T440p Owner's Thread

^crunches?

 

@iphetamine Gets crushed like the stomach does when doing a crunch exercise.

 

Would the old (T410/T420) keyboard fit? Someone reported forum.thinkpads.com • View topic - T420 Keyboard on T430 swap a successful transplant into a T430 but now we have a Full HD screen I am seriously considering upgrading from the T420.

 

I don't know first hand, but I'd have to venture to guess no. The shape is completely different since the special keys were shifted to being F-key functions.

 

@chx1975 t440p keyboard has no space for a seventh row

 

it is a joke and I ended up buying an old pair of rubber rails that I trimmed down to secure the HDD in the caddy. Lenovo doesn't even seem to sell the drive carrier required to fit a drive into the caddy. I think it's the same plastic one used in the main bay, but I can't even find a part number for it.

Made me wish that I'd bought a third-party ultrabay caddy instead.

 

This is not a seperate part, it is only sold together with HDDs to my knowledge.

Lenovo seels these caddys to big companies already with an HDD installed, so they already have the caddy I suppose.

 

Anyone else had the chance to check if changing the MBR caused the laptop to boot loop? Or is this a Debian related problem?

I'm ordering another T440p later today, just to find out if it has the same problems and as a quality check. If that device suffers from these problems also, it can't be bad luck anymore...

 

I would like to add my two cents.
My t440p is configured as below:
FHD screen
4300M CPU
250gb Samsung EVO
No discreet graphics( I have no use)
8gb of ram
6cell 57+ battery( for now)
Windows 7 "Fresh" with drivers including chipset drivers.

I watched this and other threads while I waited for my t440p to arrive. The more I read the worse I felt.
BUT I do have to say I am very happy with my device so far.
My fan is silent when it is actually running( rarely turns on).
My screen does have some minor backlight bleed, which TBH doesn't show up unless backlight is at 100% in a pitch black room and have a fully black screen. I do have the FHD screen, but strangle when I use HWinfo64 shows up as LEN40A3( Google searches states that this is the t440s panel? ).
The keyboard is great, has a nice amount of travel that i find a lot of laptop keyboards lack, On my desktop I use a mechanical keyboard and found this while not as tactile(obviously) still very nice to use.
The device feels great in the hand, any reports of "flimsiness" must have been applying some torque to find this.
The factor that I am slightly disappointed in is the battery life, I have clean installed windows 7 and have installed all the chipset and power management utility and i am still only able to get about 3.5-4 hours battery life, I may choose to upgrade to the 9 cell 57++ battery that to my understanding doubles the watt's and will effectively double the battery life.
I have yet to test the reports of issues with the "ultrabay" adapter (or what ever its called now) and reconnecting the drive on resuming from sleep. My adapter has not shown up yet.

I will try and check back so see if there are any questions or discussions to be had.

 

So I have unfortunate news. After configuring Linux for a while, it seems that the problems with two finger click in Windows (when you two-finger click you very often also get a one-finger click, so you do a left click immediately followed by a right click) are also persistent in Linux. No matter what I do I can't work around it.

Also, Lex: for what it's worth I haven't had a single issue dual booting on my T440p. I disabled everything UEFI/secure boot related in the BIOS then just setup my dual boot. I think everyone that had a problem with it has done something wrong, and I find it weird that none of them have reported it either fixed or returned (except you, of course).

 

The newest issue is now I'm running into this bug every time I suspend. I'm going to have to research it later tonight though, I have a family celebration all day today.

 

There was one other user with the same problem in here, also using a Debian based distro and an SSD. Perhaps it's Debian related? Or SSD? Did you tinker with the MBR or did you just flag boot for a partition? SSD or HDD?

Anyway, I ordered a new one (10% discount offer, so €150 cheaper...) and I'm going to check if I get into trouble again.

 

Pobega, what's your issue?

I might be experiencing something similar.. if my display(s) go to sleep / turn off after X minutes, they almost always do not resume.
Once I move my mouse or hit a key, the system seems to be on/active, but the displays do not turn on. Hitting the lock keys result in no response, and I have to do a cold power off/on to get my system back.

It's horribly irritating. I've disabled hibernate, have all power plans on max performance, have latest drivers, etc. I've read several users on the intel forum with the same issue on the HD4600.
Intel have no idea what the problem is, and are offering users to send in their complete systems (including monitors and cables) for testing.

I'm on a 4700mq with FHD panel and Nvidia 730m. I do have an external monitor via mini display port -> DVI-D (dual-link cable).

So far I have yet to find a solution..

 

I've booted both Arch and Debian on my T440p with no issues. If it is Debian related you could try installing Arch first, seeing if that boots successfully then installing Debian over that.

Hibernate causes binaries to either segfault or not work. It's almost as if there is some sort of corruption on my filesystem or something, but when I reboot it works just fine.

 

Pardon my belated reply, dericbytes. After having seen the concerns/issues you raised, I snapped out of my stupor and made some time to boot up mine and loaded up Dragon.

My Cinebench R15 CPU score is around 600 (highest ever reached was 609), and only when it was running on battery, with Windows power plan set to high performance. In BIOS I set processor power management to "maximum performance" on battery as well. But when plugged in, the highest Cinebench score reached was ~595. Go figure.

All of the above were done with the stock 8GB RAM and 7200RPM HDD. I couldn't completely unload Symantec that came preloaded. Again go figure.

I can use Best Match V vocabulary (large) for my medical specialty without any problem. There was no significant delay when dictating in complete sentences as had been recommended. Response to verbal commands was not instantaneous but still felt snappy. Manual spelling/training was unexpectedly slow for reasons I don't quite understand.

I am a total noob to Dragon and have zero prior reference to compare with so please take what I say with a mini-bag of saline.

BTW I am using an upper notch microphone / USB sound card combo (Speechware FlexyMike SE + SpeechMatic USB MultiAdapter).

Initially I had some fidgetiness wrt the USB ports in the upper right hand corner. But after trying each a few times, every USB port seems to work, with the possible exception of the one that is powered I believe (I didn't test that one well as I use it for something else, which I will get into in a separate review).

Thus far my set-up has met my expectation of speech recognition needs (it d@mn well should considering how much this whole shebang has cost me - haven't even thrown in an SSD yet).

Question for you: Did your T440p come with Win 8.1 pre-installed? Mine came with Win 8 Pro and was ordered Dec 7, 2013, and delivered Dec 21. It sat in its box awaiting Win 7 downgrade media from Lenovo, which had been backordered for 2 weeks !!??!! (even one of their reps chuckled on the phone over the fact that Win 7 Pro DVD could be "back-ordered" - I know, I know, this thread alone is replete with stories of Lenovo Customer Service's sense of humour - usually at the expense of their customers).

Why do I want Win 7? Because this thing has cost me too much to be a M$ Windows 8.x gamma-testing bench. I need Citrix and certain legacy software to work without a hitch.

By now it's open general knowledge that Win 8.x is Vista 2.0.

Having said that, I have turned my T440p into a tablet (my review of the "T440p" tablet will follow on this forum's sister site). So I do have some misgivings about downgrading to Win 7. But in the end reliability and dependability will likely win over my novelty over "multi-touch".

 

Isn't that a reason to stick with 8?

It's common knowledge that 7 SP.X is Vista 1.5.

You should try using your downgrade rights and installing Windows 7 as a dual-boot partition.

And Citrix doesn't work with 8? That's odd...

 

Why don't you tell me Win 7 was Vista itself reincarnated with proper driver support all-around? Which was exactly what it was.

Next year Bill and friends are going to repackage W8 into W9, which will be exactly W8 debugged and drivers fixed. That's why W8 is called Vista 2.0 while the future W9 (if and when gets here) considered Windows 7 2.0 - at least by me.

At that time I will embrace progress.

Until then I paid my dues trouble-shooting Redmond's paid trial-ware so now it's someone else's turn to take one for the team - the MS gamma-testing team that is.

Citrix works with W8, just requiring a couple of extra steps for me.

Besides, doesn't Win 7 have touch? I will test it out and see for myself how much "inferior" it is to Win 8. BTW, have you tried "multi-touch" over a typical Citrix application hosted on your public hospital's Server 2K8 R2 Standard/Enterprise?

Does it work?

 

Windows 7 has touch, but it's not exactly a "pleasant" experience.

The thing is, 8 has almost none of the issues that Vista did.

Debugging and driver issues?

Not many problems regarding those two.

Really, the biggest changes from 7 to 8 are a different start menu, an improved desktop, and better general performance.

I haven't tested Citrix yet, since I don't use it much. I assumed that it'd work, since this is Windows we're talking about here.

 

Perhaps you are right that indeed Win 8.x doesn't deserve to be tarred with the reputation of Vista-like bugginess.

But let's not forget MS taught the course on the virtue of "defensive computing" with its real-life (not hypothetical) shenanigans over the years.

Finally, I spent the whole day today testing multitouch over Citrix - touch works (98% the times), but there is no such thing as multitouch when the servers that were beaming Citrix applications ran on 2K8 R2 Standard/Enterprise. It's perhaps to be expected.

But it does mean that for those of us using laptop/tablet to make a living in an environment full of "legacy applications", Win 8's "touch" value is significantly lessened.

 

@axr

Glad your cpu is running at a better speed. Although it is still slower than my brothers and he got a slower CPU and only paid a grand for his machine. I created a new windows account and ran the test again and ended up with an even lower score . My fan is still really noisy and active, I will try again once it has been replaced. My machine has had loads of faults and I can not help wondering what else is wrong. Got a call from lenovo saying my monitor, fan and keyboard are on back order and they have no idea when it will arrive . I am not sure how they are going to fix my headphones.

The spelling box on dragon was unbelievably slow on my last machine. There has been a massive improvement in speed but it is still too slow. The speed of dictating is more than comfortable but my new machine is 4 times faster and the jump in improvement of dictation speed is only fractional. I am using the BT300 enhanced bluetooth dongle with the Voyager Legend headset - I really like it, I put it on and forget about it.

My machine came with windows 8. I had a copy of the windows 8.1 64x lying about. It installed without asking for a serial. (the windows 8.1 upgrade is free and can be done from the windows store but I wanted to try a fresh install - I needed to download lenovo wireless drivers to get on the internet).

ps. I found out I could stop all corner and charm popups in windows by selecting an option in the windows start classic shell program I had downloaded. To me windows 8 feels like a minor improvement over windows 7, and all things that were impeding my workflow have been disabled.

Can someone else post scores of using Cinebench 15 with a 4900MQ please.

 

How long does it actually take to ship? Mine says it should ship today and arrive on the 27th, but could it be earlier? However, it's still "released to manufacturing" status.

 

Mine said it should ship today and arrive on the 27th and I got the shipping email 4 hours ago. The UPS site doesn't give me an estimated time but I hope it'll be quicker

 

still "released to manufacturing".....wth o.0

 

The crux is that his CPU isn't slower in actual use. I am not surprised at all that our 4900MQ scored lower than your brother's 4700MQ. I am convinced that it's all in the cooling. Your brother's custom rig likely has a thicker chassis and a beefier fan.

If the 4700MQ stays in turbo'd 3+ GHz during Cinebench while our 4900MQ throttles down to 2.77 GHz (on mine over and over without exception), then the shocking news would be if your brother's 4700MQ did not score higher.

I speculate that a T540p with identical RAM/HDD and 4900MQ will score a higher Cinebench or other benchmark than the T440p, simply on account of better cooling which allows for a higher clock.

It's the price we paid for "mobility" and I myself walked into that one with eyes wide-open so I can't fault Lenovo on that. If Lenovo made T440p thicker, heavier, and with a bigger fan, I'm sure different complaints will arise.

You and I both know we went for the "8MB cache". In the end whether it works out is still open to question. And if I didn't use it for Dragon, I would've gone with a 4700MQ for better bang for the buck in the first place.

 

Hi,

I was just looking through the thread and noticed several people here have the Samsung SSD 840 pro. Is anyone of you experiencing the trouble that was reported at the Lenovo board? Did the procedure of disabling LPM help?

I'm a bit scared. I will have a T440p in the near future and the SSD 840pro is already here, ready to be built in. I want to avoid any serious problems right from the beginning.

 

Can you show me a picture of your VGA port? Mine is bit of tilt.

 

@huluvu I think a lot of people are upgrading to the SDD 840 pro and this is the first I have heard of the problem. I have this hard drive and don't seem to have a problem. My machine has crashed twice but that could be due to many reasons. I followed the instructions in the link just incase.

@axr thanks for your insight

 

@kirchhoff see google images

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=t...ops%2Fthinkpad%2Ft-series%2Ft440p%2F;1060;596

 

I had mine for a month now with Windows 8.1 x64 and the samsung 840 pro as my only drive, using it pretty much 8h a day give or take and had 0 problems.

 

wow!! it looks thicker than my t420! now i'm getting nervous....

 

It's exactly the same thickness as my T420, but is lighter, slightly less deep and a tiny bit narrower. The sacrifice, however, is that the lid of the T440p is thinner, offsetting the slightly thicker chassis.

 

I've also got an 840 SSD in mine with 0 issues. I also have a WD Blue 1TB in the ultrabay which is fairly nice.

 

Just received my t440p for work this weekend... I dunno if anyone wants another user review, but I figure I'd at least share my initial impressions.

I ordered on December 31st with upgrades to the 4700mq and the FHD screen. It was originally scheduled to ship on something like the 10th, but that got bumped back to the 15th and then the 17th. It was delivered on the 20th, 20 days after ordering.

In general it's more or less what I expected after handling both a Helix and a t440s. I really can't complain about too much other than the clickpad, which is mediocre at best and annoying at worst. The keyboard seems to have slightly less travel than the one on my x220t, but the backing also feels more rigid. I don't really have any beef with the 6-row layout, at least they aren't messing with any important keys like backspace *cough* New x1c *cough*.

Build quality isn't really MBP level, and I think even the t440s feels a bit more solid, but the feel and the flex seem to be comparable to the t400 I had, so that doesn't seem to bad. It feels very plastic on the whole, though I'm not sure how much of it is actually plastic. Either way, I was very impressed with how light it is: the 4.3lbs I measured with the 6-Cell is actually less than the 4.44lbs of an x61t with the 8-Cell.

The FHD screen is great; I really wish they'd hurry up and give it to me in the x240 without a touchscreen...

I was a little worried about the heat of the 4700mq, but it's really not that bad, despite what looks like a really dinky heatpipe/heatsink. Idle temps were down in the high 30s, and even at full load it never went above 80. Idle power draw was about 5W, giving an idle runtime of about 10hrs. The lowest fan speed is a little louder than I'd like, but it's nowhere as bad as it was on the t430 before the BIOS update.

Miscellaneous things I don't like... how they've changed the power adapter tips, the lack of an HDD indicator LED, the fact that it has an optical drive and it's not really an UltraBay device. At least the power adapter tip converters are getting cheap and plentiful now.

 

^so it took only 3 days to get delivered from china?

 

Mine was, too, once it shipped. Delivered in LA on the third day.

 

See here for taskbar solution.

 

Interesting. Mine after 26 hrs of shipping still stuck at "departure scan, China".

 

Yeah, actual shipping time for the last couple things I ordered from Lenovo were all pretty fast... it's everything before that was delay after delay after delay.

 

Nice review. How is the temperature when running both CPU and GPU full load for one hour or so?

Ready to replace my T430 with this.

 

I ran Furmark and Prime95 in parallel for an hour... the CPU temp typically stayed about 81/82C but occasionally spiked to 85C. The system was pulling about 50W total and HWMonitor recorded about 46/47W at the package. I don't think the CPU throttled at all during the run. Ambient temperature was about 22/23C.

 

It will update when it's scanned again. Maybe Anchorage. Maybe Louisville. Then it will await a customs scan, then it will scan out, then scan in again at the next location.

 

I am very interested in your experience with W8.1 fresh install because I need to "zap" this thing so I don't have to contend with Norton that Lenovo shoved down my throat with nary an option.

Please tell me that with your fresh installation you don't have Symantec, or even "Thinkvantage", and everything still works fine.

That'd be music to my ears.

Thanks.

 

Do you have the installation media? Probably you will need the retail DVD. Otherwise you will just get a system restore with all the junk still in there. Unfortunately, there are no ISO downloads at Digital River for Win8.

 

It quickly skimmed the thread a couple of weeks ago, but haven't done a full check today, so apologies if this has been answered......

Does anybody have experience with the new series of docking stations and the T440P? I have a T420 and series 3 dock that works perfectly, and would like to know that the new ones don't have any major quirks.

Thanks!

*

It should be dead easy if you can get your hands on Windows 8 install media that matches the license you bought (i.e. Win8 Pro media for Win8 Pro purchase). Pre-download the latest drivers onto a USB key, leave out anything you don't want/need and nuke the existing installation. Pop in and boot from the DVD/USB install media, let it do its thing, then install drivers and updates.

Worse comes to worse, if you bork it up you can re-install from the bloated factory recovery media.

 

I've got the t440p, have done a fresh install and am using the dock

For the fresh install, I used a usb win 8 install I had created before... you can find the install from MS somewhere... I installed win 8 (didn't have to enter the license key because it's in the bios) then let it do it's updates, then upgraded to 8.1..

For the dock.. it's great.. I have no complaints... there do seem to be issues with a lot of the 135w power supplies though, but if you use the 90w that comes with the dock (or 170w) then you'll be fine...

I'm using 3 displays.. 2 DP and one vga.. and everything's peachy

...a side note, I like the docking on this much better than the dell.. I keep my notebook in a shelf I made for it under my desk (dock and notebook are on a sliding shelf that has cooling holes and a fan)... my Dell would often have difficulty detaching from the dock if something was mis-aligned slightly it would be hard to remove.. I haven't had any problems with the lenovo dock...

 

You, Sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks!

Since you are using 3 displays simultaneously I'm assuming that you have the Ultra Dock. I can't imagine I will need that, so I will probably save a few bucks and go for the Pro Dock. And it is good to see that the Crucial Ballistix works as well. Did you go for the PC1866 CL10, or the PC1600 CL9?

 

The 1600 cl9... I didn't even check at the time if I could use 1866 (I am curious if we can though)

And yep, have the ultradock... 3 displays is nice ..

 

What are the issues with the 135W supply? I bought an Ultradock with the 90W supply that I now use for travelling while using my T440p's 135W supply with the dock. I've had no problems so far.

 

The issue with some of the 135w adapters is that occasionally breifly the adapter will disconnect... and when it's on the dock that means that it's like undocking then docking again.. so you'll hear the disconnect sound from the notebook, then the re-connect sounds as things appear again..

I've also noticed it when using the 135w alone (just with the notebook) since now I keep that adapter near my couch when I work there... the lenovo forums has all sorts of info about it..

 

That's the crux of the matter - I don't. I have in fact asked Lenovo for just a Windows 8 DVD (without the rest of the recovery junk especially sans Norton - nothing against Symantec, I just don't want it) so I can at least fresh-install W8. I'll think about upgrading to W8.1 once W8.1 Update 1 rolls out in March and stabilizes.

I searched it up and down and could not download Win 8 (or 8.1 for that matter) ISO anywhere. Certainly not from MS itself with the BIOS key I recovered through RWEverything. That's not surprising as it has been said everywhere that OEM keys don't work for these full ISO download workarounds. But disappointingly none of those so-called "generic keys" that floated around since Oct worked for me. I couldn't even download the MSDN version after signing up.

We will have to see what Lenovo sends me first. If I can't get a stand-alone W8 DVD from Lenovo, I might just have to buy an W8 (or 8.1) OEM/retail DVD. But I have seen reported problems on OEM machines with that approach, too ...

The extra gouging aside, these walls are not just asinine, they are insane.

Perhaps the reigning sultans in Redmond are beyond any hope of rescue by any "young turks" rising from within. The best thing that can happen to it (and to us) is for it to break up like Ma Bell or Rockfeller's Standard Oil Trust. That way Bill's fortune can properly double and he can make more of difference to the masses when it comes to vaccines and malaria (I don't mean that facetiously at all), but IMHO the old guards at MS do need to leave en mass and pronto so as to stop making things worse for the long-suffering Windows users.

And Lenovo needs to stop bundling crap-ware without giving users a choice. With their lot I am a little less worked up as I can always exercise my consumer's choice to ditch them and decamp to Dell/HP (unless Dell pulls out in the near future, which I think is unlikely). When it comes to crap-ware both Dell and HP were less offensive (at least pertaining to their business laptops).