T430s owners'/would-be owners' thread.

Partially true, Seagate's Thundebolt Go-Flex adapter has been dropping in price recently and Cavalry makes OEM enclosures with USM interface that fit the goflex system. There also is a company called Bytecom in Irwindale CA ( BYTECOM SYSTEMS, INC. Info) that sells empty official Seagate goflex enclosures. I have purchased 1 Cavalry case on eBay and 3 empty Seagate goflex enclosures form Bytecom recently. I am now happily shuffling my own stack of spare drives between USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt, back and forth between Macbook and T430s

 

I'm considering purchasing a T430s, and I was wondering about the availability of the stereo-mix feature in this model (which lets you record the audio that gets sent to your laptop speakers). In the past few years, many manufacturers have started to disable this feature by default.

If it's not too much trouble, can someone who has a T430s do the following on the T430s:
Download Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net) and check if "stereo mix," "wave out," or "What you hear" is one of the options for the recording device, and if not:

Close Audacity, and go to control panel -> Hardware and sound. Then, under the Sound heading, click on Manage Audio Devices. In the window that pops up, click on the Recording tab. In the box that lists devices, right click and select Show Disabled Devices. If something like "stereo mix" shows up then, enable it. Restart audacity and see if stereo mix is an option (you may have to go to edit -> preferences -> "Devices" or "Device I/O" and look around.) Let me know if it shows up then.

Thanks! The t430 is one of my main candidates, but I want to make sure stereo mix can be enabled before I buy it. My mom's netbook initially had it disabled too, and I was able to re-enable it on there, but unfortunately, I've heard that the ability to re-enable this feature varies widely based on the model of the computer and the soundcard.

 

Stereo Mix is not available since some generations of ThinkPads (T61 was maybe the last generation with Stereo Mix). I don´t have it in my L520, and I bet the T430s won´t have this feature too.

 

If you are thinking about TB, ask yourself about your personal usage patterns:

1. Will you be attaching an eGPU to your machine?
2. Do you need to transfer files from a large disk array quickly?

Right now, TB is great, but has limited uses for most consumers.

 

Did you have the option to re-enable with "Show Disabled Devices"?

 

No. There is no option for the Stereo Mix on my L520.

 

Just added a touch of My Little Pony to the lid of T430s...



Wonder what it will do to resale value in the future, but I'm planning to keep this thing until Broadwell at any rate.

 

Also, a new note concerning charging times:

With a 90 watt charger, it takes me about 3.5 hours to charge both the main battery and the Ultrabay battery to 100% from 0% in both batteries. The charger charges the main battery up to 80% first, before charging the Ultrabay battery to 100%, and then finishes charging the main battery to 100%.

 

oh humanity. the horror. :|

thunderbolt is expensive because it requires expensive chipsets that are only made by intel. intel sucks every dollar from everyone.
you can compare this to usb3.0. when it started to appear, it was expensive. but sure not as expensive as thunderbolt is now.
prices will start to drop eventually.

but anyway who needs thunderbolt except for an egpu? people who need it for other applications have loads of money to buy a desktop and a notebook.
I remember reading about a thunderbolt solution for a pci-e decoding card, well the enclosure costed $500 but the pci-e card costed $6000...

sure more speed the better and in the future it will be usefull but that's not what I wanted to point out. the thing is that it's worthless to want a thunderbolt HDD enclosure because there's no way any current HDD will bottleneck with an usb3.0 interface. not even any SSD will be enough to do that.

 

I am deeply concerned about those pajamas with the footies.

 

Really ?
Wikipedia: The "SuperSpeed" ( USB3 ) bus provides a transfer mode at 5.0 Gbit/s additionally to the three existing transfer modes. The raw throughput is 4 Gbit/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (0.4 GB/s or 400 MB/s) or more

So theoretical maximum is 625MB/s. Even now it is not enough for some SSD disks.

I have one year old Corsair Force 3, it can read data 550MB/s, so I am sure , that USB3 is not able to support it.

 

Some comments on the screen:

Whites are great, but blacks are terrible. I keep playing with the Intel driver settings, but blacks just remain awful. Chalk it up to bad contrast... I don't care about viewing angles, but if they can up the contrast eventually, I'll be happier.

 

My screen (AOU) clearly has the screen door effect. Although I don't think it's pixelation since it's not a unified grid, more like smudges on the screen caused by the anti-glare coating. I noticed the same thing on my T61p (1920x1200) if I really look, but it's somewhat less noticeable. It's far brighter than the T61p though. I have mine set at 8. Comparing to a Macbook Air (both set at medium brightness), the photo appears washed out. The image also has a blue tint whereas the Macbook is more yellowish. The T61p is far more yellow. The viewing angle is poor, but I can make out the Apple accessories ok, not as good as Macbook Air, but not as bad as the previous photo. The screen also doesn't feel bigger than the 16x10 Macbook Air 13. Macbook Air's screen does pick up a lot of glare though whereas the T430s is perfectly usable with my back to the window. I wouldn't say the screen is unusable, but it's not good and somewhat annoying. Then again, I was perfectly happy with my T61p screen, I'd say this is somewhat an improvement overall.

The new keyboard is definitely worse than before and I don't think it's less noisy. It's also not dust proof. The Thinklight is good though and I don't think back light is worth the $40. The trackpoint buttons is softer and has less travel, which is annoying. The touchpad is definitely an improvement over the T61p, but not really reliable in terms of multi-touch gestures. The fan is noisy at night and is almost constantly at 3000 level with CPU temperature at 41 to 43.

Windows 7 is speedy, sleep/wakeup is close to instant. Sunspider shows 209.7ms, which is very good (Macbook air got 246.7ms). However, CPU temperature goes above 50 quickly with the fan cracking up as well. WEI scores are consistent with everybody else's (5.0 for Graphics).

After playing about 20 minutes of Trine, the CPU temperature raised to 79 (or 82 depending on which sensor you believe). That disappointing, but still better than the Macbook Air which quickly reaches 90 degrees and the machine becomes too hot to touch whereas the T430s remains very cool.

The sound is surprisingly bad despite the two massive speaker on either side of the keyboard. And this is from somebody who rarely listen to musics.

Overall, my opinion hasn't changed much. It's a light weight mid-range laptop. At sub $700, I'd say it's an ok deal, but I probably won't pay more for it. It's a little sad since I happily paid more for my 240x. Competitions simply caught up and Lenovo hasn't maintained IBM quality.

 

Hello everyone,

Was wondering if T430s with HD4000 graphics (no optimus) would be able to run two external full hd monitors (with or without the internal display)?

Thanks

this is the exact configuration
• Intel Core i7-3520M Processor (4M Cache, up to 3.60 GHz)
• 14.0" HD+ (1600 x 900) LED Backlit Anti-Glare Display, Mobile Broadband Ready
• Intel HD Graphics 4000 with Intel Core i7-3520M Processor

 

Even greater resolutions than that See my earlier post in this thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/8652471-post609.html

 

Returned mine. Although I liked the build quality in general, the screen and battery life were both horrible; I was able to avoid the restocking fee by complaining about the display to tech support.

I think I might splurge for the MacBook Air - I need a laptop for college that is portable, has good battery life, and has a nice screen, and the T430s barely satisfies that first criterion while failing the others, unfortunately.

 

I am keeping mine .. It runs my 2 virtual machines with 2 fingers up its nose while my Macbook Air runs out of breath simply by running only 1 virtual machine .... T430s and Macbook Air are two different machines with different targeted use ... As much as I love my MBA, my previous T420s and my current T430s get the job done for me ....

 

If you are going to run Windows, I highly doubt MBA will give you significantly better battery life.

 

True, my MBA rus 2h shorter under Bootcamp + W7 then with OSX

 

Just ran Medieval Total Wars II (I have the Intel HD 4000). Everything high, huge units, two full stacks fighting each other. There are occasional hiccups, but overall it's very playable. Laptop is warm and vent is somewhat hot, but not untouchable. CPU temperature at 62 degree.

 

Battery life seems to be decent. After 2 hours of wifi surfing, the battery is down to 62%. So 5-6 hrs shouldn't be impossible.

 

Did you buy the ultrabay battery? I neglected to but I think I might soon. All in all though, I'm not getting terrible battery life from the stock battery.

 

batteries need to to be conditioned anyways if you never use it and keep it plugged in all the time your not going to get the full potential out of it

 

No, I didn't. This is from the 6 cell 44wh battery (44.35 right now, already lost .01wh after 1 charge). Every 10 minutes, the battery lost 3-4%, which makes the total running hour to be 4-5.5hrs. Mostly surfing engadget, slashgear, google news, etc... Fair amount of javascript, but not a lot of video. Display at 8. Power plan energy saver. Haven't spent time fine tuning the power plan yet.

 

I would recommend any of the new Asus ultrabooks - most of them come with a 1080p IPS display standard. Not sure about battery life, however.

 

The 13 inch ones should have better battery life since their battery is slightly larger and SSD has lower battery usage. Although it's also significantly more expensive. Also, unlike the 16x10 MBA, the Asus book's screen is also somewhat smaller.

 

Hey guys,

I want to upgrade my wireless card from the stock Centrino Wireless-N 2200 to the Ultimate-N 6300. I know Lenovo employs whitelisting of wireless cards in the BIOS, but will purchasing something like this be fine?

Intel IBM lenovo thinkpad 6300 Wifi Wireless Card t410 W700 L412 L512 60Y3193 | eBay

 

Why do you want to upgrade? Personally, I get absolutely terrible speeds over wireless, but I'm not sure if I have driver/configuration issues.

 

I can get an additional antenna and perhaps get greater range. Plus, for file transfers over my personal network, the speed boost could prove useful.

 

If your T430s is already pre-wired and has the three antennas, I don't see why not. It looks like the part you linked to is a whitelisted Lenovo part.

 

I did that and it works fine

 

Hi all

I'm new to this forum, but have readed alot past mounth here since i'm strongly thinking of getting the T430s.

Going to use it for school(mec engineering) in couple of mounths, yust woundering if anyone here use this for school or are going/plan to use it for study? Planning on getting the i5 verson since i think that will be enough for me.

Another small consern i've readed here is the battery life, some say 2 hours some say 4-5 hours and so on. If it holds atleast 4 hours it should be okei, and might aswell buy the extra 3cell sec batt later on.

Anyway i think this will be a good buy for the school, any opinions would be nice. Cheers

 

Just installed Ubuntu Linux onto my T430s. Everything works appears good so far - default wireless drivers work with Aircrack just fine, everything works, etc.

 

I think it's a very good laptop for school and the stock battery should be enough for 4 hours of light surfing. However, that's only assuming that you can't afford an Ultrabook or a MBA, or you would like to put some load on it that requires the extra heat management. Be warned, you will be disappointed by the display at first, although I don't think it will be that big a deal for most users.

If you need to do some note taking (like drawing a diagram or something), then consider getting a Windows 8 tablet in a few month. The EP121 was a great machine except for battery life and weak graphics (pre sandy bridge).

 

Out of curiosity, whats the big draw with Ubuntu? Why Ubuntu over Redhat or one of the other major distros?

 

Howdy everyone.

I've recently had my T400 stolen so have been looking for a replacement (thinkpad is the ONLY option as far as I'm concerned). I require durability, reliability, and data security. I really liked my T400. It had a 9-cell battery (84.24whr) and would get 10+ hours of battery life, with an average of 6-7 with internet surfing. Even after 3 years of solid use the battery still had about 87% charge capacity and had no problem delivering 6 hours of battery life. Really a superb machine! The only complaint I had was its weight.

I strongly considered the X230, T430, T430s, X1 Carbon, etc. and eventually landed on the T430s for it's weight and slimness and screen size/resolution.

I ordered a T430s fully loaded (got a big insurance discount, etc.) with an i7, ultrabay battery, Ultimate lan, fingerprint reader, backlit keyboard, HD+ screen, and I'm upgrading it to 12GB RAM and an Intel 520 series SSD.

My hope is that it still gets me 6+ hours battery life with basic use, and that the screen is at least of the quality of my 1440x780 T400 screen. That wasn't the best screen obviously, but I was ok with it. If it's at least that good I'll be satisfied.

Here's my order date info:

Ordered 6/17 with estimated ship date of 6/24
On 6/25 the ship date changed to 6/28
On 6/29 the ship date changed to 7/4
Still hasn't shipped...

Hopefully it gets here soon and that all works out well!

 

I'm in Australia, and I've ordered the i7, 2gb ram, 128gb ssd, backlit keyboard, HD+ screen, advanced wireless.

I've had a similar experience, with 3 delays so far. I ordered 13th of June. I've called back again today, and the latest news is a ship date of the 6th of July. It seems they're just shifting this back indefinitely.

Any time I ask about what the delay is, they say that they're waiting on stock for the "L-case". I have no idea what that is, and they can't/won't give me more information. If it's optional, I'd remove it from my build, and re-order without it.

Is anyone else having similar delays?

 

It has something to do with your configuration, I ordered mine i5 last week and it's already shipped yesterday. Good luck man

 

That's what I figured. My ordered system has:

i7 CPU
HD+ display
Integrated graphics
4GB RAM
Backlit keyboard
Fingerprint reader
Camera
320GB HDD
DVD
Expresscard + 4 in 1 reader
6-cell + Ultrabay battery
Bluetooth 4.0
Ultimate LAN

 

Interesting. This is the parts that we have in common:

• i7 CPU
• HD+ display
• Integrated graphics
• Backlit keyboard
• Camera
• DVD
• 6-cell
• Bluetooth 4.0

spargo, are you also in Australia?

 

I'm in the same boat, went for it. I haven't really run the battery trhough its courses, but I got down to 47% battery after watching a movie on full brightness for 2 hours 15 min.

This is WITH the bay battery, so make sure to get that. It's pretty much hotswappable with the DVD drive, so don't worry about that 1 time a year you need a CD drive, you just switch them out in 10 seconds. Screen will be fine for any modeling you need to do. It's not beautiful, but spend an hour calibrating the colors and you'll be fine.

I don't know what the final popular opinion is on the dGPU, but I bought it in lieu of the i7. Maybe I wasted money and battery life, maybe not. Let us know what you pick, I'm pretty interested.

 

Stolen? That sucks. I'd like to beat the crap out of a thief. Oh well, maybe they needed to feed their family. You never know right now.

Regarding the battery life and screen, you should be good for 6 hours. The screen on the T400 is probably slightly better but considering you used it probably for three years, it had probably had degraded some. Might be a wash.

My wife use a T400 with the butt ugly battery but you are right, it lasts forever.

 

Yeah, the funny thing is that it was BIOS boot protected with the fingerprint reader. A total brick, even if they put a new hard drive in it... Thinkpads FTW.

And undave, I'm in the US.

 

Thanks for feedback, will do som reply when decide in couple of days. Btw the price on the it with i5, is it that much cheaper then here? Price for the i5 verson here is about 1976,78 USD.

 

It's easy to use and you don't have to compile from source, unlike some other distributions, like Slackware, etc. Plus, it's the same old Linux at its heart - despite the Unity GUI.

I've considered Fedora, but you need to install a lot of proprietary software manually via the command line, and I hear Gnome 3 isn't that great.

Mint is another distribution like Ubuntu (it's built from Debian), but it lacks a little bit of the polish that Ubuntu has.

Yeah... there are many choices, but it all boils down to ease of use and support. Mind you, I do know how to use the command line, but if a distribution can make my life easier, I'll use it.

It appears that Ivy Bridge has trouble handling the old kernel, so for anyone installing Linux, here's a guide on how to upgrade to the newer kernel (3.4.x) to avoid system hangs:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=12035647&postcount=16

 

You can add me to the list of folks who haven't received their T430s, however I'm in the US. Ordered mine on 2012/06/11 and the Estimated Ship date is currently 2012/07/01.

here are the parts we have in common -

• i7 CPU
• HD+ display
• Integrated graphics
• Backlit keyboard
• Camera
• DVD
• 6-cell

 

Ordered mine on June 14 - Ship date has moved 3 times as well - Right now it says it should ship today - but after seeing what you all are saying.. I am expecting it to get pushed again.

here are the parts we have in common -
i7 CPU
HD+ display
Integrated graphics
DVD
6-cell

 

I used to use SUSE until Novell screwed it up. It looks like SLED might finally get an update in September when they have their conference. They'd better announce an update.

Gnome, ugh. Long live KDE.

 

Maybe is the i7? Both of my i5s were shipped within a week.

 

So you're saying a ultrabook would benefit more than getting the T430s?

I have looket at some ultrabooks have afford for them aswell but they seems not to bad many of them, xps 13, asus prime zen etc, but i have to admit personaly i think it's overated the "must get ultra thin laptop" thing many people are on to. But then again it's about personal preferences as everything else.

I like the the look of thinkpads, they are good built, realibility and no bling bling hehe.