T61p arrived quickly, but its first startup failed!

I ordered on 8/29 and received on 9/6, which might explain how QA (or the lack thereof) missed this...

On by T61p's first boot, it froze on a black screen after more than a minute.

On my second attempt, my T61p shut down on its own after trying for about a minute to boot up.

On my third attempt, my T61p restarted halfway through the boot sequence, then eventually made it into Vista configuration mode.

It's been working, but boot time averages about 3-5 minutes, and is not guaranteed to work on the first attempt. My fastest boot was 1 minute 55 seconds, while my longest one was over 10 minutes (the computer shut down during a particularly long boot attempt and I had to restart the sequence).

Once, it has frozen on shut down, requiring me to hold down the power button. Several times I have had to force reboot when installations or other tasks stopped responding and Ctrl+Alt+Delete did nothing. IE takes 6-7 seconds to display a web page.

Tomorrow, I'll be arranging to send this one back. Fortunately, tech support has been very understanding and cooperative, although they have offered no possible explanation for these symptoms. Hopefully the replacement isn't a lemon, too.

P.S. There is so much bloatware that the 100GB HD came with only 60GB of free space.

P.P.S. The LCD viewing angles are absolutely horrendous and there is significant light leakage along the bottom.

P.P.P.S. Otherwise this strikes me as a great machine and I am truly looking forward to receiving one that's working as one might expect of a new $1600 computer with close to the best Thinkpad hardware configuration Lenovo offers.

 

Hmmm....sorry to here that.

What screen do you have? Somewhere on the forums I saw a 1920 x 1200 resolution screen with some really nastly light leakage from the bottom as you described.

Hopefully things work out with your next machine. Good luck!

 

That's not really unusual. Your 100GB HDD is really only 93GB (formatted space might be slightly less), and Vista takes some 20GB, so having ~60GB of free space is not too bad, considering restore software and utilities and such.

 

you must be very unlucky.

My new 15'4" t61p works perfectly with minimum light leakage, which is a LG one(isn't that everyone will have the same LG screen?). It does take some time to boot but you know how much bloatware there is. I am considering a clean install but i might just live with what i have now.

BTW, what processor and HDD do you have?

 

@scarlin - this sounds pretty typical considering I have had experience with two T61 and they both behaved the same way. That is why I have been promoting the clean install guide (link in my sig). It will make a night and day difference.

I now boot up in less than a minute (including swiping my fingerprint reader). I have Vista Ultimate 64-bit. I currently have only 26GB of hard drive space used up and that is after installing MS Office 2007, Adobe Master Collection (which includes Photoshop CS3, Premiere CS3, Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, After Effects... and many more programs), AnyDVD CloneDVD, CloneDVD Mobile, Diskeeper Pro, Firefox, Slingbox/Slingplayer and several more applications.

I never have any instability issues since doing a clean install.