My W500 Overview

I apologize for any grammatical missteaks there may be in the following passage.

Lets start things off simple.

Keyboard: Just Wonder-full, I have no Thinkpad preface so I cant necessarily tell you if it flex's or not. How about this....It blows my old hp out of the water!

Graphics: WoW runs maxed out around 40fps, I prefer to use medium settings, which keep around 60fps(the max). It really does fill the 1680x1050 Samsung screen nicely. As for 3D Mark? Not worth my time because you can always check out the T500 3650 review or the last W500 Review. My Specs are in the signature.

Screen: Did I mention its Samsung? Yeah, well I don't have any complaints, its a great screen, better than my friends T61p.

Ram: Gonna upgrade to 4. The DDR3 doesn't outperform the DDR2 800 by a long shot, nor temperature wise.

Preloaded Crap: I disabled about 20% of it, 74 Processes running ATM.

Pictures: Camera is broken so just use your imagination of a shoe box spray painted black and filled with plaster. This thing is SOLID!

Ive got one question though, how in the world did that one guy get his computer(W500) down to 60 something processes?

Is the ATI 3650 automatically in use and are there better drivers for any components of the W500? No one has mentioned that and I'm sure soon to be buyers would appreciate it.

 

Nice. The the V5700 should be activated from the start. Vista to switch it's just a right clicky down on the power options; on the other hand, if you have XP you gotta switch it via BIOS when you start up. Press F1 with the first screen you see, config, display, set it to integrated and shut off automatic OS detection (in XP it defaults to the ATI card defeating the option). One problem is there are no display drivers for the Intel preloaded so you have XP flashing a couple warnings and new hardware wizards so just kill them I have no idea if the display drivers can coexsist on the same system and I'm not going to try it. I get about an hour extra battery life

Lenovo hasn't released any updates that go for new Catalyst versions. They just released or are about to release a fix for the glitch where Windows reconized the FireGL V5700 as the normal Radeon 3650.

 

Actually for Vista you left click the big green battery in the lower right of your menu bar and it will give you the switchable graphics. It's actually almost impossible to figure out how to switch them unless someone tells you to left click...

 

Jayonhavok, good thing you corrected me. I'd hate to give out bad advice. this is why I shouldn't talk about using an OS I don't run...

 

Do you guys get a Display driver error amdkmdapp when plugging a another monitor to the W500? After a few of these errors appear the laptop will crash and reboot