Looking to buy T500, a few questions

Hey, I've been looking around for a computer to handle video editing and occasional medium gaming but still be portable ( enough ), and have good battery life for school. I am pretty sure i have settled on the lenovo t500. On that note, i was wondering if you would suggest buying a hard drive and memory seperate and upgrading myself, rather than through the website. I have never done anything like that before, but i am fairly tech savvy. If so, what should i be looking at? I have a $200 gift card to B+H photo and i would like to use it there to buy theses components.

Also, which processor should i choose, will the standard 2.4 one work? I would like this laptop to last me through the next few years of college.

One more thing, what screen option should i get?

Thanks alot, Matt.

 

If you plan to use more space than the 160 GB that comes standard on T500's, I would suggest switching out the harddrive they ship with and replacing with a HDD you want. Go on newegg.com to find laptop hard drives and just search for one that has the capacity you want, and if you have the money, go for the 7200 drive. You should probably be able to find that HDD at B+H.

What I did with my memory is upgrade to the 2 GB, then install a second DIMM. You could go with 1 GB and install however much you want, I simply did it the way I did to make sure at least one DIMM worked if the one I received was faulty.

Processor is up to you. I've heard it said that the 2.53 really isn't much of an upgrade over the 2.4. I chose the 2.53 just to be safe. With video editing and some gaming, I would suggest the 2.53, just for that extra punch. You don't want to slow down on either of those tasks.

Screen option is up to you. Do you want more screen real estate, or do you want larger text for easier reading? I have the WSXGA+ option on my T500 (1680x1050). I have no complaints about it at all. I can have a Firefox window up, alongside a chat conversation, or word document at the same time. However, I had no need or desire for the LED backlight. If you feel like brightness and energy saving (I will tell you that on my CCFL backlight, with 9 cell battery, with discrete graphics and wireless on I can get 2 hours and 30 minutes out of about a 65% charge) are important to you, you may consider the WXGA LED, however you are sacrificing considerable screen real estate.

If you are unsure on what the WXGA, WSXGA and so on mean on their website, simply search Wikipedia for screen resolution and there will be a chart in the article that details the difference.

I hope that answered most of your questions satisfactorily. If you have anymore, feel free to ask.

cpark

 

I would order it with 1 DIMM of 2GB, that way, you can easily pop in another 2GB module to make it a very generous 4GB of RAM.

Hard drive-wise, you will also be better off getting a nice hard drive seperately and adding it into the T500 (unless you are fine with the base hard drive options). Order it with the cheapest hard drive option (which, depending on where you start, could be the 80GB 5400RPM, 160GB 5400RPM, or 160GB 7200RPM).

The 2.4GHz P8600 will have plenty of power to last you for the next couple years. The only reason I went with the P8700 2.53GHz processor is because Lenovo messed up and offered it as a free upgrade from the P8600 (long since fixed).

I would suggest the WSXGA+ CCFL display, as it provides much more screen real estate and is not much dimmer than the WXGA LED option. Of course, everything on the screen will be smaller, so you should go look at 15.4" WSXGA+ screens at your local computer store before you buy.

EDIT: Contrary to the above poster, I can actually get nearly 8 hours of useable time out of my T500 with a 9-cell (specs in signature) on a 100% charge.

 

It is almost always cheaper to buy your ram and hard-drive (if you are going to get a larger/faster one than the stock) from another online retailer. At least for the hard-drive, you may want to first see how much it would cost to buy a new hard-drive elsewhere versus the amount of money it costs to upgrade on the lenovo site. Check other places other than B&H as well. Newegg, tigerdirect,buy.com and zipzoomfly will usually have the lowest prices on ram and hard-drives.

The screen option really depends on you/your eyes. The higher the resolution, the smaller everything on the screen will be (allowing for more stuff on the screen).

 

Thanks for the quick replies guys!

I'll hit up best buy tomorrow to check out screen resolutions.

If i upgrade to the 2.53 gHz processor should i go to the p8700 or the t9400?

Also, how much weight does the 9 cell battery add? I am already giving into a 15" laptop for school purposes, would the extra weight of the 9 cell battery add significant amounts of weight? Would it also make it harder to Fit into a backpack as i imagine it sticks out more.

 

I had a question kind of related to this. If I get the lowest hdd on the w500, and get a 500gb 7200rpm off of newegg, how would I reinstall windows/thinkpad stuff? Does it come with a DVD that has all of it?
@ the weight is maybe a pound or less.. If you can't lift that you need to see a doctor lol

 

I would suggest that you do not upgrade - the $50 upgrade (I believe that is the price) to the P8700 from the P8600 is not worth it for a tiny bit more processing power, and the even larger cost upgrade to the T9400 is even less worth it, as the T9400 comes with the negative aspects of the T-series processors (increased power consumption, increased heat, etc). The money would be better spent elsewhere.

The 9-cell adds around 0.3 pounds over the 6-cell. It sticks out the back by a bit less than an inch. It doesn't really make the T500 any less portable for me, although that's a personal opinion.

You should boot into Vista first, then burn the recovery disks off of the recovery partition. Then, replace the hard drive, boot off the first recovery disk, and follow the directions for a brand new factory install on your new drive.

 

Cool, I thought I'd be stuck with the 320gb if I didn't get an os disk!

 

Well i went ahead and bought the computer, i was able to stop by and see screen res. today. Here are the specs, did i get a good deal?

Lenovo t500
2.4 gHz
Switchable graphics
9 Cell battery
15.4 WSXGA+ TFT
2 Gig ram ( 1 DIM)
160gb 5400 HD

$820.72 before tax.

Now, i need to get the extra ram and hard drive. What should i get?

 

Yes you did, that's a very good price!

For RAM, just make sure you get compatible RAM - there's not much difference between the different RAM available. Currently, the cheapest ones are from Crucial, I believe, for <$30 for a 2GB SODIMM (available on Newegg).

Hard drive-wise, it depends. How much space do you need? Do you care about the quietness of the drive? Do you need the most battery life, or do you value speed more? Do you have the budget for an SSD?

 

SSD is out of the running at this point. I want it to be fast, but size wise it doesnt have to be huge ( bigger than 160 tho), as i will have an external drive for all my video editing stuff. Battery wise, i dont want it to kill the battery, but since i got the 9 cell i would be willing to sacrifice some life for better performance. Also, i dont want something that is obnouxisly loud, but being an xbox 360 owner i have the ability to phase out anything slightly annoying.

 

looking at lenovo offer and their price, your best bet would be be to buy your own hard drive and an enclosure so you can turn the one you get into an external drive. you save money and you get an portable drive to use.

 

I do my video editing on a 1.6 GHz laptop just fine, but I don't use a heavyweight program, I use Muvy. I also tried running this program on a 1.3 GHz CULV system and it was slow to load clips and to render but not unbearably.

 

I think that there are different processors available now then when this thread was started. What are the advantages/disadvantages of the current processor options for t500?

 

There's still not much to it: there are still 2 categories of processors for the T500, the P-series and the T-series.

P-series
+ cheaper
+ lower power consumption
+ run cooler
- 3MB instead of 6MB L2 cache
- lower clock speeds (generally)

T-series
+ higher clock speeds (generally)
+ double the L2 cache
- greater power consumption
- runs warmer
- more expensive

The differences in power consumption and heat are minuscule, however. I would be much more concerned about cost - I believe a P8700 or P8600 would be more than sufficient for most everyone except those who specifically have some application that is bottlenecked by the CPU.