T61p mini-review, with comparison to an Asus F3Sv, and before and after clean install benchmarks

In search of a good number-crunching workhorse machine, I picked up a T61p to replace my year old Asus F3Sv-B1.

The specs I ordered up for this T61p are:

• T9300
• 4GB ram
• 160GB 7200rpm (Seagate)
• 1GB Turbo memory
• Nvidia FX570m
• 15.4", 1680x1050 matte screen
• Intel 4965AGN 802.11a/b/g/n wireless LAN

It came with 32 bit Vista Ultimate installed, so it wasn't taking full advantage of that 4GB ram.

Initial Impressions

To start with, I had a bit of a frightful un-boxing experience. Here's a shot of the box the laptop came in:




Notice that two inch gap on the side and at the top (note: click on the thumbnails to see larger shots)? Yup, lots of room to rattle around in! I actually heard it shift and "thunk" when the UPS guy put it down on the ground on its side. I don't know what they were thinking with that (it was wrapped in a plastic bag originally - I removed that before taking the shot though). The Asus, and my previous Dells, all have come in nice tight shipping boxes. Thankfully, though, this machine appears to live up to its reputation of being a tank, and didn't seem to have suffered any from being shaken around a bit.

The T61p is noticeably smaller than my 15.4" Asus:




The angle on that last shot kind of makes it look like they are both the same thickness, with the Asus tapering to a thinner profile. This is not the case; the Thinkpad is about 3/8" thinner at the back, and the Asus tapers down to the same thickness.

You can also see the difference between the highly reflective screen on the Asus, and the matte screen on the Thinkpad. I had to stand over near the Thinkpad to stay out of the picture ;-)

The Thinkpad is is also noticeably better engineered than the Asus, with little to no flex in the chassis or screen. The chassis of the Asus flexes so much that a crack actually showed up just a few days before the Thinkpad arrived:


I'm pretty confident I won't be seeing that in a years time with the Thinkpad! Looks like I'm going to need to get some warranty servicing on the Asus before selling it.

There are some flies in the ointment regarding the build though. While the back of the screen feels solid and secure, with no flex (thanks to the magnesium alloy "roll bar" in this model no doubt), the front of the bezel itself is rather thin and flimsy feeling plastic, and you can just catch the edge of it when you run your fingers across the sides of the screen. The bezel also isn't that tight up against the screen, as compared to my Dell 2405 monitor for example, which allows for some moderate light leakage.

The platform around the keyboard and trackpad also appears to be made of this same plastic, but it is joined to the surrounding chassis much better, so that you can't catch the edge of it.

Performance and Comparison to its Predecessor

I used the restore discs on the Asus to return it to its factory condition, to run some comparison benchmarks between it and the Thinkpad with both running in a factory install condition then a clean install condition. The specs for the Asus are a T7500 processor, 3GB memory, a Hitachi 100GB 7200 rpm drive, Nvidia 8600m GS, and a 15.4" 1680x1050 glossy screen (as shown above), running 32 bit Vista Home premium.

I let both computers do any automatic updates that any of their pre-installed software wanted to run. Both of them had Norton Anti-virus installed (yuch), which ran its updates and scans. For both of them there were a ton of Vista updates, but neither of them received SP1. The Thinkpad system update utility was really busy downloading tons of driver updates, as well as software, while the Asus auto-update tool didn't capture any of the driver updates available from Asus (the lack of utility of this utility is a long standing complaint from Asus customers; it also apparently suffers from some significant memory leakage problems).

After all that I ran the Windows Experience Index ("WEI"), HDTune, PCmark05, 3DMark06, and Wprime 1.55. I grabbed screen captures of WEI and HDTune, however, somewhere during the process I managed to delete the ones for the Asus (I took them off the system before the clean install, but lost track of them in moving files around between the various machines I had running... ). I believe it scored a 4.3 for the WEI though, being held back by the graphics.

Here are the captures for the Thinkpad:



The Pcmark05 for the Thinkpad was 5673, vs 5280 for the Asus.
The 3Dmark06 for the Thinkpad was 3905, vs 2070 for the Asus.
The Wprime1.55 for the Thinkpad was 31.181sec, vs 37.22sec for the Asus.

I'm just using the trial version of the Futuremark benchmarking suites, so I can't provide you with a list of comparable machines. But then I didn't spend a lot of time tweaking these machines either, so I'm sure you will see some similarly configured machines easily topping these scores if you do look at some comparisons.

Comparing the two against each other there are some relatively interesting conclusions to be drawn. For instance, comparing the 3D Mark stats shows that the FX570m really trounces the 8600mGS, showing an 88% difference. I certainly wasn't expecting that big a margin, but then, again, at this point it could have been due to no driver update for the Asus. The difference between running the T7500 and the T9300 was less marked, but still noticeable, with a 20% improvement in the Wprime score. while the other scores show

Performance under a Clean Install

After all that I did a clean install of Vista Home Premium 32bit on the Asus, updating with all the latest drivers from the Asus site, and a clean install of 64bit Vista Ultimate on the Thinkpad (it came with 32 bit installed) following Stallen's excellent guide.

This time the Vista updates for both systems included SP1. I also tinkered with the cache settings on the hard drive for the Thinkpad (the Hitachi in the Asus wouldn't let me adjust the settings), as well as setting the virtual cache to a fixed size of 1024 on both systems. I then used Defraggler to defragment, and again ran the above benchmarks.

Here are the WEI and HDTune captures for the ASUS:



The Asus score jumped up a little, most likely due to updated Video drivers.

Here are the WEI and HDTune captures for the Thinkpad:



Some small improvement there for the Thinkpad on the WEI; in the memory of all things.

The burst rate for HD tune tanked on the Seagate in the Thinkpad in the clean system for some reason. The Hitachi in the Asus seems to perform better than the Seagate in general (not too great a surprise, the travelstars have topped the Storeagereview's leaderboard for some time) so I'm thinking of swapping the drives - speed over size any day. I'm not sure why Lenovo isn't using the Travelstar's, maybe to distance themselves from the old IBM Travelstar "click of death" legacy.

Here are the other benchmark results for the clean installs:
The Pcmark05 for the Thinkpad was 6305, vs 5362 for the Asus.
The 3Dmark06 for the Thinkpad was 3881, vs 2046 for the Asus.
The Wprime1.55 for the Thinkpad was 30.951 sec, vs 37.41sec for the Asus.

So there was a noticeable 11% jump in the PCmark05 score for the Thinkpad, but barely any change for the Asus (2%) - perhaps implying the factory install for the Asus is a little cleaner than that for the Thinkpad. Both systems saw marginal decreases (less than 2%) in their 3DMark scores. The Wprime scores weren't affected much either (why would they?).

Comparing the two machines aginst each other, again we still see nearly a 90% margin for the FX570m versus the 8600mGS in 3DMark06, and a 20% improvement in the Wprime score for the T9300 over the T7500.

Investigating Screen and Game Crash Complaints Regarding the T61 Line

Two things concerned me when considering the Thinkpad T61p; the first was comments that they had sub-par, dim screens, and the second was that there were issues if two memory sticks were installed (game crashes seemed to be the main symptom). I have been reasonably satisfied with the brightness and colour performance of the screen on the Asus, but the reflective screen can be a real nuisance in all kinds of light conditions - far too mirror-like.

Brightness-wise, I have no problems with this monitor. After a full day and night of use, in a variety of lighting conditions I have to say that not only does it seem to put out just as many candles as the Asus screen, but it is also easier on the eyes thanks to the lack of reflections.

On to the colours though...

I calibrated both monitors using a Colorvision Spyder2 colorimeter, and then compared some photos on both. Here are some shots of the same photo displayed on both laptops and my Dell 2405 (also calibrated with the Spyder).

The Thinkpad:


The Asus:


The Dell:


From these shots you can see that the Thinkpad colours are a little muted as compared to the other too (love that Dell!) (You can also see reflections in the dark area of the screen under the orchid on the Asus).

Moving onto a shot with a bit broader range of colour, things get a little shakier for the Thinkpad panel:

The Thinkpad:


The Asus:


The Dell:


Look at that lily pad; there is some pretty scary dithering going on in that image on the Thinkpad! Here's a close-up comparison against the Dell 2405

The Thinkpad:


The Dell:


Not good - that would definitely launch a class-action suit if it were a Macbook! While the colours on the Thinkpad aren't nearly as inferior as they appear to be in the orchid shots above (comparing photo images of screen images definitely exacerbates any differences) the dithering issue is pretty bad. In fact, it kind of reminds me of what happens to an image that is printed with conflicting colour profiles (turned on in Adobe and the printer driver for example), so I think I may have to tinker around and see if there is some other issue at work here.

Thank goodness this machine is primarily a workhorse number-cruncher for me, and I do all my photo work on the desktop with the Dell monitor . For word processing, spreadsheet, and other office type uses the monitor works well, thanks to the matte finish. Still though, that panel (not sure what the original make/manufacturer for the panel is, it shows up as a Lenovo 1650x1080 in the device manager) sours an otherwise top-notch machine, knocking a couple of points off any review score to be sure; it isn't too much to ask to have a decent panel AND a matte finish!

The viewing angles on this monitor are quite good though. You can see in that close-up shot of the dithering above, that it was taken at a bit of an angle, yet there is no drop in the overall visibility as compared to the head-on shots.

Next up was to test for game crashes. I tried out Oblivion, as it easy to just set your character up in that game to run for the hills. I maxed it out at 1680x1050 resolution with 4x anti-aliasing, and just pointed a character and let it run for awhile. While these settings were definitely taxing the video card (probably not playable at that level - a little jerky - 2x anti-aliasing was better but still some jerkiness), it ran fine for over an hour (character didn't do to well though - drowned a couple of times, eaten a couple of times... honestly, you can't let these guys out of your sight for a minute ). Hopefully that is good news with respect to the crashing issue in games with two sticks of memory installed that others were experiencing, though I don't recall if anyone had experienced a crash in this particular game. I know some people were experiencing crashed in Bioshock, but that game is a little more difficult to setup and let your character run around on its own, and I don't have time for any marathon gaming sessions at the moment, so that will have to wait. I might try something with one of the Half-life 2 episodes (Lost Coast maybe).

These tests were all run with the stock 570m video drivers, not the optimized gaming drivers some are using. My purpose here was not to benchmark the gaming performance though, just to verify that there were no crash issues. Regardless, even with these stock "non-gaming" drivers, some reasonable performance could be eked out of this system for some gaming on the road, but not really a replacement for a good desktop system (darn it, he just drowned again over there!). One minor annoyance I did note while running the game test though was that the hard key volume controls didn't work in-game.

EDIT: Just ran the Half Life 2 Lost Coast Video Stress Test for a quick stability check and gaming benchmark. With the resolution at 1680x1050, model detail high, texture detail high, shader detail high, water detail at 'reflect world', shadow detail high, no anti-aliasing, trilinear filtering, and full HDR, using the latest stock drivers from Lenovo, the reported average frames per second was 73.04. Setting it to 2x anti-aliasing drops the framerate down to 54fps. At 4x anti-aliasing it crawls, and there were some serious video quality issues. No tweaking has been done to this system, so I'm sure these could be improved upon. My reason for posting these is not for bragging rights though, but just to give you an idea of what kind of performance you could expect out of the box. It was cool to see that Lost Coast runs in 64 bit mode!

MAJOR EDIT! Bioshock will not run on my system. CRAP. CRAP. CRAP. This is a known issue at Lenovo, and they say a fix is on the way. It appears to only affect some systems that have two sticks of memory installed, and the symptoms of the issue only seem to appear in certain games. I have not pulled a stick of ram from my machine yet to verify if it is this particular issue affecting my system, but the symptoms do appear consistent with what others are reporting. I notice that SonDa5 has posted lots of shots of his system running Bioshock, and he has two sticks or ram, so obviously not all systems are plagued by this issue.

BASHFUL EDIT: Ok, it seems my system is not affected by this two memory stick issue after all. I was able to get Bioshock running by simply updating the video driver (with a more recent driver than is offered at the Lenovo support site.

Other Observations

As has been noted in just about every Thinkpad review, like the T61p review here, the keyboard on this machine is awesome. The trackpoint is also placed just right, positioned for some quick pointer action without having to lift your hands from the keys. Nice... but I still will be hanging onto my Logitech G5 mouse. And, for when accessing that keyboard in limited lighting, there is a cool little keyboard light; I love that!

On a less positive note, it seems even the Thinkpad engineers can't design good smartcard/expresscard ejection buttons. These ones, placed at the very front of the left side of the chassis, pop out at the lightest grazing touch. Better than the CD tray on my Asus that pops open when you look at it though!

I haven't had a chance to run any battery life tests. This is not generally a concern for me, as I'm rarely using my laptop off the battery. As such, I went with the lighter 6 cell battery for greater portability. Speaking of which, not only is the laptop smaller and lighter than the other 15.4" models I have owned in the past, but so is the power brick. Hallelujah.

Conclusions

So, my initial impressions are overall mostly positive - this is the little workhorse machine I was looking for. However, knocking it back from a possible perfect 10/10 score to an 8 were a couple of issues; dithering and washed out LCD panel, some cut corners on an otherwise solid build.

I also have to say that while I am usually a proponent of the clean install to wipe all the crap that comes pre-loaded on a machine (and the PCMark scores above seem to vindicate this approach), I have to say that while playing with the system out of the box, I found a couple of the "Thinkvantage" tools that came on the system to be quite useful - I liked the update tool (finding drivers on IBMs site is a nightmare - my experience with Asus and Dell have been no better though), and the power management tool was pretty cool too. So, as a first for me, I may actually be reinstalling some of the system software on this machine! Some people have reported issues with some of these tools - but try and show me a piece of software that no one has ever had issues with! The golden rule is, if it is useful to you, install it, if you ain't using it, don't! Maybe I'll add on another .5 to the score for developing some actually useful system utilities.

EDIT: SCORING
So, really, the score for this system will depend on your intended uses.

For my primary intentions, largely to work with large databases and spreadsheets, with some occasional game play on the side, and quick review of photo dumps from my camera (but no editing work), the machine is a champ, and I would give it an 8.5

If you're looking for a gaming machine, I would knock a point off for the current unresolved issue that arises with some games, giving the machine only a 7.5. This is the only real additional detriment for gaming, as the screen issues shouldn't affect most gaming, it is largely an issue for images with high colour depth. There were no noticeable quality differences running the Lost Coast video test side by side with my desktop system. So, if Lenovo fixes this issue, that score would pop back up to an 8.5.

If you're looking for a photo/graphics work machine, I would knock some more points off for that sub-par panel, maybe coming in at a 6.5.


Pros:
Fairly well built
Relatively small and light for a 15.4" workhorse
Bright non-reflective screen is easy to read in dim and bright lighting
Powerful

Cons:
LCD panel has fairly washed out colours
LCD panel has noticeable dithering of colours

P.S. If you like those wallpapers, or just want to check those issues I'm seeing, you can grab the shots off my Flickr page - the orchid is here, while the water lily is here. Plenty of other florals and general travel photography there too.

 

I don't see your images. Just Xs..

Cool review.

Your benchmarks seem low.
Maby it's because you are running Vista Business.

Did it come with XP Pro recovery disks?

 

ummm... crap... don't know what happened to the pictures... they were showing up just fine right after I posted that.

Nope, it doesn't come with XP. Nor would I have reinstalled with XP; I like Vista.

 

Great review, thank you! This will be helpful to potential buyers.

 

Good review!

 

Nicely done, too bad IBM doesn't put better screens in their Thinkpads

 

It's not IBM, it's Lenovo, and they really needs to stop using Samsung Screen.

 

In the close up pics it seems the 'dithering' is a result of different levels of digital vibrance? I'm not sure what's going on there but I have the same wallpaper on mine currently and it doesn't look at all like that pic.

Where there should be purples on the petals, it is pretty much non existant on the closeup. Could be a calibration issue with the reds. Mine shows some purple but not quite as good as the desktop's. The colors are still a bit muted compared to a hi quality desktop monitor no doubt about that. I'll post a pic of the same wallpaper when I get home next week sometime..currently on a trip and don't have my camera with me.

 

Is there a high quality replacement screen that is purchasable?

 

After seeing both the Samsung and LG screen they aren't to diffrent the LG is just brighter and has better veiwing angles.

 

Yes, it's odd that they offer a professional grade graphics adapter, and then pair it with sub-par panels.

Morphy - which image are you referring to, the water lily image? The dithering I'm spotting appears mainly in the greens and yellows. As I mention in the review, it sort of looks to me like two layers of colour interpretation may be occuring - like when printing from Adobe without turning off colour management in your printer - which sounds like this "different levels of digital vibrance" you're referring to. I hope that is the case, and that I could clear these images up a bit!

natejosiah - Nope, you get to choose from different resolution monitors (this one is 1680x1050, you can also get a higher res one - 1920x1200 I believe - but that's too high for me on a 15.4), but you have no choice as to what kind of panel you get for your resolution selection... it would be nice if you could! I would have paid more for a better panel for sure!

Arkit3t - I like your vision of the glossy thinkpad interior - but let's keep the exterior as is, the rubbery matte finish is peerfect there.

 

Edited the post to add these Lost Coast comments:

Just ran the Half Life 2 Lost Coast Video Stress Test for a quick stability check and gaming benchmark. With the resolution at 1680x1050, model detail high, texture detail high, shader detail high, water detail at 'reflect world', shadow detail high, no anti-aliasing, trilinear filtering, and full HDR, using the latest stock drivers from Lenovo, the reported average frames per second was 73.04. Setting it to 2x anti-aliasing drops the framerate down to 54fps. At 4x anti-aliasing it crawls, and there were some serious video quality issues. No tweaking has been done to this system, so I'm sure these could be improved upon. My reason for posting these is not for bragging rights though, but just to give you an idea of what kind of performance you could expect out of the box. It was cool to see that Lost Coast runs in 64 bit mode!

 

Edited the post again to add the comments below on the issue affecting my system - and to temporarily suspend the score pending the Lenovo fix...

Bioshock will not run on my system. CRAP. CRAP. CRAP. This is a known issue at Lenovo, and they say a fix is on the way. It appears to only affect some systems that have two sticks of memory installed, and the symptoms of the issue only seem to appear in certain games. I have not pulled a stick of ram from my machine yet to verify if it is this particular issue affecting my system, but the symptoms do appear consistent with what others are reporting. I notice that SonDa5 has posted lots of shots of his system running Bioshock, and he has two sticks or ram, so obviously not all systems are plagued by this issue.

 

Edited the post one more time to add the following more detailed scoring evaluation:

So, really, the score for this system will depend on your intended uses.

For my primary intentions, largely to work with large databases and spreadsheets, with some occasional game play on the side, and quick review of photo dumps from my camera (but no editing work), the machine is a champ, and I would give it an 8.5

If you're looking for a gaming machine, I would knock a point off for the current unresolved issue that arises with some games, giving the machine only a 7.5. This is the only real additional detriment for gaming, as the screen issues shouldn't affect most gaming, it is largely an issue for images with high colour depth. There were no noticeable quality differences running the Lost Coast video test side by side with my desktop system. So, if Lenovo fixes this issue, that score would pop back up to an 8.5.


If you're looking for a photo/graphics work machine, I would knock some more points off for that sub-par panel, maybe coming in at a 6.5.

 

Thanks for the detailed review. That's too bad that the dual DIMM issue is still an issue. I just returned a T61P because of a stuck pixel, after returning an XPS 1530 for having a crappy Samsung screen. I'm running out of options for a quality 15.4" laptop!

 

Mtnbiker - it's an issue, but I haven't fully assessed how big an issue it is right now. So far, the only thing effect of this issue for me is that I can't run Bioshock. For me that is no big deal, because I never had any intention of playing Bioshock on this machine! Mark on the Lenovo forums has so far proven himself to be a fairly reliable spokesperson for Lenovo, so I'm placing a fair degree of confidence in his assertation that a fix is imminent.

 

Keh,
Hold up a minute. Are you sure you have this graphics card + 2 DIMM issue? The people who are having problems are having them with anything that is 3D intensive including a PCDoctor test program. The machine is just shutting off like the power was pulled. You are able to run other 3D stuff at a high frame rate, just not Bioshock, correct? This does not indicate this issue to me, it looks like a different problem, maybe something specific to the way Bioshock and Vista are interacting. I would try a bunch more games and other 3D intensive stuff before coming to the conclusion that you have a problem. Your case seems different to me.

 

You don't have the issue.

Bioshock won't run because you don't have the latest DirectX installed.

Been there, done that.

 

Fire Snake - As I stated, I'm not certain if this is the two memory stick issue, but it appears to be consistent with some other peoples experiences. Some of the postings I have read indicate that they are only having problems in certain 3D intensive aps, like Bioshock. To be certain I would have to pull a stick of ram and see if Bioshock ran, for sure... but pulling ram on this system isn't as straightforward as on other laptops I have worked with. I noted that someone had success overcoming this issue using the Nvidia tuner app to underclock their vid card - that will be my next step.

Ichupacabras - Thanks for the suggestion. I'm running Bioshock through Steam, so it automatically updated my Direct X. However, to be certain, following reading your post, I manually downloaded and installed the latest Direct X runtime from Microsoft (it was dated August 2007 I think), and tried Bioshock again... same thing, it freezes and crashes at the first cutscene.

 

Try different drivers- Forceware 169.28 for example.
If it only crashes on a certain game but not on others its a software issue. Look at the Bioshock forums on 2Kgames-alot of postings on crashes esp when it was first released.
Also if it always crashes at a particular point in the game-again software. The initial cutscene crashing was one of the more documented ones. and well known issue with Bioshock.

The 2 DImm crashing is less predictable-it could crash 1 min into the game or 5mins or even 15mins.

 

Well, I've run some more tests - and it is looking like this is more a Bioshock issue than a system issue for me. For example, underclocking the vid card had no effect on the Bioshock crashes.

So that's encouraging... though I don't know why Bioshock is crashing... but so long as the issue is restricted to Bioshock that is fine because I have no intention of playing Bioshock on this system (that's what my uber-desktop is for).

Also the hard key volume controls now work in game, so that's good too, although I have no idea what I did to fix that.

 

Oh yeah, and piece of advice for anyone running 64bit Vista - don't install Nvidia's ntune software! Had more than a few blue screen crashes - trying to access the system information screen, or running the system monitor ap causes a blue screen everytime. To make matters worse, once you select the system info screen, every time you try to open the program, it opens with that screen selected which automatically triggers a BSOD crash. Not good.

 

After modding screen display colors and trying diffrent calibrations my Samsung screen looks decent on my T61p.


Very sensitive to the angle of the screen. Have to be looking straight at it.

 

How do you find out the panel manufacturer?

 

Alright, a driver update fixed Bioshock for me! Phew, that's a relief.

I edited the review to reflect this.

 

Good news! Thats what I thought. Did not seem like the 2 DIMM issue. Best of luck. I hope you enjoy your machine. I have been waiting and waiting forever to buy my machine. I am just trying to see if Lenovo will ever get their fix out for the 2 DIMM problem

 

Yeah, I saw your posts over in that forum. I sympathize.

Now I have another issue though... I've been getting some Blue Screens! Been spending the afternoon and evening loading things up, and then rolling things back with system restores, and I think I've isolated it to the Thinkvantage Power Management software now which I added back on given the positive comments on it others have posted.

 

Boy you just can't catch a break. Maybe this is good though. If you work out the bugs now you can just worry about using the machine later. The whole Vista thing has just thrown a monkey wrench into everything, adding another factor in the mix of debugging.

I have heard good and bad about the think vantage stuff. Some say it is worthless, since Vista/XP can do everything that it can. Others have mentioned that is starts a lot of processes and it forces you to start them up automatically each time the computer boots.

I myself am going to test it out and see if it is offering me anything really special, if not I am just going to get rid of it on a clean install. Just less things in the mix to go wrong. Besides I am going to be Dual booting Vista and Kubuntu Linux and using Kubuntu Linux 95% of the time.

 

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing - I started with a clean install, and then load a piece of software, stress test the machine, load the next piece, etc, etc

 

Hmm... blue screened on me last night without the power management software installed, but while I was adjusting options in the built-in Vista advanced power management options screens (e.g. setting the power button to shut off the computer, turning the wireless power down to medium) ... that makes things a little more difficult to diagnose... was it just coincidence that it happened while I was doing that, or is it indeed something with the power management... ugh... rolled back to a previous restore point, prior to a webcam driver install, to erase anything I had done to the power settings, reinstalled the webcam drivers... and it has been running fine... now I just redid those power setting changes...

 

OK, so I just checked - it looks like my screen is the LG panel. PC Wizard 2008 reports it to be the "LP154W02-TL06"

 

Oh, I've also posted my BSOD experiences with the power management over on the Lenovo Forums, here, if I hear anything interesting back, I'll post it here.

 

So, my latest guess is that the BSOD crashes might be coming from that Nvidiia driver I updated to fix up Bioshock! Of the irony.

I used the recovery discs to go back to the factory installed 32bit version of ultimate, with all the factory installed drivers, and the system was perfectly stable (even running bioshock with no issues). So that does look like it is an issue with something in the 64 bit environment. Reinstalling Vista 64 now, and I'm going to test it for awhile with strictly the Lenovo sanctioned drivers for awhile to see if it remains stable.