Sunday, July 05, 2009

Love-Hate Relationship With My Lenovo T61p


I have had my current laptop (company issued) for nearly 2 years now.  In technology years, that’s more like 8 years.  However, I still think my laptop’s hardware specs can kick butt.  So why is it that it takes me nearly 5 min to boot up to Vista?  Could Windows 7 solve my woes? Perhaps…

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To be fair, since Vista SP1 was released most of my headaches with the hardware went away (in particular, the bug with the sleep/hibernate feature).  What is taking my laptop 5 minutes to boot up?  What is Vista doing that brings my machine to a halt when booting?  What apps are being loaded that suck the RAM out of my machine?

My laptop is a Lenovo T61p, souped up with 4 GB or RAM, which are fully utilizable by the 64-bit edition of Vista Enterprise.  On top of that it has a pretty decent video card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M with 256MB dedicated graphics RAM.  It also sports an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz CPU.  Overall, I get a nice 4.8 on the Windows Experience Index).

This laptop has all the potentials to be a speedy work horse.  It includes 3 USB ports and 1 FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3-in-1 card reader, DVD-ROM, and a 7200RPM hard drive.  For a model that has been out on the market for the last 2 years, I would say that the only things that have seriously improved in laptops are the newer Quad-core CPUs, faster graphics, and bigger hard drives.

I have seriously considered re-paving the machine with Windows 7 for the next while, but the only thing keeping me from it is the downtime while I re-install all my required apps.  If/when I do that, I will definitely post my updates and opinions on the process right here.  I must say that Win 7 64bit, which is running on a secondary drive on my home desktop, has been a very stable and pleasant experience “out of the box”, much different than my first year on Vista.

I wonder what will be the replacement for the Lenovo T61p, under my employer’s equipment lease program – perhaps the W500?

3 comments:

Colin Z said...

My money is on the T series du jour

Kyle Finley said...

I'm sure you know my opinion of that exact lappy was that it is a total POS. Mine lived in my closet with a broken drive for over a year. :) I'm tellin ya man just go Mac. Trust me once you do you will never go back. hah

Anonymous said...

The screen is nice on that thing though. And btw, it fits perfectly into the MacBook Pro 15" (previous version not the current). Don't ask how I know. :)