W510 Initial Impressions

[furball4]

Just received a new W510 (4319-2PU) and have some initial impressions to share.

1. I got the classic CPU whine/screech problem. I let myself be annoyed by it for a while, and then followed the advice to disable one of the CPU power-saving features in BIOS. That killed it instantly, completely, and permanently. (phew...) It's the one toward the bottom where the only options are Disabled and Automatic.

2. Keyboard is perfectly solid, battery fits nice and snug, no bad pixels, etc.

3. Windows 7 shuts down the optical drive and then I can't open it no matter what. Sometimes after pushing the button I get a message saying that Windows is powering it back on, but nothing changes. An obvious workaround is to disallow Windows from shutting it down in the first place, but that solution is getting old fast. First time's funny, second time's silly...

4. The FHD screen is quite good. I'm an IPS snob coming over from a T60 Flexview and I'm perfectly satisfied with this one. Viewing angles are miles ahead of standard screens, color reproduction is solid, etc. All in all I think it's probably not as good as the Flexview, technically speaking. But the stronger backlight is a plus, and frankly the Flexview was so outrageously good that the FHD doesn't need to match it.

5. Wow, do these speakers ever suck.

6. The 135w power brick is 6" x 2.5" x 1.5" and weighs a whopping 1.4 lbs. At my desk this is irrelevant, but I'll have to test how a 90w behaves for the road. A quick search tells me I may be disappointed.

7. I'm playing with both Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit, and both are pretty well behaved for such spanking new hardware. What I'm happiest about is that both do an excellent job out of the box at adjusting font and icon sizes to this display's high pixel density. No eye strain required.

[jayk]

Thanks for the info. As a fellow T60/IPS-snob (I own three), it's great to hear about the FHD display. Also glad to hear from someone else who solved the CPU whine problem (the thread over at http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-a ... d-p/219822 is pretty scary). I'd go with the T510 over the W510 mainly so I could use the smaller power brick (and because I don't need the very fastest processor and/or >8GB RAM).

- Jay