New R61 8932A52 Thoughts & Battery Issue

[malcolm99]

Hi all,

A few days ago, I picked up a new R61 (T9300, 2gb, 250gb X3100 15.4 WXGA etc) after being undecided about choosing between the R/T lines.

In the end, I figured that for the same price, the Penryn CPU and bigger HD on the R61 outweighed the very slight size/weight advantage, slower cpu and smaller HD of the T61.

Oddly enough, whilst the Microsoft sticker on the underside of the machine shows that Vista Business is installed and shows the Vista key, and there's a Vista sticker on the palm-rest, in fact the Vista32 recovery disks were supplied along with an XP pre-install. This is fine with me, for now...

My initial out-of-the-box experience was that the machine was well-built etc, but seemed much slower overall than what I'd expect from the latest Intel 2.5ghz cpu. I was a little disappointed at this point.

Other than that, and the fact that the display is nowhere as good as my old R50p's UXGA 15" flexview, its excellent.

I persevered with the slowness for a couple of days, and then decided to do a custom factory recovery from the service partition - this really made the machine as fast as I had expected. I can live without most of the Lenovo software.

I'm away from home on business at present, but plan on upgrading the RAM to 3 or 4gb and clean-installing Vista64 (TechNet) on a separate hard-disk when I get home, just to see what it can do.

The only minor irritation - which I'm sure that is nothing to worry about, is that the battery meter always shows a maximum charge of 99% - never 100. What's up with that?

When I get home in a week or so, I'll put my old R50p on the Marketplace forum - its served me well, but its time to let it go.

Its in pretty good condition except for the fact that the USB ports don't work ( I use a PC card) and there's a very slight separation on 2 parts of the plastic screen bezel.

I was about to basically exile it to the depths of the "unused/forgotten and/or ill-conceived / purchased-in-a-moment-of-passion" gadget vault that I'm sure most of us have, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that there's still a bit of interest in the old R50p Who woulda guessed?

I'm also going to sell my 1st-gen 17" MBP - I feel X300 fever coming on....

[andyP]

malcolm99, welcome to the forum,

glad to see you like your new "toy"

re. the battery; it is probably not charging to 100% due to the energy manager settings. These are set as default only to charge the battery when it's under 96%. To check this you can run on battery for a while untill it's under the 96% and then charge it again.