T60 Design

[christopher_wolf]

Familiar. This was the same problem that some people whined/complained about with the T43; yet I have a T43 and has been as quiet, or quieter, than my friend's T42 which everybody at the time claimed was the quietest. I could pretty much say that I had no problems while others somehow got convinced there was a major issue with the direction that Thinkpad were taking before we were even out of the T4X series.

My uncle is about to get an X60 soon, so I will be taking a good look at it; yet imagine these problems as either uniquely manifest or over-exposed to the point of oddity.

The only parts of the T60 and/or X60 I could imagine giving you any sound trouble are the fan and possibly a 7200 RPM HDD and various buzzing noises. If such is the case, it can be fixed with the TP FCU as it work with both the T60 and X60, the HDD can *always* be managed, and the "buzzing noises" are present on just about all laptops that use the Intel chipsets and usually either goes away on battery or disappears when one toggles the power schemes in the power manager; a little decent work eliminates most of those problems which are, again, nothing new.

[McRyan]

Oh my gosh! I just noticed my perfect T60P is a slightly different shade of black than my old T43! I'm not sure I can live with that. Also, I just got out my precision instruments and it looks like my "H" key is 0.00005 in. out of alignment with the "J" key. I would have paid another $3000 to have avoided that. Oh, and one more thing, my battery seems a little too loose. I'm afaid to use the computer for fear the battery could trap my arm or fly out and injury an innocent bystander (maybe a MAC user!?!). I MIGHT GET SUED!

Hold on...taking my meds!! Oh, there we go, I love it again.

[BillMorrow]

Oh my gosh! I just noticed my perfect T60P is a slightly different shade of black than my old T43! I'm not sure I can live with that. Also, I just got out my precision instruments and it looks like my "H" key is 0.00005 in. out of alignment with the "J" key. I would have paid another $3000 to have avoided that. Oh, and one more thing, my battery seems a little too loose. I'm afaid to use the computer for fear the battery could trap my arm or fly out and injury an innocent bystander (maybe a MAC user!?!). I MIGHT GET SUED!

Hold on...taking my meds!! Oh, there we go, I love it again.

<ROLF>


great..!
and to think that i was NOT going to activate you until you added your location to your user profile..

so, uhmm.. location please..

[christopher_wolf]

Oh my gosh! I just noticed my perfect T60P is a slightly different shade of black than my old T43! I'm not sure I can live with that. Also, I just got out my precision instruments and it looks like my "H" key is 0.00005 in. out of alignment with the "J" key. I would have paid another $3000 to have avoided that. Oh, and one more thing, my battery seems a little too loose. I'm afaid to use the computer for fear the battery could trap my arm or fly out and injury an innocent bystander (maybe a MAC user!?!). I MIGHT GET SUED!

Hold on...taking my meds!! Oh, there we go, I love it again.

An excellent first post if I may say so.

And, might you not please put your location in your profile?

[astro]

Oh my gosh! I just got out my precision instruments and it looks like my "H" key is 0.00005 in. out of alignment with the "J" key.

Actually, I fixed it based on Snife's advice... Pulled it up from the back and it popped back out to the correct position (didn't actually come off the keyboard, though).

Phew! I can throw away my meds now.

[yao]

Familiar. This was the same problem that some people whined/complained about with the T43; yet I have a T43 and has been as quiet, or quieter, than my friend's T42 which everybody at the time claimed was the quietest. I could pretty much say that I had no problems while others somehow got convinced there was a major issue with the direction that Thinkpad were taking before we were even out of the T4X series.

My uncle is about to get an X60 soon, so I will be taking a good look at it; yet imagine these problems as either uniquely manifest or over-exposed to the point of oddity.

The only parts of the T60 and/or X60 I could imagine giving you any sound trouble are the fan and possibly a 7200 RPM HDD and various buzzing noises. If such is the case, it can be fixed with the TP FCU as it work with both the T60 and X60, the HDD can *always* be managed, and the "buzzing noises" are present on just about all laptops that use the Intel chipsets and usually either goes away on battery or disappears when one toggles the power schemes in the power manager; a little decent work eliminates most of those problems which are, again, nothing new.

It can't be fixed the way you suggest and it is the second 60 that I tried. And it neither is overexposed to oddity - I am not crazy about being quiet in the environment where it is not needed - I am happy with the loud desktop I use at home for non music purposes - but 60's to me are the first Thinkpads I own that are simply useless in the silent studio and in library reading rooms. Maybe you never had been using the thinkpads in silent rooms to notice the difference of fan noise between the 60's and 40. I am sure it is OK in the rooms that has the some background noise covering and absorbing it, but I can't sit in the library and keep avoiding people looking at me every time the fan on the 60 starts - it is even on the speed one of around 2200rpm that the sound is heard throughout the library room and noticed by all people around (t40 on speed one of 2300rpm is not heard at all) and I did not find any way to make the fan move slower than 2200rpm - did you? No metter how I play with the fantool from this forum, it either gets too hot of over 70 degrees or it keeps bothering people around me, me included. All it does is extending the interval of fan off and on - without the fantool it keeps getting on and off every couple of seconds while with fantool it is matter of few minuts - but it simply cannot be avoided for very long neither I can slow it down below 2200rpm.

Neither does the vibration of the drive goes away by playing with the OS (at best you can avoid the clicking) - the only help is to put some soft material under the thinkpad to absorb it and not make the desk bellow resonate.

And the electrical buzz though, I did not manage to avoid, it is the least problematic - nothing in comparison to the fan (the biggest problem and noisiest of all) and the HD (somehow managable - I can arrange things to absorb it)
Neither of the above was any problem with my T40 and the earlier machines. It started to make problem to me with the T43P where it was almost as bad as the 60's but somehow managable and bearable. With 60s I simply gave up after trying every advice and tool I was able to dig out from this forum.

It may be I got same bad apples, but the trying made me completely exhausted with bitter feeling about the Lenovo and the new Thinkpads.
I understand your feelings about the 60's and do not doubt or ridicule them in any way (I do not find responses like McRyan's neither helpful nor funny, he probably think that everybody who finds problems doing what he himself does not do is weirdo) - but your objections and opinions clearly stem from different use of the thinkpads. You probably do not record and master music neither you work in silent rooms like libraries - simply said, you do not need silent notebook in your working environment. Right now I am perfectly happy with t40 and the only reason I look for another thinkpad or notebook in general is that I wish for something smaller and lighter with similiar speed and power and as silent and sturdy in construction as t40 to carry for long journeys with me. Any suggestion?

Cordially

Yao

[astro]

but I can't sit in the library and keep avoiding people looking at me every time the fan on the 60 starts

Umm... Not trying to be a troll here, but I would think that the sound of the keyboard tapping is a lot louder and more annoying than the sound of the fan turning on. If you say you're not using the keyboard, then please explain how you go about using the computer when you are in the library...

Furthermore, my T60 (200763U) does not exhibit any sort of vibration whatsoever.

[yao]

but I can't sit in the library and keep avoiding people looking at me every time the fan on the 60 starts

Umm... Not trying to be a troll here, but I would think that the sound of the keyboard tapping is a lot louder and more annoying than the sound of the fan turning on. If you say you're not using the keyboard, then please explain how you go about using the computer when you are in the library...

Furthermore, my T60 (200763U) does not exhibit any sort of vibration whatsoever.

The sound of the thinkpad keyboard is not louder and as unpleasant as the fan and most of the time people in the library with notebooks read and use trackpoints rather than type and in fact 99 percent of them read paper books not using notebooks - so I try to avoid too much typing while in there - BTW do you spend any time with your thinkpads in the silent reading rooms in the library? People come there to study precisely because of the silence, they need to concentrate in a quiet environment, the silence which they cant find elsewhere and you come there with this buzzing that irritates them. I sit there almost every day for few hours and when with x60, than I do notice the people sitting around me to keep looking at me in relation to the fan on-off noise with kind of strange, funny or annoyed look. It never happen when I sit there with the old T40 which is dead silent. Similiar sounds are in the library only when people come with some very old cheap notebooks - but I did not expect this latest of the Thinkpads to be on pair with those. The library is very silent, of course I do not notice anything of the kind in office or restaurants or home where the windows are open to the street - there the notebook noice is 100% covered by surrounding noise.
I have no reason to express some dreams, I simply have to get rid of the 60's because of this and I am loosing money on it. There are three different types of fan according to the Hardware manual and mine is the standard voltage - maybe the two others with lower voltage are less noisy but I cant exchange the fan or play with the fan voltage without loosing the three years warranty - so I simply get rid of the 60's I have, and either try some different lower voltage models such as those with the L processor and lower voltage fan or the ultra low voltage 60's for Japanese market or leaving the Thinkpad family for some more silent or even fanless notebooks available from other vendors, but with the models of 60 that I have tried I believe there is no solutions, except getting rid of them.
I wonder why Lenovo could not manage the fan issue as some other vendors who are already able to bring even completely fanless and yet very powerfull notebooks or use more expensive but better less noisy fans. I love the Thinkpad sturdiness and virtual unbreakability and this stupid noise issue just keeps popping up and pushes me to other notebooks.

Maybe they are bad apples but I cant keep buying and testing and returning them until I find the one silent, as I can never sell them for the price I buy them and living in Europe I have to wait until someone is coming from US to bring me the piece, which takes month or more and the 30 day return is over. Buying them here in Europe means paying double and sending them by post involves huge taxing and VAT. So when I buy it and it is not silent it means loosing hundreds of dollars in each case.

Regarding the vibration, when I put the T40 on the table with HD and fan of it is as silent as death, but both the 60's I had were resonating with the desk when the SATA disk was on. When you hold them in the hand you can clearly feel the vibration, that is not there at all (not the slightest sign of it) with the T40 and 600x when I do the same. I would not care about it, but it produce the buzzing sound when layed down on the table.

Cordially

Yao

[christopher_wolf]

Of all the Thinkpads I have encountered, I have been promptly able to minimize extra noise if there was any; also, I can *guarantee* that, in any library, you will hear sounds enough to block out any noise except for the keyboard (Model M feel for me; noise notwithstanding). It has been my experience that things are never perfectly quiet in any library and there is always random background noise; other people typing, coughs, pages flipping, pencils, erasers, etc. Only if I go to the far end of the library, seek a place where no one else could possibly sit, then turn my system on full and actually listen for the fan was I able to deem it significant by any means. If one is working in an acoustically isolated room, then yes, it might get on one's nerves; then again, in a perfectly isolated room with sound-dampening and no-echos...One might very well go crazy of not hearing any sounds coming back to listen for. Why one would want to spend more than 1 minute getting buggy about the noise of the Thinkpad when one should be studying in the Library is possibly past comprehension. If I wanted to do that, I would record all sorts of different fans, play them back, and compare the differences I heard, then write about it and theorize on how the mechanics of the fan rotor, spindle, and bearing assembley contributed to it.

In either case, if one wants perfect silence, there are other options that should have, if it was an actual requirement for an engineering job at hand, been taken into consideration and not patched up hurridly after the thought when it was evident at the outset that increased levels of noise varied within certain tolerances, none of which could be fully eliminated, and would increase to some extent on the higher performing system. No laptop system with a fan and a fast HDD is going to be quiet, especially not one with a keyboard.
In such a case, might as well get an X41 Tablet with a Flash HDD and simply use the tablet feature all the time.

I have never gotten stares of any kind in the library, for that matter...I can't recall people ever getting such stares; even when a guy sat right behind me with what appeared to be a model of my old HP ze5170 (which had three fans) and started up. Now *that* is something I could hear.

When somebody comes up to me and says that my Thinkpad fan is being too noisey or when I feel it is getting to noisey, I will believe it. Until then, I will just keep on using my Thinkpad for what I got it for which is study, work, and research....If I wanted to hear fan noise I would have bought an old fan unit, a PSU to go with it and haul it around with me; possibly using it as some do with "gentle ocean wave sounds" or "forest sounds."

[yao]

I found it meaningles to yodel about the sound in your library. It is just nonsense - if your fan in thinkpad 60 is not howling as mine it is all just experience against experience and it leads to nowhere.
I never been to US and do not know how noisy the people are in the reading rooms - so it is going nowhere. Here it is about or bellow 30dB and the x60 howling is heard by people around me. If you will try to use the thinkpads in rooms of around 20 to 30dB you will right away know the differencies between T60 and T40. Just measure the background noise in the room where you use them. Forget about the library if you have different experince just think of someone who needs to use the laptop in fairly quiet places of around dB25.

I am just telling you that I use here in the library T23, 600x and T40 and none of them howl as the X60. The fan in them in fact never turns on, while not pushing the processor too far. I am sitting in the library now and this t40 I use is just pure peace and silence compared to the annoying X60. I am sure it is well bellow 20dB no matter what I do with it.
There are zillions of people having trouble with silencing their notebooks or looking for which one is better and worse on this respect and disscussing the library background noise is not going to shed any light on whether the Lenovo 60's are good in this issue or not. The two I tried were definitely the later case. It is in this in fact the worst of all Thinkpads that I tried.

[christopher_wolf]

I found it meaningles to yodel about the sound in your library. It is just nonsense - if your fan in thinkpad 60 is not howling as mine it is all just experience against experience and it leads to nowhere.
I never been to US and do not know how noisy the people are in the reading rooms - so it is going nowhere. Here it is about or bellow 30dB and the x60 howling is heard by people around me. If you will try to use the thinkpads in rooms of around 20 to 30dB you will right away know the differencies between T60 and T40. Just measure the background noise in the room where you use them.

I am just telling you that I use here in the library T23, 600x and T40 and none of them howl as the X60. The fan in them in fact never turns on, while not pushing the processor too far. I am sitting in the library now and this t40 I use is just pure peace and silence compared to the annoying X60. I am sure it is well bellow 20dB no matter what I do with it.
There are zillions of people having trouble with silencing their notebooks or looking for which one is better and worse on this respect and disscussing the library background noise is not going to shed any light on whether the Lenovo 60's are good in this issue or not.

I can assure you that I have used a T43, an X40, and I have heard an X60 (soon to try one) in a environment that was consistently under 30dB (I would be very suprised if it ever went over this and stayed at that higher level for a long time; 30dB is around the sound of a normal whisper about a meter away from the ear) in the library. Typing is the only distinct noise I hear that continues from when I use my system to when I pack it up and go. I am more apt to get interrupted by people walking by or moving chairs around.

The debate about fan noise will continue; although it is very sketchy to stereotype a model set as having uniformly noiser and noiser fans. Different noises, high pitched and low pitched, are heard by human ears differently, let alone different people with varying ambient dB. The "meter stick" used to measure the noise changes from one person to the nest, that is a given...Also, one must take into consideration engineering tolerances when the system was built; yet again, there is variation, but the goal is to keep it within a certain range.

Once you start adding up the variances of these parameters and consider the statistics, you get a certainty that is not near 95% (p<=0.05 for statistical signifigance)....Graphed out, this would be evident in the manifest of error bars. You can't say for sure, or even with a reasonable amount of sureness, that the next Thinkpad of a given line with a given model type will be this much noiser and the user can expect to get this much more annoyed at it because of it.

When all is said and done, one can only get a good feel of it after one has tried out several different models and types and gone through the differences many times over, looked carefully at the requirements for the application that the new system will be implemented upon, and minimize the costs/risks to an acceptable level. I have what I consider to be a very quiet T43...I have also seen loud T43s as well as loud Thinkpads across the T4X Series and T2X Series.

If there are zillions of people trying to silence their laptops (bit large of a number, but it is significant), then there are utilities such as the TP FCU, SpeedFan, etc. Real work does get done about such issues and most have been resolved to a satifactory extent; rarely, however, does it get progressively spurred on by discussions consisting of who is staring at who in the library (or how loud the library environment is averaged over a daily basis) because the startup sequence of a certain laptop matched the 30dB limit and said person had tuned themselves to pickup any sounds above or at 30dB within +/- 1dB...Much more valuable as a auditory lab project's test subject instead of mobile library alarm.

[yao]

then there are utilities such as the TP FCU, SpeedFan, etc.

I keep explaining that these utilities do not help in this issue - at best they extend the periods of the fan on-off from seconds to minutes even while doing nothing but reading from the screen some open webpage.

What will help is either:

1. more silent fan, like the one T40 - being very quiet at 2300rpm

2. undervolting the T2400 to less then 0.95V so it does not keep heating as much as to make one afraid of bringing some demage while being able to go fanless when the processor is completely idle

3. slowing down the speed of fan bellow 2300rpm

so this are the issues I found unsolvable - any concrete help beside getting another notebook and leaving aside the acoustics of libraries?

[meditate2001]

There were 2 different fans for the t4x, are there also 2 fans for the t60 ??

ps.: yesterday i accedently touched a bit(really not much) an usb-light which sticks in my t60 so that it get pressed a bit to the t60 and voila i got a blue screen ! nothing saved...great...
so pay attention with these usb ports. it isnt the best quality, i guess....

[christopher_wolf]

You started talking about the acoustics of libraries, or rather lack thereof.

That's about it; what they have done on the fans they have done. It is unlikely that anything will be changed as far as that is concerned.

Yet I still don't understand how an instance of somebody finding the fan too loud one one unit constitutes a design flaw that is bringing the entire T Series down as well as the rest of the Thinkpads.

And TP FCU and the rest are as concrete as you are going to get without either getting another unit or replacing the fan structure with something custom-made. Such modifications are time consuming and are counter-intuitive as to the whole point of buying a Thinkpad in the first place.

[yao]

Yet I still don't understand how an instance of somebody finding the fan too loud one one unit constitutes a design flaw that is bringing the entire T Series down as well as the rest of the Thinkpads.

And TP FCU and the rest are as concrete as you are going to get without either getting another unit or replacing the fan structure with something custom-made. Such modifications are time consuming and are counter-intuitive as to the whole point of buying a Thinkpad in the first place.

I never said anything that would suggest that these problems of T60 and X60: "are bringing the entire T Series down as well as the rest of the Thinkpads". I still like my old thinkpads more than any other notebooks I ever had. I am here talking only of T60 and X60.
There are numberless issues I do not like about these two but I can live with them, but the sound issue is in my particular situation most important for me and it is worse than almost any cheap computer I ever heard.
Besides all that - it is all like saying - well, you bought just new Rolls-Royce and you pay the full price, did you expect it will have everything at least as good as any cheapo Toyota? It takes you to where you going, so why do you care that you can't close the door, turn off the heating and change the gears? It is going, man, stop complaining!

[christopher_wolf]

Yet I still don't understand how an instance of somebody finding the fan too loud one one unit constitutes a design flaw that is bringing the entire T Series down as well as the rest of the Thinkpads.

And TP FCU and the rest are as concrete as you are going to get without either getting another unit or replacing the fan structure with something custom-made. Such modifications are time consuming and are counter-intuitive as to the whole point of buying a Thinkpad in the first place.

There are numberless issues I do not like about the 60's but I can live with them, but the sound issue is in my particular situation most important for me and it is worse than almost any cheap computer I ever heard.
Besides all that - it is all like saying - well, you bought just Rolls-Royce and you pay the full price, did you expect it will have everything at least as good as any cheapo Toyota? It takes you to where you going, so why do you care that can't close the door, turn off the heating and change the gears? It is going, man, stop complaining!

I fail to see how this relates to that Rolls royce/Toyota analogy; the basic premise of which indicates that the vehicle has to be road-worthy in the first place. Nobody goes off and pays that much for a RR and ends up complaining about not being able to close the door or no heating; if they do, RR will either fix it or point out that the customer got it almost custom-made for them and paid a huge price for it. If, at that point they weren't sharp enough to pick out a basic function which was inoperable before paying for it, then the customer pretty much deserves it. In any case, that has nothing to do with fan or other noise issues on the Thinkpads.

The notion of the 30-day period comes in here; try it out, if you don't like it, return it, talk to us, and we will send you another unit. Certainly a better option than some of the "Warranty" RMAs I have heard of as of late. I agree that, if one pays that much for a Thinkpad, they should get what they are expecting to get; however, if they are *that* serious, they should also be able to understand that there variations in the way each unit was built and what each Series model was optimized for. Would one use an X60 with integrated graphics to do CAD work? Perhaps not; unless there were other, more important factors to consider (such as an overwhelming need for mobility).

I still don't see what "noise issue" persists in the T60 series that either didn't exist on the T4X Series or was dramatically increased above the T4X Series of Thinkpads. This is the samething that went on with the T43 and it proved to be significantly over-stated from different temperature profiles to how it got worse over time. If that is the case, I have yet to experience it. I have also yet to be able to predict the fan noise levels *exactly* on the next Thinkpad that gets sold by IBM/Lenovo...I don't know, maybe I am not psychic enough (or perhaps haven't taken enough meds yet) to see into their minds and postulate the future of Thinkpads for the next 5 years based solely on fan noise.

[foodle]

There are numberless issues I do not like about theese two but I can live with them, but the sound issue is in my particular situation most important for me and it is worse than almost any cheap computer I ever heard.

Thinkpads aren't marketed as the "most silent laptops ever!!!" They're robust, workhorse laptops with excellent support. If your situation requires an absolutely silent laptop, then you need to buy for that. To expect a machine with cutting edge performance to run absolutely silently is unreasonable. The CPU will need a fan. The fast spinning drive will make some noise.

There are a number of laptops that are fanless and very quiet. The Fujitsu P7120 and Panasonic W4 come to mind. However, they aren't cutting edge performers, because they have ultra low voltage, slow running processors and slow drives.

Besides all that - it is all like saying - well, you bought just Rolls-Royce and you pay the full price, did you expect it will have everything at least as good as any cheapo Toyota? It takes you to where you going, so why do you care that you can't close the door, turn off the heating and change the gears? It is going, man, stop complaining!

This analogy is pretty broken. If you really think that the new Thinkpads are so broken, akin to a car that cannot turn off the heat or change gears, then I'd suggest you buy another brand. I think your complaints are closer to buying a Hummer and complaining that the ride is too rough. No laptop (or car) will be all things to all people.

[yao]

There are numberless issues I do not like about theese two but I can live with them, but the sound issue is in my particular situation most important for me and it is worse than almost any cheap computer I ever heard.

Thinkpads aren't marketed as the "most silent laptops ever!!!" They're robust, workhorse laptops with excellent support. If your situation requires an absolutely silent laptop, then you need to buy for that. To expect a machine with cutting edge performance to run absolutely silently is unreasonable. The CPU will need a fan. The fast spinning drive will make some noise.

There are a number of laptops that are fanless and very quiet. The Fujitsu P7120 and Panasonic W4 come to mind. However, they aren't cutting edge performers, because they have ultra low voltage, slow running processors and slow drives.
.

Thanks
I do not need "absolutely silent" - anything like the sound from T40 or T23 that I have will be more than enough.

What I need and expect is:
1. that when the processor is completely idle (while you just read off the screen for example) it does not need fan or that the fan is of the same quality as the fan in T40 which is very quiet on 2300rpm - sufficient fan speed to cool the idle core duo.

2. I indeed do not expect the Core Duo to be busy and yet need no fan. But, for the working processor: the T40 fan even at full speed is very quiet compared to the same full speed of fan in 60's. The fan in 60's is far louder at the same speeds than the fan in older thinkpads. I do not see any explanation for that except that they put some low quality louder fan into it.

[McRyan]

Yao,

My response wasn't meant to offend. However, you're flogging a dead horse here. The 60 series is what it is. We can't fix it for you.

That being said, I can't validate your complaints as my T60 is dead silent (I MY OPINION). I don't have an issue at the Library either as there is usually a hoedown going on at the one local to my house (smaller community with many smaller kids).

IMHO it seems you have three options:
1) Live with what you consider inordinate noise levels
2) Return it and try again with a different 60 series or a different brand.
3) Buy and distribute earplugs to each and every person at your Library for use when you arrive with your machine.

Bottom line is that Laptops ARE machines; machines make noise (some more-some less). Lenovo engineering probably didn't use ambient Library noise levels as a design criterion - nor should they have. They designed the thing to have more processing power and that it does.

[yao]

That being said, I can't validate your complaints as my T60 is dead silent (I MY OPINION). I don't have an issue at the Library either as there is usually a hoedown going on at the one local to my house (smaller community with many smaller kids).

IMHO it seems you have three options:
1) Live with what you consider inordinate noise levels
2) Return it and try again with a different 60 series or a different brand.
3) Buy and distribute earplugs to each and every person at your Library for use when you arrive with your machine.

I am sitting in the reading room of library of the academy of science - very old building with some old professors - not some local library where people come to borrow books and carry home, maybe that is why I did not get my point across and have been missunderstood with the silence in here.

I cant return the thinkpads as I am in Europe and and have to buy them in US and have them caried here whenever some friend can take it into his briefcase to the airplane - to avoid the huge prices in here (they cost double when bought in here).
My hope lies in the X60s with the low power L core duo which I expect will emit much less heat than the T2400 and let the fan off while being idle. Or trying to buy the X60s Japanese edition that seems to consume the lowest power of all the 60's and hopefully will have the quiter fan as well.

I just hoped I can get rid of all other notebooks I have and get one which I can use for heavy duty non-silent work of mastering music and than use the same machine for some silent reading in the library or for music recording - where the processing power is also minimal but some silence is needed.

I will still try and keep the option of buying the set of earplugs for the readers in our library as the last option, even though it seems easiest and cheapest of them all.

[christopher_wolf]

That being said, I can't validate your complaints as my T60 is dead silent (I MY OPINION). I don't have an issue at the Library either as there is usually a hoedown going on at the one local to my house (smaller community with many smaller kids).

IMHO it seems you have three options:
1) Live with what you consider inordinate noise levels
2) Return it and try again with a different 60 series or a different brand.
3) Buy and distribute earplugs to each and every person at your Library for use when you arrive with your machine.

I am sitting in the reading room of library of the academy of science - very old building with some old professors - not some local library where people come to borrow books and carry home, maybe that is why I did not get my point across and have been missunderstood with the silence in here.

I cant return the thinkpads as I am in Europe and and have to buy them in US and have them caried here whenever some friend can take it into his briefcase to the airplane - to avoid the huge prices in here (they cost double when bought in here).
My hope lies in the X60s with the low power L core duo which I expect will emit much less heat than the T2400 and let the fan off while being idle. Or trying to buy the X60s Japanese edition that seems to consume the lowest power of all the 60's and hopefully will have the quiter fan as well.

I just hoped I can get rid of all other notebooks I have and get one which I can use for heavy duty non-silent work of mastering music and than use the same machine for some silent reading in the library or for music recording - where the processing power is also minimal but some silence is needed.

I will still try and keep the option of buying the set of earplugs for the readers in our library as the last option, even though it seems easiest and cheapest of them all.

Option of doing what? I would like to see that.

I have used my T43, despite how much has been made of people who like to whine about fan noise, in the library and it has been far quieter than even a "cheap" Sony Vaio Ultraportable. That said, buying everybody else earplugs is not only laughably ridiculous, it is also probably the most in-elegant solution one could think of.

And, despite ye olde buildings and ye olde professors (perhaps doing ye olde snooze on the couch which might sound like fan noise), it is still a library; the question now is what is more important, listening to fan noise, music, or studying? I should say studying is the best. If the fan noise gets to be an issue for oyu because you are so close, put on some tunes on the earphones and then concentrate on working; else, turn the fan down.

And, if you have ever been to the Main Stacks or Engineering Library at Berekely, I think you will find the reading stalls the quietest place on campus....Nobody bothering me, I have sat and studied there for, literally, the whole day (falling asleep is a real danger) with only seeing one other person walk by. And I assure you, when I concentrate I *mean* to concentrate; the music doesn't blare, the books get read, and the work gets done. All this whilst my T43 happy works away. If there was a problem with it, I think I would have noticed by now. Silence isn't an option in these areas, it is [censored] near the code.

You can try consuming less and less power, but you will still have a fan and you will still be prone to those "buzzing" noises. There is no guarantee that you will get a "silent" model in the slightest. Perhaps the X60s is your best bet, perhaps it will still be as noisey.

I find it hard to believe there are heavy duty notebooks out there that don't spin their fans (most of them have more than one) when they get even the slightest hint of a load from the chipset. If these are the Toshiba, Sony, Acer, and HP media notebooks I have seen...Then there is little chance of them being quiet.

[yao]

You keep shooting at the wrong targets. I am just telling you again and again that there are fans far more quiet at the same rpm's such as the one in my t40. It is meaningless to discuss the libraries and earplugs or wherever else you keep hitting outside the issue - if the sound does not bother you or people around you it does not mean it is same all over the universe. The fan in my T40 at full speed is far more quiet than fan in x60 at minimal speed.

[McRyan]

Option #3 was a jokie joke!

Obviously no one would buy earplugs and distribute them because the Library Patrons keep changing (new ones each time). Then there are the Professional Earplug collectors who would each want 2-3 sets. It could run into thousands!!

Actually, I forgot a fourth option which would be a protable, self contained cone of silence. One would set it up and climb in after arriving at the Library and determining that visiting Patrons that day included a high percentage of hyper sensitive Laptop fan monitors.

[yao]

Option #3 was a jokie joke!

I never took it for anything else. It is just christopher who seemed to get cought on that one.

Besides I am completely confused about the music versus study importance issue he keeps hitting - I study in the library and make living by recording and mastering the music in the home and in studio - these two activities are not interrelated and neither is less or more important than the other - I just mentioned it to explain that I am trying to use the same notebook while doing them. But is completely besides the point except that it explains why do I need somewhat more silent notebook than the howling 60's as I have them now. There is no meaning in attacking why does the loud fan bothers me or does not bother someone else. Whether or not it can be made little more silent by lowering the fan speed or changing the fan for a a more silent one or whether the processor can be kept bellow 60 while completely idle so that fan is not needed at that time are the only relevant question worth of taking as target in this issue.

[christopher_wolf]

Option #3 was a jokie joke!

I never took it for anything else. It is just christopher who seemed to get cought on that one.

Besides I am completely confused about the music versus study issue he keeps hitting - I study in the library and make living by recording and mastering the music in the home and in studio - these two activities are not interrelated and neither is less or more important than the other - I just mentioned it to explain that I am trying to use the same notebook while doing them. But is completely besides the point except that it explains why do I need somewhat more silent notebook than the howling 60's as I have them now. There is no meaning in attacking why does the loud fan bothers me or does not bother someone else. Whether or not it can be made little more silent by lowering the fan speed or changing the fan for a a more silent one or whether the processor can be kept bellow 60 while completely idle so that fan is not needed at that time are the only relevant question worth of taking as target in this issue.

Which is exactly what I answered with the TP FCU a few posts back; either that or turn the settings down to low...That's it. What is so difficult about that as to cause a massive hijacking and diversion of a un-related thread I have no idea.

[yao]

Which is exactly what I answered with the TP FCU a few posts back; either that or turn the settings down to low...That's it.

It does not work that way - with TP FCU you can at best extent the on-off periods from seconds to minutes - but after some minutes it again heats up above the sixty even while it is running idle and that I feel is too much to allow and let grow further without triggering the fan to run at least at the lowest speed to put it back few degrees. But this cheap fan is very loud even at that speed of 1 being 2300rpm - that is why I complain about it. And there is no way to run it slower than 2300rpm - is there? The internal mechanism triggers much earlier already at bellow 40 making it on-off every few seconds. With TP FCU it is with best setting I can think of matter of minutes between on and off while processor is idle.

What low setting? - I did not find any way to put the processor bellow 0.95V did you?

[GomJabbar]

As a late comer to this thread, I may have missed something in skimming it over.

Would the following solution work for you?

Using the Battery MaxiMiser Wizard, set up a silent profile. For both AC power and Battery power, set the processor speed to Slow or Very Slow. That is assuming you need a quiet setting for AC use as well as Battery use.

[yao]

Using the Battery MaxiMiser Wizard, set up a silent profile. For both AC power and Battery power, set the processor speed to Slow or Very Slow. That is assuming you need a quiet setting for AC use as well as Battery use.

Dear GomJabbar

Thank you for the kind help. But that was indeed the first thing I did even before I started to experiment with the undervolting and fantool speeds and temperature setting.

The problem is that you never get the fan under the 2300rpm and you never achieve temperature bellow seventy even while completely idle.

Meanwhile I found couple of threads like this for example

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=25304

on this forum where number of people report GPU units on their T60 also always around 70-80 degrees C even while idle and some others bellow and that made me believe that is is not some some foulty unit I got but rather large variations of different T60 units.
As somebody said there:

"All these make me believe that the thermal design of T60 is indeed faulty (or sub-optimal at least)."

and he says that three different tech support people from Lenovo told him on the phone these three different Lenovo versions of the story:

"1st person: The constant-on fan is by design. Some T60s are, by design, supposed to run the fan all the time.

2nd person: Some Z60s are supposed to run the fan all the time, but NOT T60s. He said, "if your T60 is running the fan all the time, that is defective."

3rd person: The fan on a T60 should NOT run all the time. That does not make sense because that is a very, very bad design for a laptop (battery draining). T60 is the flagship laptop, and it is NOT supposed to do that. You have a lemon. Return it."


It is exactly what I came to believe now and unless you may pick up from between number of of machines and select the one that heats less than 70 to 80 degrees C while idle, there is good chance you will have to live with the constant poor quality laud fan howling - but I am not sure all fans are as laud as the one with the unit I have.

BTW it seems funny to me that when some moderator does not agree with what you saying about the 60's thermal design he just eaither tries to attack you personaly avoiding to discuss the factual problem and if that is going in vain the thread dissapears from the appropriate forum.

Cordially

Yao