T61 -Warped display casing?

Received my new ThinkPad T61 today. After ensuring configuration was correct, opened the (somewhat battered) box for inspection.

This is admittedly a first impression of build quality here, but so far when compared to, say, the Dell Latitude D630, I'm not impressed. My biggest note: The display and hinge assembly. The display does not lie flat when closed, and can actually "bounce" up and down up front on top of the palm rest, even when latched shut. Bigger stil, when looking at the back of the notebook, it's very obvious that the casing does not lie flat and level: it is warped, bulging up near the display cable, and bending/flexing in order to meet both hinges.

Is this par for the course with Lenovo? Will loosening the display/hinge assembly and re-tightening it help, or is this something I have to live with? The fit and finish just don't seem nearly as rugged, nor as polished as a D630; some of the seams seem poorly joined as well.

When I get home tonight, I'll take a picture of the back of the case. Meanwhile, I'm reluctant to start using it, even though I know that no matter what if I return it, I'll be subject to the restocking fee.

 

Sounds like grounds for a replacement, but I'm no expert. I feel your pain, not least because your positive experience was going to be an argument to persuade myself to get one of these things.

 

See this article for an explanation.

 

Totally normal. It suppose to be like that. Check out msb0b's linky.

 

Good to know. Thanks for this. Better and better. Now if only the configurator on the Lenovo Canada site wasn't down -- again.

 

Wait until I give it a full review --I don't want to "roast" it yet.

I tend to be a very picky person when spending my own dollars, thus my quick reaction; perhaps its because some of my blood belongs to the engineering side of my family (four engineers, and then me in computing). I'd also seen nothing in any FAQs that mentioned this design until now, and when I've seen this kind of "bow" in a notebook, it's generally been because the hinges were assembled/attached poorly, causing binding that could later lead to shortened life of the hinge assemblies

I do wish the latching mechanism didn't allow for the display to move at all when shut, but I don't want to be premature in judging the machine. I'll try and post something early next week, once I've given it a fair test drive, so that none of my reactions are "shoot-from-the-hip" gut responses.

In short, I don't want to be a LappyForPhotoshop.

 

nice one =)

 

I'm pretty OCD myself. After returning two, count 'em two, Dells this month I took delivery of a T61p this week. Needless to say I inspected it very thoroughly. It's dam near perfect. So whatever problems you find aren't likely to be a design defect, but rather a manufacturing problem. Maybe a Friday afternoon build?

 

Well, I've had a chance to use it a little longer, and I think that in some cases at least, I may have overreacted. My biggest gripe was that "warped case" and while it still jars me when I look at it, I now understand that it's on purpose. I'll probably have some nitpicking to do when I give it a real once-over, but I'm warming up to it.

One thing that is darn near perfect --the screen. Backlight is perfectly uniform, no noticeable bleed, no bad pixels, and it's very bright --almost too bright (I got the 15.4" WXGA). Keyboard is good too. Someone commented about the SD card slot with no door --I used a fake plastic card insert from a Palm Treo SmartPhone to take care of that. I've got to do a fair amount of tweaking and tuning, but I'll keep people updated.

 

I'm in the same boat. It would be interesting to compare notes.

 

If you're running Vista, apply SP1. It adds a slight additional snappiness to things.

I ran Vista Beta 2 and all the release candidates, and kicked it to the curb after that. It still isn't perfect, but it's miles ahead of what I remember. Doesn't mean I won't eventually go back to XP, but I do find that fonts are a lot better for everyday use.

 

As an MSDN member I've been paying a lot of attention to Vista SP1. I was ready to install it until MS pulled it last week due to multiple driver problems. I'm hopeful that it will make Vista more snappy, but I'm not unhappy enough with Vista to make the plunge to a shaky SP1. I'm happy to let others be the guinea pig.

 

I'm happy to be that guinea pig at this point, since I don't have anything mission-critical on my machine yet. The worst I can do is restore --btw, in what seems to contradict previous users' experiences, my ThinkPad came with restore discs, it appears I do not need to burn any.

SP1 was the first thing I installed after powering up. So far, it's been fine. From what I have read, the driver issues will just require re-issuing a few drivers, due to changes in Vista's kernel. I myself have had no driver issues.

I did take a look at the program incompatibility reports, but there were only a few apps, most of them rare. Firefox and Avast! Antivirus are the only other programs I installed this evening and kept. I did try a couple of WiFi VPN tunnel programs, but every free one so far has had a catch, so I dumped them.

 

Look at them carefully. They're probably XP.

 

I understand the desire for everything to be perfect, especially when you just spent a lot of money on one of these things. What's important is if it will serve you well and remain trouble free through its useful life.

I see you ordered Vista Business from another post. Double check those discs. They should be XP Pro recovery discs. You still need to burn the ones for Vista. Lenovo is bundling the XP Pro recovery discs to make it easier for the users to exercise their Vista downgrade rights.

 

Any noticeable performance improvements? Anything noticeable at all or is it all under the hood?

 

I have to admit, I've been a bit of a Vista-phobe. Based on testing the betas and RCs, I felt Vista was slow, that UAC was incredibly annoying, and that there wasn't anything I could do with Vista that I couldn't with XP. While I have copies of Ultimate and Premium for home machines, I haven't installed them. And yet I knew I'd need to know the OS sooner or later (esp. now that Server2k8 is out), so I bought it on this machine, knowing I could roll back. So this is my first full-time Vista machine.

SP1 feels mildly snappier compared to without it --opening/closing windows, menus, etc. seems just a little quicker. I haven't run anything heavy enough to say more than that, but it's at least fast enough for everyday business use. Startup time seems about the same. Reviews from major publications have said there aren't a whole lot of major performance changes (other than file copy operations); I'd say they're probably right.

UAC is a lot less annoying than I remember, although there are exceptions: renaming my C: drive from SWTools to something else took multiple prompts.

The one big plus with Vista to me seems to be that the fonts are far more legible. Sounds silly, but one of the reasons I enjoyed having a Mac laptop was that it was a lot easier to read than XP (even when I used the ClearType tuner PowerToy), and Vista improves upon XP here. I'm still pretty sure there's nothing I can do with Vista that I can't with XP --but at least Vista isn't the unfinished product I thought it was at the time of release. That said, I'll still be recommending XP a lot to people to save on hardware costs and becuase they're familiar with it, at least until Microsoft stops making it available to OEMs.

 

This is an interesting thread. Thanks to the OP, as well as the person who posted that link about the purpose of the "warped" frame.

 

The frame is not actually 'warped'. That's a bad term to use. It's just a tiny amount of bulge, almost unnoticeable. At first glance it really looks flat until you really examine it.