W701 info and questions.

Greetings,
Most of the thinkpad w701 threads that I have found on this forum are already closed. At present I own a refubrished Dell M6500 that has been having the blank screen issues. The W701 is a possible replacement that I have been looking at.

A couple of questions are
Do they have any notable problems that I should look out for when purchasing used?
How well does the digitizer pad work in office, for Power Points?
If, say, I got a unit with the 2800m. Does the 3800m upgrade have to be a Lenovo card?

Plenty more questions but that should suffice to start off.

 

Not that I'm aware of. They are generally well-liked by the few who actually own them.

Someone else will have to chime in to answer this, I have no first hand experience to share.

Yes. If you can find one, that is...

While I like the W70* series a lot, for the amount of money that they're going for nowadays, I believe you can do better, *unless* you specifically need some of the capabilities that were built into these machines...

 

Thanks for the info
I am hoping to find one maxed out with the digitizer pad for about $1000. One of the reason's that I am going for the old systems is that they still have older tech that is compatible with some of the applications and games that I like to use.
The M6500 is nice, but just a little too plain, (not accounting for the blank screen issues.

 

Plus, the fact that the 3800m is an overclocked desktop 9800 GT isn't bad either. The system blows away the M1730's I have toyed with in the past.
And I have always wanted to have a Thinkpad.

If anyone wants to sell one in excellent shape let me know!

I have heard reports that the screen is darker when compared to other equivalent laptops. I don't mind a darker screen, but to what extent is this?

 

If you're talking about W701 and not W700, all I'm going to say will be "good luck".

Do bear in mind that parts for the W70* series are both rare and extremely expensive...

 

I actually just missed one for $1200 with a SSD, so taking that to be about $200 for the SSD, It was pretty close. I wasn't expecting anybody else to bid, so I missed it by a couple seconds on ebay.

 

Feebay is a gamble, as always. I stopped following it quite some time ago...

Looking at completed listings, one remained unsold at $950 and with warranty remaining, which is a steal IMO...

Happy hunting.

 

Yeah I saw that one too. But it didn't have the digitizer pad build in, which is nice since having a separate device is not practical due to space constraints.
Factoring that in and the SSD it didn't seem worth it.

If anyone wants to share their experiences with this model please feel free to do so. Had I gotten more feedback like that about the M6500 I probably would not have bought it.

 

Nobody else?

 

One more try...

Thanks AJKula for some information!

 

You're welcome. Wish I could've offered more help.

These babies are rare...they were atrociously expensive when new, and not too many (compared to your run-of-the-mill T400/410/500/510 and W500/510) were sold...that's why you're not getting much of a response here or on TPF. I could count on one hand the folks that own one that I'm aware of, which is pretty scary...

Happy hunting.

 

I currently have a W701ds. There is serious issues with Nvidia GPU (3800m) randomly failing. Apart from that, there is no other hardware issues that i notice.

The digitiser on the W701ds works about as well as a Wacom bamboo tablet.

There are only 50,000 units of W701/W701ds produced, as compared to say W510, which would have over 1 million units.

 

My W701, (920XM, Quadro 3800M, 32GB RAM) has been the main workhorse for quite some time now. I'm working exclusively under Linux, where the machine has to endure calculations under full CPU load for days. I don't do graphics or cuda coding though, so the video card has not much to do. I have the digitizer, but actually never use it. Just briefly tried it as mouse alternative, and for drawing some funny sketches in Gimp. In that regard it worked reliably. I also did some minor benchmarking and gaming under Win 7, and the Quadro never failed during that short time.

In summary I'd say the W701 is a fine machine, but unfortunately terribly outdated, and not worth the money people ask on ebay for it. I got an ASUS G75VW last summer, and although it has just entry level to mid class components (i7 3610QM, Geforce 660M), it outperforms the W701 in almost every way (except expandability). All that new, for the same price as a decent used W701.