My T510 is here...

[lparsons]

And over a week ahead of the original projected date! When I first ordered it said it would ship on Jan 18. I received it yesterday, Jan 10th. I did pay for the quicker shipping; not sure if that made a big difference or not since it left China on a Friday. I have heard others say that laptops sometimes get delayed coming in, but there was no sign of that happening with mine!

Anyways, my first impressions:

Build quality is fantastic. I did the 15.6" HD+ display and it is beautiful. I haven't loaded much on it yet to really push the graphics but I will soon. I will soon be setting it up to dual boot, as well.

The laptop runs quiet and cool when I'm just doing light stuff. I've got the core i5 (quad core) in here and haven't come even close to maxing it out on anything yet. Once I get Linux on here, that will change, though.

The keyboard is very nice. Similar key travel to what I am used to from my R32s. If I was in charge of design for it, though, I would have made an option for the widescreen laptops to have keyboards with slightly smaller keys and a separate numpad (like the HPs have). I noticed also that they enlarged the "delete" key at the top of the keyboard (they moved the insert key over relative to where I had it before); here I thought ctrl-alt-delete wasn't supposed to be as important anymore?

The other thing I notice right off the bat is that the ports have been moved a fair bit from where I had them on the R32. Of course some of that is just evolution; the PS/2 and parallel ports are gone. I presume the CPU sits near the far-left corner (my left when looking at the laptop) because I can see the copper fins up there through the vent slots. The only connector between the vents and the battery (I opted for the 9 cell right off the bat) is the power outlet, which is larger than the one from my R32. On the other side of the battery I have a modem (didn't expect it to have one anymore!) and a USB. I have a total of 3 USB ports, 1 firewire, an eSATA, an HDMI, a 15pin VGA, and a couple of card readers as well. One card reader looks like it might be missing a cover, I'll have to contact Lenovo about that.

I'm not really used to Windows 7 yet; I hadn't upgraded MS Windows on anything past XP to this point. I already found how to make it look like XP, which is nice. Why it needs such enormous icons everywhere I don't know...

Also, Windows 7 seems to take a while to boot - especially when I don't have any other applications set to start up immediately. I haven't timed it yet but it seems like it may be well over a minute between power up and login. And then more time elapses between login and being actually usable.

I also find the partitioning done a little odd. I will have to play around with it a bit to get it as I like before I then repartition for Linux. I just noticed that the Disk Management tool in windows now has a "shrink partition" option, which is a definite plus. I guess MS realized that a lot of people need to be able to run an OS from time to time that doesn't crash regularly.

Anyways, at this point I'm 28 hours or so in and very happy. I think the price was very reasonable for what I got. I know I was certainly due for an upgrade and as much as I loved my R32 that served me for so long, this new T510 makes the R32 look kinda silly.

[ZaZ]

It's certainly a good upgrade from a R32. Congrats on the machine.

[killer]

@lparsons: So pleased you like your T510. I've had mine for about 8 months now and it is a joy to use.

Boot time is about 60 seconds, which is acceptable to me as I rarely reboot. Normally I just close the lid and send it to sleep. When the lid is opened it is ready to use immediately.

[Alejandro Audisio]

Congrats on the new machine... Im also close to pulling the trigger on a 510, but am a little dissapointed that no new coupons or deals have been announced now that CES is over. I havent checked all the information but have the new models that replace the T410 and T510 been announced??