Laundry list of problems with Lenovo T60p

I bought a Thinkpad T60p in May 2007, pre-installed with Windows XP
Professional and SP2. The hardware is excellent, as many online reviews
correctly attest. However, the laptop has many software "issues". In
particular, after using it daily for 3 months, I have compiled the following
list of problems. Some of these are reported elsewhere in various online
Forums, including on this Forum.

1. Sometimes when the display turns off (after a period of inactivity),
it can't be turned on again, e.g. by pressing a key or moving the
mouse. To remedy this, I have to put the laptop into standby, e.g. by
closing the lid, then resume it again. Doing so of course drops my
wireless connections. Setting the display to never turn off in the
ThinkVantage power manager has no effect; the display still turns off.

2. Sometimes when resuming from standby, my Wi-Fi no longer works. The
LED says it's on, but the ThinkVantage wireless connection status
display says it's off, and no WLANs can be found. Sliding the radios
switch off and on does not repair the problem. To remedy this, I must
reboot the laptop. This problem is particularly widely reported.

3. Sometimes the cursor starts freezing every few seconds, making it
nearly impossible to operate any programs. To remedy this, I must
reboot.

4. Sometimes when resuming from standby, one or more of my USB ports no
longer work. Sometimes, none of them work. Typical devices plugged
into these ports are a Logitech optical mouse, a PalmOne Treo 650, an
SD card reader, or a USB key. To remedy this, I must reboot.

5. Last week I received a ThinkVantage error, "Irreparable damage to
the battery has been detected. Replace the battery with a new one."
However, the battery seems to work and charge fine. Their
"lenovobatteryreplacementpackage.exe" says Lenovo won't replace my
battery, but doesn't say it isn't damaged, i.e. their program's results
are ambiguously worded. They are also ungrammatical.

6. If I am connected to the Internet, but not VPN'ed to my corporate
network, all applications hang for about 30 seconds before launching.
On occasion, I have seen these hangs even when not connected. Even the
Windows Task Manager hangs on launch. Sysinternals tools show attempts
to access a non-existent "Z:" drive. Clearing the My Recent Documents
sometimes helps. This problem is also widely reported, and it may be
a problem in Windows XP, not Lenovo.

7. Sometimes I close the lid, but the laptop won't enter standby or
hibernate. This may be related to the 30-second hangs just described,
but the hang is much longer, sometimes 20 minutes or more, and it
sometimes happens when not connected to the Internet. It may correlate
with running OpenGL programs, but not always. In this case (or perhaps
in others), the laptop never enters standby, thereby draining my
battery. To remedy this, I must reboot. After rebooting, the laptop
sometimes finishes entering standby or hibernation as soon as I log in.
Sometimes, I have resumed from hiberation, just to have the laptop
re-enter hiberation spontaneously 20 minutes later, due to a previous,
apparently hung, attempt to enter hiberation.

8. The battery icon sometimes disappears. Logging out and in fixes
this problem.

9. Explorer.exe sometimes crashes. Sometimes it restarts
automatically, but sometimes not. In the latter case, I must
cold-reboot the laptop. This may be a Windows XP problem.


On August 21, I attempted to solve some of these problems by updating my
ThinkVantage software. I did this by invoking ThinkVantage "Update System".
That invocation first updated the Update software and rebooted my laptop
(without warning!). Then, using the new update program, I requested all
critical & recommended upgrades, but not optional upgrades. Upon rebooting, I
discovered that I now had no Presentation Director. After installing the
latest version of Presentation Director from the list of optional upgrades, my
system hung during login.

With the aid of telephone technical support in Atlanta, I restored my system,
then attempted a piece-by-piece update instead of the failed automatic update.
This manual process consisted of un-installing and installing updated versions
of my Power Manager and ACPI Power Manager (v1.16 and v1.43), Hotkey driver,
Atheros Wireless driver, and Access Connections (v4.42). Upon rebooting, the
display of my ThinkVantage menus (upon hitting the blue buttom) were messed up,
I received a variety of error messages I've never seen, like "Unknown ethernet
port detected" (from ThinkVantage Access Connections), I saw no more balloon
messages on connect or disconnect of wireless, and enabling or disabling radios
using the physical switch on the side of the laptop did not bring up a dialogue
box, as it had previously. Moreover, my bluetooth was permanently disabled.

After 6 hours on the phone with technical support, 2 of which was spent in
phone queues after being repeatedly disconnected, I restored my system a second
time, and I abandoned the attempt to upgrade my ThinkVantage software. I will
live with the annoyances enumerated above until I can find a better laptop.

-------------------

In summary, I have owned a succession of Thinkpads for about 7 years. My last
one (before the current T60p) was a T42. This is the first time I have had
significant problems.

I suspect that the cause underlying these problems is poor integration between
the laptop hardware, its drivers, and the ThinkVantage applications. The
failure of both the automatic and manual upgrade procedures also suggests poor
software quality control. The inability of Atlanta's technical support people
to walk me successfully through an upgrade, and the long telephone queue times,
suggest a decreasing emphasis on customer service. Some of these problem may
be related to the handoff of the Thinkpad line from IBM to Lenovo, but this is
conjecture. I do note that the download instructions and release notes for the
ThinkVantage software are written in ungrammatical English.

Unfortunately, these problems make it difficult to use my laptop spontaneously,
e.g. to show demos to people during meetings, and it makes giving talks to
large groups a nervewracking experience. Since this is what I do (I am a
professor of computer science), I will never buy another Lenovo laptop. I will
also recommend to my colleagues and students that they not buy one.

-Marc Levoy
Professor
Computer Science Department
Stanford University

 

Well, I'll tell you this. The first thing I did with my Thinkpad was reinstall from scratch. I trust the built-in Windows applications for handling power management far more than some third party application.

 

Yes, he needs to reinstall windows.

 

use as little of thinkvantage stuff as possible.