r52 & r60 comparison

[retired]

I've had an r52 for about a year now and have been very pleased. Thought I'd 'upgrade' and got an r60. R52 has 1.8 gpu, r60 has 2.0 core duo. Both have 60 gb/5400 hitachi. Both have 1 gb memory. R52 has 2200bg, r60 has 3945 wifi. Loading small files the r52 is slightly faster. Copying a dvd to hard drive the r52 is slightly faster. For wireless the r52 saw about 20 networks to about 4 to 8 for the r60. The r52 easily, consistently connected to the strongest network. The r60 had a difficult time connecting when it did. Same linux os, same driver, recent kernel for both. I'm quite surprised at the difference in wifi performance. My guess is the mini pci express of the r60 isn't as strong as the larger mini pci card of the r52. Regarding speed handling small files - ?. The r60 seems a bit more solid construction wise, but the r52 seems like it's higher quality. I'm keeping the r52! If I recall right Garvin found his r52 also had better wifi performance than his t60. Curious about other's experiences.

[schen]

My wife has an R52 and I have a T43p that we use at home. We also both work for a school district that issued us R60s as well, so we're pretty familiar with both systems. From our experience over the last 2+ years, the performance of the R60s in the typical "office" type uses hasn't been very good. Purely from anecdotal evidence alone, it's not close, however I must say that much of it has been the fault of the machine itself.

Other than the typical large WAN & LAN issues, as well as the added security necessary from working in a public Primary and Secondary environment, there are a number of other issues that impact those machines as well. First of all, our IT department saw fit to order those machines with 512Mb of RAM and have not subsequently upgraded at all (I did an immediate "unauthorized" upgrade to 1Gb on our machine though), and 40Gb HDDs. Neither of these specifications have been upgraded and the machines have not be given new images over the course of that time either. Of course this compares poorly to our home computers with 2Gb of RAM each, 7200rpm HDD on my T43p and a high areal density 5400rpm HDD on her R52, as well as the fairly highly spec'd graphics subsystems on our computers as well.

In the end, just from our "seat of the pants" impressions, we'd probably agree with you completely: that the R60 is more solid feeling than at least her R52 if not my T43. I'll also have to say that the standard 14.1" XGA display is one of the worse I've used on any notebook computer. You might want to take that with a grain of salt given that my and her last 2 ThinkPads have had either SXGA+ or UXGA Flexview panels in them!