R61 with t9300

I ordered following R61 CTO notebook. The estimated shipping date is Feb 26. I came to know from other discussions that shipping date might advance. Any body ordered t61/r61 with penryn processors and got their unit shipped??
Also, how is the performance of penryn processors? it seems to help in battery life and keeping the cpu cool....This is my first thinkpad....I'm excited


42X5952 SBB INTEL CORE2DUO PROC. T9300
42V8010 VBB MS WIN VISTA BUSINESS
42W7229 SBB MSWIN VISTABUS.32 US ENG
42X1670 SBB 14.1"WXGA TFT,W/ CAMERA
42X5957 SBB NVIDIA QUADRO NVS 140M
41W2060 VBB 1GB PC2-5300 667MHZ 1DIMM
42V8195 SBB KEYBOARD US ENGLISH
42W7033 SBB ULTRANAV(TRCKP+TOUCHP) +FINGR
42X5220 SBB 160GB HDD,7200RPM
42V8193 SBB INTEL TURBO MEMORY 1GB
42V8718 SBB DVDREC.8XMAXDUAL L.ULT.ENH
42V8177 SBB INT.WIRE.WIFI/LINK4965AGN
62P6054 VBB INTEGR.BLUETOOTH PAN
42V9339 SBB 7 CELL LI-ION BATERRY
39T6442 SBB COUNTRY PACK NORTH AMERICA
42W7087 SBB LP,US ENGLISH

 

I ordered mine two days ago and just got off the phone with a customer service rep. He told me that my order was sent to manufacturing and my updated ship date was sometime during the week of Feb 3rd. Originally they estimated my ship date as Feb 25th. I'll believe it when I see it, but it sounds much better than Feb 25th.

I originally called him because I payed via paypal to get the additional discount and was wondering when that transaction would clear my bank account. He said they won't charge me until it ships. Since it looks like it could be here in the next week or so, I'm off to newegg to get 4gb of ram and a bigger hard drive.

 

Thats encouraging news!! me too ordered 2gb ram....

 

acruxksa, how is the new R61?
I'm still waiting for my R61....

 

It's awesome! I've got my ram installed and am waiting on my Vista 64bit upgrade anytime disk to do a clean vista 64bit install on my new hdd. Screen seems fine to me (I'm not really that picky though). No apparent dead pixels and gets bright enough for my tastes. There is quite a bit of cr@p installed that has no easy way to remove it so I can see why many people opt for the clean install. The keyboard is nearly as good as my desktop saitek eclipse.

 

That is good news. How is the battery life?
I forgot the bloatwares. Glad that you mentioned in the post.
I ordered the anytime upgrade cd.

 

i received my R61 today with an 8300
when on 100% battery, if i unplug it, it says a little over 4hrs..
i need to test if this is true or not. im reinstalling some stuff so i should have results tomorrow

 

It's kind of early but battery life with the 6 cell seems to be in the 3hr. range for normal usage. I really haven't tweaked the power settings much so it could be a little better. That was with about 75% brightness and an external mouse connected while surfing the net. I never got it below about 65% though so I can't really give you a good estimate.

 

I ordered my R61 14.1" on the 1st, built on the 3rd, shipped on the 4th, received on the 6th @9am. and this with the free shipping option no less. yeah!!!
Haven't open it yet, though, too much school works.

 

What other keyboards have you owned? I have the G15 on my desktop and don't get me wrong it's a good keyboard but the firmness and low play of the laptop keyboard rocks my socks. I even VNC to my main computer sometimes just so I can use this keyboard lol.

edit: You can DL the 64-bit Vista if you look at Stallen's guide instead of waiting for it. *The WAU disk from Microsoft took 2 weeks before it arrived*

 

The saitek eclipse is the only keyboard of note, I've got a MS bluetooth keyboard that's ok, but nothing special. Every keyboard up to that has been whatever was cheapest when i went to the store to buy a new one. There is no doubt the R61 keyboard is nice. It is without a doubt the best laptop keyboard i have ever used.

I know i can download the 64bit files and make my own disc, but for some reason I keep getting errors when I try to run the X13-49121.exe file to unpack the .wim files. and the only md5sum I could find for install.wim (64bit) didn't match. I've had less than stellar results with truedownloader (probably will give a different download manager a try tonight). There is actually a copy of the 32bit anytime upgrade disc on the laptop in a hidden folder at c:\wauupgrd that you can use to make your own disc with vlite, but I want vista 64 so I'm just going to wait for my disc to arrive. I ordered it about 5 or 6 days ago so it should be here pretty soon anyway.

 

...shaking head.....what's up w/ this thinkpad keyboard worship???
Seriously, I just got the R61 14.1" and I'm not drooling over it...I bought the r61 for its exellent worksmanship....not its keyboard.
No laptop keyboard will ever replace my external usb keyboard when it comes time to type my term papers.

Any recently **solidly** built laptops will have above avg. keyboard typing experience..I can personally vouch for the HP dv2000 series 14.1inchers as they are compact, thus no give on the palm rest when pushed. But I got to return to OD because the fan will not stop running...ever...(due to non-roll-backale bios released earlier this year).

Sit back and enjoy your R61(14.1")/T61....

 

great laptop

 

oh, quick ques. acru, since u got the t9300 (mine is t8300), does your fan run more than you'd like it to? basically, no heating issue?

 

It isn't worship, but it is truly better than most standard keyboards that I have typed on.

And that is weird because I just downloaded it *not via any download manager* through the main website...even though it was a big download...2gb at about 800kb/s. Also, I understand about the 64-bit, that's why I downloaded it and updated mine to it, so far everything is stable on 64, Photoshop runs uber quick.

 

I'm trying it again but with the vlite instructions instead of just converting the .wim files and making an iso. I'll see if that helps. I was able to make an upgrade disk earlier, but kept getting a bsod when installing. I guess I should also rum memtest just to be sure, but everything is stable in Vista32.

The fan runs a bit more than it did on some of my other laptops, but it doesn't really bother me. As I said before, I'm not really very picky. I wouldn't say it runs constantly though, unless I have Folding@Home running.

I've owned quite a few laptops over the years, mostly Dell's (but an HP and Compaq as well) and finally decided to give Lenovo a try (price was right). I'm glad I did, none of the laptops I've had in the past had a keyboard that even comes close to this one. Granted my past laptops were configured more with price/performance in mind rather than ergonomics, but they all were squishy in the keypad area. It's been about 21months since I bought my last laptop, so maybe things have changed and better keyboards are more common place on laptops now. I don't really know, I'm simply saying that of the 7 or 8 laptops I've owned over the last 12yrs, this one has the best keyboard.

 

yesterday I got my r61....its an awesome notebook...I'm very happy. The battery seems to wiggle a bit. Did anybody have this issue?

 

Yea, the battery has a really tiny amount of play for me too. No big deal though.

 

Never noticed it until you mentioned it but mine moves a bit, not much, but it does move slightly when I wiggle it.

I was finally able to figure out my issues with installing Vista64. It would appear that one of my 2mb memory sticks is bad, even though I let memtest86+ run on the system for about 4hours and it never produced a single error. All my BSOD's disappeared when I removed one 2GB module and replaced it with a 1GB so-dimm (for a total of 3gb). I'll be testing it in another system sometime today.

Running Vista64 and all is good except that the xD card controller driver is apparently unsigned and not operating. No problem though because I don't have any xD cards. All the other card controllers appear to be operating properly.

 

Which brand of memory stick you bought? I bought crucial 2gb, it seems to be working fine.

 

2x2gb of A-Data. The funny thing is, the stick I removed works fine in my Asus eeepc so I'm at a loss. I'm going to try putting the 2gb corsair value-select stick I pulled out of the eeepc into the R61 and see if that works. It will mean using 1 2gb sitck of A-Data and one 2gb stick of value-select, but they are both rated the same so that shouldn't be much of an issue. having to run Vista64 with 3gb of memory kind of defeats the whole purpose.

I'm going to shut down and make the swap now just to see if it works.

***update*** Well I swapped out the dimm and the initial impression is that all is good. It's a bit early still, but things seem fine. It's wierd, maybe the "bad" dimm just didn't seat properly, it seemed a little bit thicker than the others, perhaps that was the issue. Although I tried re-seating them and swapping slots a couple times with no improvement in instability. Time will tell though.

 

The fingerprint software is not working consistently. Sometimes it works sometimes it does not. I did the Thinkvantage system update. It may be due to that. I found vista indexing constantly accessing hard drive. I found it was indexing my whole hard drive. Configured it to index my outlook and startup. Now, I don't see annoying constant hard drive access.

 

Well, I can't get my system stable with 4 gb of ram. It works great with 3, but when I switch to 4gb it will eventually bsod and then once it does they become more frequent and the system eventually just won't boot. I've even gotten bsod's in safe mode a time or two. It could be the ram (2 x 2GB of A-Data), but I've read reports of other people having no trouble with this memory in their Lenovo's and it works fine in my other laptops.

It seems like my issue is similar to what some people are experiencing in this thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=179172 They are talking about T61's and T61p's, but it seems like a very similar problem.

My system seems perfectly stable in Vista 64 at 3gb, but if I put 4gb in it it bsod's eventually. The bios boot diagnostic test only tests 3070mb of memory when I have 4gb installed and tests 3054mb when I have 3gb installed. Not sure why the diagnostic program only sees 3070mb of my 4gb, because vista 64 recognizes 4030mb. (which is apparently normal for these lenovo's)