Just got my t500, some thoughts

i'm not gonna go through the whole list since you can find those in older posts, but just a couple of things i notice.

IT IS BIG...it's quite bigger than i thought, especially for school but it shouldn't be that big of a problem.

the keyboard is amazing, i can't find any flex points.

runs very cool but there is a little high pitched pulsing whiny sound comming from my hard drive i believe or sometihng else. it's not loud enought to make me worried

i also found that my lid doesn't close all the way. i can see just a tiny bit of light when i look across when it's closed.

a lot of bloatware it seems, yet it still runs very well..

the monitor is pretty good, i wouldn't mind staring at it for hours. i have the high res ccfl one. it is as good as my macbook's screen.

my room is completely silent and i can only hear a bit of the fans...which is actually kinda annoying...until it starts accessing the drive, then a bit of the whiny sound.

i just got it this morning, so i have to play around with it more.

 

You probably have Power Manager installed .. you can make it run even more quieter and cooler by using profiles like Light Use or Maximum Battery Life (sorry I am not typing this from my T500, so I can't see the exact profile names).

That high pitched pulsing whiny sound is some kind of power regulation I think (someone do correct me if I am wrong ). I have seen it mentioned here on the forums before, basically it is nothing to worry about.

I think that it is not too big for a 15.4" computer. I have seen far worse

Congratulations on your new toy!

 

thank you, and i think the sound is actaully my palm laying on the fingerprint scanner...lol

 

is it so big that you wish you had gotten the t400 instead?

 

haha...almost, except that i think that extra battery sticking out would probably annoy me more.

 

yeah good point, i picked t500 for that and for the 3650

 

i actually wish i had gotten the T500 instead of the T400, for the bigger screen.

 

now i'm actually having a little problem with it.

i did a clean install which worked perfectly, thank to the forum and various guides.

but i can't get the fingerprint sensor to work, it seems that none of the driver work for it...i can get the software to work.

and i'm wondering, after a cleaning, what do you install back, the list of programs and drivers are getting pretty long already and i haven't even installed anything important.

and the screeching sound is still there, it's light but i can hear it. can't place where it is, it seems seperate from the harddrive. it seems to come from the center of the keyboard.

 

i fixed pretty much everything, took all day.

the screeching sound was probably from the bios since it detected the fingerprint reader but i haven't installed a driver for it. now it runs very quiet.

battery life is ehh, about 3 hours with a 97% charge, but probably 4 hours after using it. gonna try to improve on that.

a lot of people are having problem with the fingerprint scranner after a clean install. install the lenovo fingerprint software, not the thinkvantage one. somehow that made the difference.

 

I hear a lot of people saying Lenovo is cutting down costs because it is losing money and that they are cutting down their build quality.

 

the quality definitely isn't what it was before, i remember my dad's IBM thinkpad from the mid 90 and i thought very highly from it. the t500 is not that bad, just isn't what it use to be.

 

I'd say the durability yings and yangs. The T30 was very durable, but the T4x machines were much more fragile. The T60s were very good as were the T61s in my opinion, but it seems the T400 is a bit more flexible.

It's sort of a scale more than anything else. Lenovo has to balance quality and price. Every dollar you put into making them more durable costs sales. Many who are here now would not otherwise be able to afford them. I'd still say ThinkPads are a cut above what your getting elsewhere, but the gold standard they once were. ThinkPads are also no longer a small part of huge IBM, where the fact they weren't making much could be overlooked more easily. Lenovo is in business to make money. If you don't make a profit, it's no good for anyone because you go out of business.

Your dad's ThinkPad from the mid 90s probably cost $3k minimum.