Thinkpad T61

[Clocker]

I'm thinking about getting a Thinkpad T61 with 15" screen. Is there something better that also has a trackpoint (or similar)?

Also, I'm trying to decide if I should pay a little extra (~$40) to get XP Pro rather than Vista. I'm leaning toward XP but was wondering if there is any reason I should consider Vista for the laptop...?

Also, is there a better place to but a T61 rather than directly from Lenovo's site?

C

 

[Fushigi]

Dell Latitudes still have both the pointing stick & the glide pad. Mine also has a fingerprint reader built in to the glide pad.

Well, my Vista laptop (Latitude D830) will happily hot-undock. My previous XP laptop (D800) would get unstable & have to be rebooted. I don't know if it's the hardware or Vista but the new laptop is smarter about what it does when it transitions from AC to battery. For instance, if it detects no wired LAN connection it disables the hardware -- leaving wireless on -- to preserve battery.

Vista Ultimate includes Bitlocker so you can encrypt your hard drive w/out extra software. With IT Security my day job I consider drive encryption mandatory on laptops.

The only reason to run XP is if you have legacy peripherals that doesn't have Vista drivers.

Vista has a slightly different look & feel so you will have to get used to things. But the built-in search is way better & more integrated than XP ever offered. I don't even bother to drill in menus a lot of the time. Just hit Start & type in a partial file/program name. Start-"cmd"-Enter for a command/"DOS" prompt.

Vista on identical hardware will be a little slower but then you're not running it on identical hardware. Vista does more under the covers so naturally it needs a little more oomph.

UAC isn't the bother people make it out to be. It only really occurs when you do sysadmin or other non-user type activities. Personally, I think that's why reviews dissed it so much; they don't act like users & spend an inordinate amount of time futzing with settings that simply aren't touched during the process of actually using a machine. If you power up, browse, edit docs, etc. then you won't even see it. When you run things that aren't done often, like updating the users on the machine, it may prompt.

Vista is the present & future, XP is the past. And if you still want the garish green Start button on occasion you can always run XP in a VM.

 

[Clocker]

Good points! Since the laptop is only used for browsing and editing docs. etc. mostly at home, maybe I'll save some $ and stick with Vista. I wonder if I could save some money and get it with NO OS installed? I could then use my XP install from my current laptop (Compaq M700) on the new machine... Will have to check into that. Either way, I must run some form of Windows so my wife can do some work stuff on it once in a while.

In general, what is the better machine, Dell Latitude or Lenovo T61?

 

[Fushigi]

I'm not qualified to answer that question as I don't have anything close to recent experience with the ThinkPad lineup. That said, my employer, who BTW is a service provider to your employer ;-) , buys thousands of Latitudes each year, almost all are the D6xx series. We wouldn't buy them if the quality was poor.

Also, while evaluating a Lenovo (dunno which model) recently, our IT COO was annoyed at the constant patching - Lenovo patches, not MS - that the device needed. Something - wireless, BIOS, some other driver, etc, - would have a new driver at least once a week. While it's nice that Lenovo was constantly investing in the product the constant updates were a detraction from the user experience for him.

Back to the XP v. Vista thing, the CEO of SANS spoke at my local ISSA chapter meeting this month. As IT leaders he noted that we have a responsibility to know what's current. Not just what's out there but how it works. He started with Vista when it was first released & has gone through the growing pains along with all first adopters. So when someone in his personal network of friends and business associates, including potential clients, asks something he has truly first-hand experience.

 

[LunarMist]

I recently purchased a Japanese notebook that came with Vista Business pre-installed. Restoration disks for both XPP and Vista Business were included at no extra charge. However, I'm not sure about the Chinese brands.

My first experience with Vista was pretty bad, but not as bad as I had expected from all the complaints. The main problems are the hassle factor in getting to and changing system settings, software problems with some older programs that run fine in Win2K and XP, and total failure with some externals. If you have only newer mainstream applicatioons and peripherals Vista may be desirable. I did not wish to spend a couple thousand on software/hardware upgrades, especially since some older software is better and does not exist anymore. I finally restored the system to XPP. At least the option of using Vista is there when needed in the future.

 

[Clocker]

I really like my M700 (512MB P3 850/700Mhz with Speedstep). I just wish the 14" screen had higher resolution. 1024x768 sucks for even general web use nowadays...

 

[ddrueding]

Vista is fine, provided you do things where performance isn't an issue. When I rolled the main machine at home back from Vista Ultimate to Server 2003 Standard, she missed a number of features including the better thumbnails for multimedia files and more intelligent search capabilities.

 

[Bozo]

Vista UAC can easily be turned off with msconfig.
Hibernate is a real resource hog. It is constantly writting to the hard drive. Open a administrator command prompt, type 'powercfg -h off' without the quotes.
Indexing is another resource hog. Uncheck the box in the properties menu for each hard drive. Then stop the indexing service. Unless you spend every waking minute of the day using search, you won't notice the difference. During the beta, search had the most post in the news groups. (besides 'General'). Almost everyone to the person tried to get M$ to reinstall the XP search engine. I have never had search find any file I was looking for, even when I was looking at it in Explorer. And, to the best of my knowledge, you can't search for a computer on a network, like you can in XP.
Networking is another pain. I have two computers sitting side by side. They are connected by a crossover cable. Vista never did find the other computer. It still doesn't. I have Vista Ultimate x64 running on one box and it can't 'see' the XP box right next to it.
Almost everything you want to do is now burried under two or more extra menus. Try installing a static network address. Or share a folder out. Or stop the folder tree in Explorer from jumping back and forth.
Vista, the ME of NT.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Bozo]

One other observation. Vista SP1 just adds more bloat. I haven't noticed any improvements..
Has anybody tried IE8?

Bozo :joker:

 

[Fushigi]

While I do see indexing keeping the HD busy at times when I am not using the system, I've not really noticed any slowdowns from it. I suppose it'd be extra drain on a laptop's battery but then MS probably throttles it back when not running on AC. Dunno.

Anyway, you can search for PCs. I just hit Start - \\av\ to find my AV distribution PC and it found it & brought me right to an Explorer window for it.

Second, it's index is nice. It has indexed my Outlook PST files so my searches include email messages as well as general filenames and whatnot. Very convenient. I don't use search all the time but I do use it more often since going to Vista. It's more handy than anything I ever tried (and gave up on) on XP.

I've not done networking via crossover cable for many years so I couldn't say anything about that. But my Vista boxes joined my local workgroup, and my corporate laptop the domain at work, with no problems at all.

Sharing .. right-click the folder, Share, select the people to share with. Just did it.

And as I had noted elsewhere, VSP1 sped up my machine (higher User Experience Index score). I don't know how that equates to bloat.

 

[timwhit]

One other observation. Vista SP1 just adds more bloat. I haven't noticed any improvements..
Has anybody tried IE8?

Bozo :joker:

Oh great, another version of IE to have to write hacks for and test with. Of the websites I work on IE7 versus IE6 use is just about even. Whereas Firefox use is over 85% the most recent version. The real problem is that I can't run different versions of IE on the same machine without having a separate OS installed in VMWare.

 

[Tannin]

IE 8 should be no issue, Tim. Word is that it actually works as per spec - in other words, if a page displays correctly in Firefox and Opera, it will almost certainly be OK in IE 8 as well.

 

[timwhit]

IE 8 should be no issue, Tim. Word is that it actually works as per spec - in other words, if a page displays correctly in Firefox and Opera, it will almost certainly be OK in IE 8 as well.

I installed IE8 beta and it appears to have broken several of my sites.

These sites render correctly with IE6, IE7, FF, Safari, and Opera. It appears all the hacks I used to get IE6/7 to render correctly are causing problems for IE8.

 

[Tannin]

Damn it, my memory ain't what it ought to be, but as I recall, you should be able to simply switch the hacks off for IE8 and treat it the same as you treat Firefox and Opera. (Or, for that mater, IE 7 a lot of the time - IE 7 is vastly better behaved than any of the older ones were.)

I haven't worried about IE 8 yet. I'll let it slide till it's out of beta. There will be a fairly slow uptake - hell, there is only ~ a 50% uptake of IE 7 as yet - so that should give me plenty of time to sort any issues out.

 

[ddrueding]

I would think automatic updates would make the uptake rather fast, as soon as it hits...

 

[Fushigi]

As we had app compatibility issues with IE7 we blocked the download when it was released (GPO? SUS? I don't know what we used to stop it). I don't know if we ever relaxed that & let it be installed but so far I haven't had any IE7 issues on Vista.

 

[timwhit]

As we had app compatibility issues with IE7 we blocked the download when it was released (GPO? SUS? I don't know what we used to stop it). I don't know if we ever relaxed that & let it be installed but so far I haven't had any IE7 issues on Vista.

Your company might run it's own Windows Update server, which makes it easy to block updates.

Going from IE6 to IE7 isn't nearly as big as the change from 7 to 8. If you try the beta and just browse around to normal sites the vast majority aren't rendered the same way. Google Maps is a good example.

 

[Fushigi]

I try not to run much beta code nowadays and Firefox handles about 98% of my browsing needs so I don't think I'll look at IE8 until it's official release.

 

[Clocker]

I ended up getting this Thinkpad R61.

Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T7500 (2.2GHz 800MHz 4MBL2)
Operating system: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop version 10
Operating system language: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop version 10 US
Display type: 14.1 WXGA+ TFT
System graphics: Intel GMA X3100 GM965 w/ 1394
Total memory: 2 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz SODIMM Memory (2 DIMM)
Hard Drive: 100GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
Optical device: CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo 24X/24X/24X/8X Max
Wireless cards: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
Battery: 6 cell Li-Ion Battery

Total was $710 after tax, online coupon and free shipping.

I got the version with Linux installed because I realize I have both an unused copy of WinXP (that is on my old P3 M700 laptop) as well as Vista Business that I can just put on there. Now, the tough decision is, since neither is costing me anything, which one should I use?

 

[ddrueding]

XP with Notebook Hardware Control.

I get ~25% more battery time with this thing. It rules.

 

[Clocker]

That sounds sweet!

 

[LunarMist]

It's not really doing anything for my notebook, probably because it already has similar software pre-installed. I guess this would be useful for clean installs or some notebooks sold without power saving software.

 

[ddrueding]

I've found NHC to have more features than most pre-installed packages.

 

[Clocker]

Got the new R61 today. What a nice machine! I immediately installed XP SP3 over the SUSE installation. This thing is so smooth it is sweet.

I didn't know the 6-cell battery would protrude out the back a bit. Oh well, not big deal. Still works great in bed or on the couch where we use it....

Downloading and installing all the drivers was a bit of a pain but it was worth the $ saved by getting the Linux version since I already an XP key to use...