Just purchased a W500 this evening!

Hi Everyone. I just wanted to share that I decided to purchase the Thinkpad W500 this evening. Hopefully to be shipped December 25th.

Here’s what I built:

Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 (2.53GHz 6MB L2)
Windows Vista Business 64 and Office 2007
15.4” WUXGA Screen
ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 512MB
4GB PC3 SDRAM
200GB Hard drive, 7200rpm with Disk Encryption
Fingerprint Reader and Camera
DVD Recordable 8x
Bluetooth
Intel WiFi Link 5300 (AGN)
6-Cell Battery
3 Year Warranty - Onsite 9X5 Next Business Day

I am not sure if everyone has seen but today Lenovo had a killer deal of and additional percentage discount over their sale prices. The W500 discount was 15% and it’s supposed to expire tomorrow. In total (according to Lenovo) I received a discount of over $900!

I had been obsessing on what laptop to get for the last month and today after seeing this deal that made my decision. I had been considering an HP Elitebook 8530w, but everyone said go with Lenovo.

 

nice choice

 

Congratulations! Great saving too

 

Wow. Impressive specs and price. :GEEK:

 

Very nice specs and good savings. I thought I did good when Lenovo had their EPP program for everyone in mid-september. I saved $600 on the specs below. Congrats, I'm sure you will enjoy it.

 

WUXGA screen, nice. Let us know how you like the screen. Some pictures of the screen and the size of objects on it would be great too. Congrats

 

How much did you pay for???
And yeah, please post some pictures of the screen.

 

1870$. thats huge so is the saving. congrats on your purchase

 

I will post pics when it gets here for you all. Now I have to wait...I hate the waiting game. With tax and 2 day shipping ($10 upgrade) it was $2020 out the door.

 

Congrats!

why did you decide to go with the 200GB Hard drive, 7200rpm with Disk Encryption?

 

I've been looking at the sale prices too, trying to compare that same Thinkpad W500 to the Ideapad Y730.

Any thoughts on how the ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 512MB would compare to the ATI Mobility Radeon 3650 512MB? I think that may come out to be the deciding factor on my purchase...

 

I decided to go with the W500 for the Ideapads are not customizable to my liking and a WUXGA screen was not an option. My current 5 year OLD Dell Inspiron 8600 has a WUXGA and I love it. I just bump the DPI to 120 so the text isn’t as small. In regards to the Video Card, it’s hard to say although I doubt it would be a huge difference. People say that for CAD and 3D programs the FireGL and Nvidia Quadro cards are the only way to go and that “gaming cards” are not adequate. At the same time the drivers are optimized for CAD and gaming isn’t supposed to be as good. The interesting thing is that the video cards are basically the same but use different drivers, but I couldn’t tell you first hand how the Radeon really compares to the FireGL. Actually the computers I use for work on CAD and soon to be Revit don’t have as much power as my new personal laptop. I don’t game and friend of mine for work uses Revit on a Mac with an Nvidia Geforce card and says it’s perfect.

And to answer Mandrake’s question about the hard drive, I guess I don’t really care about the encryption part as much as the speed. I wanted the 7200 rpm drive (which I have on my 5 year old Dell) and wasn’t interested in the 320GB 5400 rpm because of the speed although the storage space would be nice. So the 200GB was the happy medium and the extra security is fine with me too. A friend has a Thinkpad T61 with the encryption and its just an extra layer of security. I do have an external 500GB hard drive that I keep all my important docs, photos and things on that I don’t necessarily need on my laptop. Since I reloaded Windows on my current computer I think I have only put about 30GB on my 60GB drive, so 200GB should be good.

 

I'm leaning the same way. I like the W500 more also but do plan to do a significant amount of gaming on it, so hopefully if it's just a drivers issue I should be able to get around that. Then again, like you said, the difference may be pretty small.

Thanks for the tip.

 

The FireGL card is ATi's card so in theory, if you want to mess with the drivers then you have to search for Radeon drivers.
But since Lenovo has their own drivers with the switchable graphics and all, I suggest you test the performance and if you're really not happy with it, then well, you can always start tinkering with the drivers....

Also, I'm not a real expert on that thing either, just shared my two cents

 

Brain fart! I forgot the W500 has an ATI card, doh! Forget what I said if you read my post. I deleted it from this thread already in case you are wondering.

 

Ordered one myself today. Review to follow.

 

Congratulations