T61 Arrived - My First Impressions

[eecon]

My 15.4" T61 arrived yesterday (Monday morning) only 2 business days after shipping out of HK, and I only paid for standard ground shipping.

Very impressive, but I'm not surprised because IBM also shipped my T42 with equally impressive on-time performance nearly 3 years ago. So far so good, regarding the hand-off from IBM to Lenovo.

Now I'm comparing it side-by-side with my T42 15" Flexview 1400x1050 and I am not disappointed with the display quality on the new T61. The viewing angles may not be as wide, but the brightness and visual crispness is comparable for my eyes.

The keyboards feel nearly the same, but then again I am not a speed typist.

General build quality of the T61 is almost as good as my IBM T42, with the nod given to the T42 only because the T61's post-recall 9-cell Sanyo 92P1132 battery wiggles about 2 -3 mm back and forth when latched and the display latches down some what looser than the T42.

Pure CPU performance is stronger for the 2.2 T7500 Duo 2 processor, as I expected. It seems to have twice the CPU processing power of the T42's single core 1.8 Pentium-M. This is somewhat subjective ..... I was running a high CPU utilizing engineering program on both units .... 98-99% on the T42 and about 50% on the T61 ..... both units are running WinXP SP2 Pro.

Also, the fan on the T61 is noticeably quieter than the T42 when both CPUs are running at 100% trying to do similar tasks.

Now I need to decide whether to do a 'custom' factory reset recovery on the T61 (from the service partition) and selectively 'not' install some of the 3rd party software from the factory. I prefer different security programs and CD/DVD burning programs. I've read elswhere here that the latest T6x's give you this option now when doing a factory reset but I'm somewhat skeptical that this may foul up something else on my new system? Maybe the standard control panel add-remove programs is the way to go? Also not sure how effective the System Migration Assistant will work? I have lots of time on my hands to manually transfer settings, etc and maybe that's the cleanest way to go?

The T61 is going to spend about 95% of it's time on the new Lenovo advanced mini-docking station that I also ordered but not yet received. And no wireless roaming, except occassionally while on business trips (via the company's VPN). I will also be using the Lenovo enhanced external USB keyboard while docked, USB travel mouse and a 22" WS external 1650x1050 LCD monitor .... just like I did with my old T42, except I can now keep the lid closed and power up from the mini-dock's on/off button, etc .... at least that's what is claimed by others ... we shall see.

Generally speaking, I like my new T61, but only more time will tell.

[corsac]

Pure CPU performance is stronger for the 2.2 T7500 Duo 2 processor, as I expected. It seems to have twice the CPU processing power of the T42's single core 1.8 Pentium-M. This is somewhat subjective ..... I was running a high CPU utilizing engineering program on both units .... 98-99% on the T42 and about 50% on the T61 ..... both units are running WinXP SP2 Pro.

Well, I don't know how Windows computes CPU usage, but I'd say that's only because your program use 100% CPU on one core, and nothing on the other :)

[ennma]

run two cpu intensive jobs, set one affinity to core1 and the other to core2 that should load the dual cores.

to set affinity

laundh task manager
click process tab
right click on process you want
set affinity

ennma

[NaT]

I believe windows shows CPU utilization by average the %CPU on both core: Eg. one core use 2%, the other uses 100% The averages shows 51%.

[NaT]

eecon, what's your graphic card in T61 ? Nvidia NVS or GMA3100? How does it perform?

[ennma]

I believe windows shows CPU utilization by average the %CPU on both core: Eg. one core use 2%, the other uses 100% The averages shows 51%.

I think that is why the affinity option is available, so you can tell
which process to go to which cpu. eg, one cores uses 100% the other uses 100% the average will show 100%

[eecon]

eecon, what's your graphic card in T61 ? Nvidia NVS or GMA3100? How does it perform?

My new T61 has the nVidia NVS card and one of the two CPU core graphics was showing nearly 100% CPU utilization while the other graphic was only at 2 or 3% during my original test.

Never the less, the T61 is definately able to do more simultaneous processing than my T42 and that's a good thing for me, because my engineeering program would bog down down if I needed to call more variables to the the equations when the T42 was running at 98-99% (with it's one and only CPU core). Now I can run more simultaneous scenerios to obtain iterated structural design solutions much quicker (3 or four 4 compared to 5 or 6 hours. That's all that matters to me.