I haven’t posted in a while due to illness and my horrible luck. This actually is my first post since I received my new t400, and quite a bit has gone on since. I received the laptop the Monday after my last post. They sent me the wrong hard drive, a desktop hard drive, for the ultrabay. I had to overdraw my checking account getting another drive here on time off Newegg, since they took a couple weeks to give the full refund they offered. The laptop got here, and worked kinda konky. I formatted after a day to XP, which is to be in a quad-boot setup with Ubuntu, Vista, and OSX. The drivers in XP aren’t the greatest. I can’t use the hybrid graphics without a manual switch in the bios, the wireless drivers are hard to make spoof (they shouldn’t be) and the video card keeps crashing. I installed the desktop Radeon drivers so the crashing would actually recover, but it’s not a good fix. I also hare the port setup. I have VGA, but no SVideo or DVI. I really need SVideo, and DVI would be preferred to VGA, since the adapter would be downwards in quality instead of losing it. It also doesn’t have serial or parallel ports, but those aren’t too problematic since I have a dock.
A month in, my hard drive died. The main one, from Lenovo, was completely covered by warranty. I started having issues, and then ran their hard disk checker to find SMART tests wouldn’t run. By the end of the day I’d lost my partition tables, and I couldn’t recover. They had a new drive there by the next day since the returns are done by IBM, but that doesn’t cover a almost month worth of work lost. I still haven’t finished setting my computer back up.
The advanced dock I got also hasn’t worked right. The new drives use the newer serial ATA drive interface, rather than the standard, or parallel ATA that the last models used. Therefore, the devices wont work properly in the dock, so I will need to buy ANOTHER DVD rom (for use with the systems on my ultrabay drive), even though I paid extra to get a burner in my computer. It doesn’t state anywhere on the dock purchase page that it wont work, and is offered as an accessory with this PC. The dock I bought also doesn’t seem to be working with my video card (extra PCI-E Radeon in the dock) for no reason. I don’t really care though, since the one internally is faster. I don’t know if it will work with any others though. They really should be a little better with compatibility, or at least stating that there is none. They don’t make another dock for this computer.
Now for the good things. I love this computer. I have the ability to get 9 hours on battery life with my extra battery in (four cell and ultrabay), burn DVDs, or run a 7200 RPM hard drive for Vista and my more intense games. The speakers are better than previous models, which had no volume , even though they are in the same spots, and aren’t as tinny as most laptop speakers. I like having a PCMCIA slot too. I use a lot of old cards, and I can place a card reader in it so I don’t lose that funtionality (it’s either PCMCIA or card reader when you buy). OSX doesn’t seem to like it right now, so I will need to work on that (I need it since I only have intel network cards built-in.) The computer is also the fastest I have ever used. A DVD that took all night on my 2ghz Athlon desktop or p4m laptop is encoded and burned in under an hour. I can even use the computer while it’s doing it. I step it down to battery power with speedstep and lowered graphics (the slower integrated card) and I get amazing battery life with only a big speed difference in games (I can still play Portal just fine). It works nicely with the dock, runs quiet and cool, and usually gives me no issue. The biggest reason I buy thinkpads still is true with this one. I can, at ~140lbs, stand on my laptop and bounce with no negative side effects. I have a more detailed and organized post of the t400 here.
