was the w510 any good?

I'm wary of first gen i7 and possible heat/battery issues.

 

There is a wanted to buy section in the Marketplace forum. If you're looking to buy a W510, that's the appropriate place to post.

 

I have a customer who owns seven identical T510 units that are on 24/7/365. Pushing three years now.

Apart from a software gltich here and there, they have been dead stable. Two of them went through hard drive failures but that's something I really wouldn't consider an issue related to any particular model.

If the screen were more to my liking I wouldn't have a problem buying one myself.

Obviously, YMMV.

 

Strictly speaking, there are HD, HD+ and FHD screens. I'm very picky with screens (my desktop monitors are all Dell IPS, the latest being UltraSharp U2713H), but I find the AUO FHD panel on the T/W510/520 very good. Looking at one right now.

As you noted, YMMV.

 

You're absolutely correct. I should've stated what panel exactly I was referring to, and that was the FHD one.

Welcome to the club...:hi2:

A lot of people I know are happy with those. In all fairness, it doesn't any get better on any full-size Lenovo nowadays...or anywhere out of IPS land..

Which is exactly what I told the aforementioned customer when they were ordering these T510s in the first place...

The fact that I haven't bought one myself due to not-really-being-impressed with the LCD shouldn't mean much to anyone else. I'm known for being difficult when it comes to screens on the machines that I personally use...extremely so.

 

Not all the notebooks you've sold have great screens. (Perhaps they were not for personal use.) I take care of my eyes by not limiting to notebooks, including ThinkPads.

Sigh, "IPS" does not always mean "better" or "great." I'm weary of that kind of broad characterization.

 

Heh...I must have sold a couple of thousand T2x and 14" T4x ThinkPads in my days. None of these have screens to write home about.

My eyesight is bad, mostly due to hereditory factors, but in a very unusual manner. That's one of the reasons that I haven't gone through Lasik yet.

At some point in the game, that step will become unavoidable.

It will be interesting to see what my screen preferences will be afterwards...

As for IPS, I was referring to screens used on Precisions and EliteBooks...I'm not aware of anything else that is IPS in the 15.6" FHD format...

 

Sony with the S15 and HP in the dv6 notebooks are IPS. I think they use the same screen if I recall correctly. I think Samsung might offer or has one coming with a PLS screen. The Sony is one of the more interesting notebooks on the market. It's very light at 4.4 pounds and has a very good screen. You get it with a quad core and decent GPU. I believe the optical drive is swappable for another hard drive or you could do the RAID SSDs if that floats your boat. I'm not completely sold on it because I disliked the touch pad on the S13 I reviewed last year and the fan was pretty much a constant. The search for the perfect notebook continues.

 

There are a few issues with the W510 you should be aware of. First, the battery life isn't good. That was corrected in many respects with the Optimus chipsets in the W520 and W530.

Second, the Quadro FX 880M in the W510 is limited to support for two external LCD panels. If you have more, you will need to get creative.

Like a lot of the ThinkPads, you'll probably want to run TPFanControl for additional controls on fan RPM and heat. The W series machines aren't exactly quiet and cool.

The FHD is just fine for many people that want a 15.6" screen. Beats the crap out of the 14" screens. Calibration recommended.

My W510 has been very good thus far. It is coming up on warranty expiration in about 6 months but I hope to get another couple of years out of it after that.

 

i think the ThinkPad W510 is a very good machine in many respects, i still have my oriiginal one with 32 gigs of RAM and two SSD installed. While, the new W530 is faster and supports more LCD, i think the W510 is still a fine machine.

 

Does the W510 support 32 Gb of ram, I thought the max was 16 gb?

 

Quad core i7 arrandale supports 8 gigs per slot.

 

For the short period of time that I had it, the W510 seemed pretty good...although it got sent back about 2 weeks after I bought it. Something that seems to have been common among that generation was noise coming from the CPU, sounded like an electrical chirp. Since my W510 had just come out, I had a tech come replace the CPU, that didn't fix it, so it got mailed back for their techs to look at it. They couldn't fix it, and couldn't send me another due to backorders, so I ended up getting refunded. Twice.

So, I guess that makes the W510 my favorite laptop that I ever had. It actually paid me $2200 to no longer use it.

But, the FHD high gamut was a beautiful screen.

 

I got my W510 a year after its release. It has served me extremely well since then.

 

Thank you for the information, nice to know. I've been using a W510 as my main machine for almost 3 years now, and it just works. The only complaint I have is that it gets quite warm, also when just almost at idle, and the battery time is not good at all, I get 2-3 hours when doing light work on a 9-cell battery.

 

i use my W510 as a desktop replacement, so the battery life aspect of the machine is not a really big deal. But i am grateful in having the w530 with the 9 cells main battery + 9 cells slice, as these two batteries combine gives me about 13 hours of battery time when used with the Nvidia Optimus mode (or around 15 hrs with the integrated gpu activated).

 

I also have one of the first W510 (3/10), and running it "16/7" ever since. No problems so far. Battery life is still resonable, too.