't use, no $$ for contract)

It also has an SD slot which is a huge deal for me. Previously I was using a PCMCIA adapter to transfer stuff from my SD cards to my laptop. It was slow. The internal slot on this machine is about 3x as fast as the PCMCIA card was.

I also have an Express slot should I decide to by a card for it. Also has a firewire, 4 USB ports, e-sata, an SC slot.

LCD is a little low res at 1366x768 but to these tired eyes it looks great.

I haven't owned a wide screen laptop since my old Powerbook G4. I forgot how nice it is.

The price for the machine was perfect. Free, as in beer.

Oh I will probably come back to Thinkpads. Heck I'd do it now if someone had a machine of similar caliber they wanted to give me (hint). Otherwise this box is very, very fast and should serve me well for a long time.

NOTE: I will still continue to check in (I lurk a few times a week).

Peace.

[goofyGAguy]

Peace out.

[Temetka]

2 Things.

I'm not leaving the forum. I intend to hang out, lurk, post, and whatnot for a long time to come. I love this place. I meant peace out as in peace out to Lenovo, not the forums here. I see how it could have come across as leaving the forum.

Secondly, I scored a 2nd Dell M4500 today. This one with an 8 core i7.

[dr_st]

Well, it's actually a 4-core with Hyperthreading.

[Temetka]

Yep.

But most importantly, it was free.

Heck I might be able to snag a few more as we roll out more new laptops.

You know why this was e-cycled? Bad battery, only 4GB RAM.

'Tis easier for them to order 25 new laptops, and deploy them instead of ordering random parts and having the field people stop by and wait for repairs. They drop the old laptop off, we image their data and hand them a new shiny machine. Out the door in 30 minutes or less. Sometimes longer if the user wants to hang around and chat with us. It's all one big write off for my client anyway and their employees feel taken care of because of a new shiny. Win - win.

And a woot.

[jayton4]

Yep.

But most importantly, it was free.

Heck I might be able to snag a few more as we roll out more new laptops.

You know why this was e-cycled? Bad battery, only 4GB RAM.

'Tis easier for them to order 25 new laptops, and deploy them instead of ordering random parts and having the field people stop by and wait for repairs. They drop the old laptop off, we image their data and hand them a new shiny machine. Out the door in 30 minutes or less. Sometimes longer if the user wants to hang around and chat with us. It's all one big write off for my client anyway and their employees feel taken care of because of a new shiny. Win - win.

And a woot.

You hit the lottery! I used to work for someone like that. I don't agree with that way of thinking, but that's just me. Some folks are scared of ordering the wrong parts or spending 2 minutes looking up the right type to order.

Also, I thought the M4500's only came with the dual core i5, are you sure it is the quad core?

[Temetka]

Yes, I am sure it has more than 4 cores.

[jayton4]

Yes, I am sure it has more than 4 cores.

Cool. I meant the first i5 model you got.

The i7-720QM is quad core. It is exactly 4 cores, not more than 4 cores. See near the bottom or your CPU-Z right about the Validate button. There is a BIG difference between cores and threads. Either way, awesome score!

[Cigarguy]

Sweet deal but that system with that CPU have only 4 cores. CPUZ is showing as much.

Here's another confirmation: http://ark.intel.com/products/43122/

[Temetka]

Cool. I meant the first i5 model you got.

The i7-720QM is quad core. It is exactly 4 cores, not more than 4 cores. See near the bottom or your CPU-Z right about the Validate button. There is a BIG difference between cores and threads. Either way, awesome score!

I meant I was sure it was an i7, not the core count. I was tired when I posted that screenshot.

This particular machine has 4 physical sores and supports hyper-threading so the OS sees 8. Plenty for me. My tower is quad core, my tablet is quad core. Hmm, I sense a theme.

From what i have read this laptop will got 16GB of RAM too. That would be sweet for my VM's. That's the one thing my tower could do that any laptop I owned was unable to replicate. 3-5 VM's running at once while the host OS still stays snappy and responsive. This laptop also has a 500GB Seagate Momentus HD which I will leave alone for now. It's "fast enough". Unless of course there are 1TB drives running at 7200RPM and with 32MB of Cache. I'd go SSD but they are too small for my needs, and still far to expensive. I will give them a few more years.