First week experience with T61P(SXGA+), and PROBLEMS

[mike20030405]

Hardware:
1. The building quality is very good, but NOT great. The screen is bright and sharp, but view angle is BAD. Keyboard is ALPS and good, but NOT great.
2. On the both side of the LCD screen there are two slots(about 1/2mm wide) from which I can see clearly the tips of backlight lamps(with angle >160). I've never seen this with any laptop. Has anyone ever checked with your LCD at that angle? Does it mean a assembling defect?(I will post the photos)
3. The top lid is not solid as T60 I owned 5 months before. When I pressed the T60 lid I was not able to see any effects with the LCD. But, with the T61P, I can see the ripple clearly. The harder push the bigger ripples. The lid coat feels like leather, totally different with T60.
4. The plastic strip between the top edge and top row buttons feels pretty weak. not totally flat, and seems some holes/caves under the strip.
5. The palm rest(both sides) pretty NOT solid. The right palm rest is pretty warm(with Energy Star Plan). It is very danger to hold a corner of the machine with one hand.
6. The 9 cell battery is HEAVY and slightly wobbles, about a millimeter up and down. How can I can make it tighter?
7. Making the R&R discs is faster. With T60 and XP, I need about 2 hrs to make R&R discs, but with T61P and Vista I spent less than 1 hr.

Software(native OS is VISTA HOME Premium):
1. Vista LOOKS good, but [censored] the HD runs all the time. How come the HD so busy? especially at the first 5 minutes after I login in? I have disabled TMM/system restoring/indexing and many other thing. I check the task manager all the time, and don't see many HD read/write operation there.
2. [censored] again the fan! runs always and so noisy! With Energy Star Plan the fan runs still. With Maximum Battery Life Plan(with AC and set brightness to top level), the fan is still running all the time. I created my own power plan, but didn't know how to adjust the fan speed level directly. Is the tpfancontrol helpful to decrease the noise?
Some guys mentioned the power adapter's mosquito kind noise, but I can hardly notice it, only when I hold the adapter closing to my ear. The fan noise is 50 times louder than that.
3. I shrank the preload C partition to create 18G empty space for OpenSUSE 10.3. After I installed OpenSUSE the "ThinkVantage" key doesn't work at booting time(too bad). The OpenSuse Cube is cool, and installing nVidia driver and wireless card was straight.
4. The fan makes same noise in OpenSuse as in Vista.
5. OpenSUSE KDE dead after I tried to testing standby/hibernating. Before login everything is fine, but when I type in password to login in KDE, the screen crashed. I have to Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to stop xserver, and reboot with command line. SaX2 can't fix it. With the installation DVD not able to Rescue or Repair the OpenSUSE. I tried to login with Gnome and got in surprisedly. So weird. How can I fix the KDE environment in Gnome environment?
Seems the OpenSUSE is not stable yet, at lease not good as 10.2.
6. Because the KDE dead I guess it was my fault not choose to upgrade the BIOS in VISTA, then I went back to VISTA. Now the VISTA is much slower than before. I will upgrade BIOS today,and see what next.

Sorry about my English, and I have mixed all stuff in this post, just wanted to help others to make decision, and hear some suggestions.
Thanks for your time and patience. Any advices would be appreciated.

[Troels]

5/6.
With opensuse 10.3. the fingerprint reader is recognized automatically, whcih 10.2 did not. 10.3. uses pam-thinkfinger. However KDE does not support it, and will crash back to console after you log in, no matter if you use the finger print reader or not. It's a bug with KDE/KDM and has been since like 2005 or something.
See the section "KDE" at the bottom: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_en ... hinkFinger

edit:

3.
Your boot loader has owerwritten the master boot record containing the "link" that the thinkvantage button had with a boot sector on a seperate partition. I.e. if you want to keep functionality, DON'T use Lilo, but Grub instead.
I don't think there's anyway to tell the installation that Lilo should keep the record for the hidden service partition and the key binding...

2. tp-fancontrol works nicely for me, but on a T60p - should work for you also. However, opensuse 10.3 does consume more battery power than winxp - generally any linux distribution does, prolly because some of the power saving modes of different components aren't known.

[Crunch]

Unfortunately, your LCD is no longer an IPS Flexview, as Lenovo was not able to find a manufacturer that could meet its strict quality requirements.

I love my T60p, and was thinking to swap out my 15" SXGA+ with a UXGA one. Due to a variety of reasons, however, I will not do so. Instead, I will likely buy another one with a UXGA display, which still has a 15" and UXGA w/IPS, such as the 2623-DDU. I find it very unfortunate that the first Thinkpad designed by Lenovo (T60/p's were still IBM's design with the IBM logo), the quality of the T61/p's seem to have taken a step backwards. At the very minimum with the LCD's.

[erik]

Unfortunately, your LCD is no longer an IPS Flexview, as Lenovo was not able to find a manufacturer that could meet its strict quality requirements.

mike20030405's panel is a 14.1" SXGA+.   those were never IPS flexview.

[mike20030405]

Thanks for your guys replies, especially for Troels.

Troels: Is there a way to add the R&R partition to grub booting list? In default the OpenSUSE had already installed grub. I still want the ThinkVantage button working.

Edit: From this link seems the R&R partition could be added to grub. Will try it.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Pre-Installation_steps

Last night I updated BIOS in Vista, and updated some very necessary packages, still struggling with the fan noise(Not try tpfancontrol yet). I disabled turbo memory, but hard drive is still annoying me.

For OpenSUSE part, instead of seeking the solution to fix the KDE, I thought it was better to reinstall the OpenSUSE 10.3(this time 32bit version) coz I had downloaded 32bit version already.
After I installed opensuse and rebooted to opensuse, I got a black screen. This time the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace didn't work anymore(weird worked very good for 64bit). I tried sax2 with many different options, and finally "sax2 -r -m 0=vesa" did the job to reset the graphic adapter.
With the built in 1KMB adapter I installed nVidia graphic card. Didn't try compiz fusion. A weird thing is in both 64 bit and 32bit Opensuse 10.3 I could only install the wireless adapter through source package.

I will report other issue in case.[/url]

[Crunch]

Unfortunately, your LCD is no longer an IPS Flexview, as Lenovo was not able to find a manufacturer that could meet its strict quality requirements.

I love my T60p, and was thinking to swap out my 15" SXGA+ with a UXGA one. Due to a variety of reasons, however, I will not do so. Instead, I will likely buy another one with a UXGA display, which still has a 15" and UXGA w/IPS, such as the 2623-DDU. I find it very unfortunate that the first Thinkpad designed by Lenovo (T60/p's were still IBM's design with the IBM logo), the quality of the T61/p's seem to have taken a step backwards. At the very minimum with the LCD's.

Hey erik,

Really? I thought anything SXGA+ or above was IPS? Weren't there X series ones with 12.1" SXGA+ IPS panels? I'm looking forward to getting a 2623-DDU...basically that's what I have except the extra 200 and 150 pixels, respectively. Or maybe I'll get a T42p or T43p. There was something going on with the T43p's that made some people prefer the T42p's, if my recollection serves me correctly. Does anyone know what that was?

[erik]

Hey erik,

Really? I thought anything SXGA+ or above was IPS? Weren't there X series ones with 12.1" SXGA+ IPS panels? I'm looking forward to getting a 2623-DDU...basically that's what I have except the extra 200 and 150 pixels, respectively. Or maybe I'll get a T42p or T43p. There was something going on with the T43p's that made some people prefer the T42p's, if my recollection serves me correctly. Does anyone know what that was?

SXGA+, UXGA, and some QXGA IPS panels were only available in 15.0" models of the A30p, A31p, R50p, R51, R52, R60, T42p, T43p, and T60p.   again, no 14.1" thinkpads were ever offered with IPS panels regardless of resolution (XGA or SXGA+).

the X-series tablets have 12.1" XGA and SXGA+ FFS panels.

the 2623-DDU has a 15.0" UXGA IPS panel.

the "something going on" you're thinking of is with the T43p models; they are generally accepted as being the loudest T-series ever made.   the T42p was much better in both noise and temperature.

[ryengineer]

Hardware 6.

Is it moving like this? :

battery wobble

If so then that's kind of normal with 9 cell version.

Put a duct tape on it.

[jamesqf]

5/6.
...opensuse 10.3 does consume more battery power than winxp - generally any linux distribution does, prolly because some of the power saving modes of different components aren't known.

You can tweak the system to use less power than the default setup. Go to www.lesswatts.org and download the PowerTop program. There are also a bunch of good suggestions there.

[dr_st]

The screen is bright and sharp, but view angle is BAD

That's about as good as it will get on a laptop screen these days. Some glossy screens can give you slight improvements, but nothing will overcome the inherent technology limitations.

2. On the both side of the LCD screen there are two slots(about 1/2mm wide) from which I can see clearly the tips of backlight lamps(with angle >160). I've never seen this with any laptop. Has anyone ever checked with your LCD at that angle? Does it mean a assembling defect?(I will post the photos)

I can see a very small white stripe from the backlight on the sides of my T60. My T42 shows a much more noticeably white stripes on top and bottom. It probably does have to do with the assembly, but as long as the screen works fine and doesn't wobble, I wouldn't consider that a defect.

3. The top lid is not solid as T60 I owned 5 months before. When I pressed the T60 lid I was not able to see any effects with the LCD. But, with the T61P, I can see the ripple clearly. The harder push the bigger ripples.

I can see ripples on my T60. Very clearly. So what? Do you normally press the lid of your LCD while working? I don't think so.