Lenovo = a piece of crap?

[ice.shark]

Right, so my time is up for a new laptop. I have a lenovo thinkpad w520 and I've had major pains with it - anything from a hardware/software/bios bug which makes it go into an unbootable loop when you put it into sleep mode (only way out is to remove the battery) to the nasty annoying CD tray which is on the right hand side of the laptop and opens every time you pick your laptop (unless you are left-handed I suppose). Needless to say that the Nvidia Optimus technology makes using linux a pain and to top it off the scroll function on the touchpad is worse than on a cheap dell laptop. To top this off, they've put the CTRL key at a non-standard possition which makes me think the laptop was designed for HR people (sure you can change the control key from the BIOS...). The speakers are also crap and at the highest volume level you can barely hear anything (seriously - that's how low they are) and the built-in microphone seems to be a cheapo since no-one can hear me speak clearly whatever application I use under both windows and Linux. Well I guess the list goes on - the camera also doesn't have a cover so you never know in what weird possitions that NSA has taken pictures of you (I use a plaster to put over the camera). Oh, and it does not have an HDMI port...it has an advanced Nvidia Quadro GPU with a VGA port...Lastly, the whole thing just looks and feels flimsy and cheap. There are individual pieces that look good (screen hinges) but that's just a few individual pieces.

Which makes me wonder, are the lenovo/thinkpad laptops getting worse, were they always that bad or am I over-reacting? Surely with a price tag of well over $2000 it must be a solid product. Most of the people in the office use Macs which seems to be the new engineers' choice. If you were given a laptop for free, which one would you pick - thinkpad W-series or a macbook pro?

[exploder]

For free, MacBook Pro. My oldest daughter has a MaccBook, it lasted all through college and still runs like new.

[kedaha]

I had a vague idea that lenovo was OK for Debian but, having read your post, I'll think I'd better give it a wide berth. I sold my laptop recently for the main reason that it was too heavy with a view to getting a lighter replacement. So I 'll be interested to read further replies to this topic too.

[ice.shark]

I had a vague idea that lenovo was OK for Debian but, having read your post, I'll think I'd better give it a wide berth. I sold my laptop recently for the main reason that it was too heavy with a view to getting a lighter replacement. So I 'll be interested to read further replies to this topic too.

I guess depends which model of lenovo. For their W-series which are their portable workstations, running linux is almost made impossible because of the GPU. Support on Linux for Nvidia Optimus growing but little at present and I have only been able to get it working on Arch Linux so I'm stuck with Arch for my laptop. The other thing is that the lenovo laptop is very heavy and thick. A similar Macbook pro is much thinner and lighter.

[gradinaruvasile]

Im not convinced about macbook. It is seen as the ooh-so-stable-and-productivity-enhancing thing... Well i experienced it firsthand and its not. Now i have a Retina 15" Mac here at work and reboots all over the place, even when it connect my external monitor via hdmi or if i move Firefox between monitors. It heats up like hell. The older macs (that run reasonably stable) we have around seemingly have overheating issues- 4 crapped out (video chipsets burnt out) while from the Dell Latitudes (which are more than Macs) none had this issue.
And dont get me into the whole changed keyboard hotkeys that cannot be customized (some can, but dont work everywhere) and other UI and useability changes Apple thinks its best for everyone. Id take linux any time over Mac if i dont need specific programs.

BTW i installed Ubuntu on a few Latitudes that have Optimus and it worked. It needs the bumblebee package.

[muttrudd]

I like having actual buttons, at least a right and a left for the trackpad; not a gimmicky touchpad like Mac's have. I even get annoyed with Apple's "we have to be different" AC adapters. I like the pointy stick Thinkpad's have. I don't doubt that the quality of Thinkpads are diminishing. I just hope that in the future I can still get a real laptop computer with buttons, standard external monitor jacks that don't require adapters, ctrl keys and the like.

[jobine702]

I like having actual buttons, at least a right and a left for the trackpad; not a gimmicky touchpad like Mac's have. I even get annoyed with Apple's "we have to be different" AC adapters. I like the pointy stick Thinkpad's have. I don't doubt that the quality of Thinkpads are diminishing. I just hope that in the future I can still get a real laptop computer with buttons, standard external monitor jacks that don't require adapters, ctrl keys and the like.

The law of supply and demand. Less and less people are demanding pointing sticks and more and more are demanding multitouch trackpads. Blame marketing, blame the new generation for not growing up with these, blame multitouch technology for being more advanced, blame smartphones, and blame Obama while you're at it.

Feels like every time i browse this forum i see a bunch of people whining that it's not the 90's anymore. Do I really have to go back to Ubuntu?

Personally on every Thinkpad i've used, i've disabled the pointing stick because it's been the cause of several misclicks for me.

[Job]

Wasn't Lenovo sold by IBM to some Chinese company? Way back I had a Thinkpad at work that did the job with no trouble.

[muttrudd]

jobine702, I do not believe I blamed anyone. The features mentioned are part of the Thinkpad brand, hence why they come up in a discussion of Lenovo.

Do I really have to go back to Ubuntu?

Or maybe you could just quit trolling the discussion forum.

[G-Known]

When it comes down to it, you need to figure out what type of feature you would need when purchasing a new laptop or PC. It's important not to buy extra features or junk that you don't need. My HP machine experienced a recent traumatic event that causes the BGA chip to fry and had to be replaced, this seems to be occurring in HP Pavilion product lineup and not much else. The durability of the machine has come into question, as I spend ~$700 for mine and I have took good care of it as the screen wasn't damaged when I stressed it with books. It's still run fine today but my guess it would take couple more years before the BGA chip thing start coming alive.

[xT440s]

I think you are overreacting a bit. I have a Thinkpad T440s at the moment, and I like it overall.

Sure, there are some annoying things about (the touchpad REALLY sucks -> I needed to buy my first mouse for a notebook) and I would agree that the old Thinkpads from IBM had a higher quality than the Lenovo ones have now. But overall, I wouldn't say that I can't recommend them. I yet have to find something better (not a lot of good choices at the moment IMHO).

When you buy something, you should get some information first. For example, you mention the missing HDMI port. That is something you can look up in the internet before you buy it. Same thing for the camera. The Fn and Ctrl keys can easily be reconfigured as well.

[ice.shark]

I think you are overreacting a bit. I have a Thinkpad T440s at the moment, and I like it overall.

Sure, there are some annoying things about (the touchpad REALLY sucks -> I needed to buy my first mouse for a notebook) and I would agree that the old Thinkpads from IBM had a higher quality than the Lenovo ones have now. But overall, I wouldn't say that I can't recommend them. I yet have to find something better (not a lot of good choices at the moment IMHO).

When you buy something, you should get some information first. For example, you mention the missing HDMI port. That is something you can look up in the internet before you buy it. Same thing for the camera. The Fn and Ctrl keys can easily be reconfigured as well.

Yeah, but all those things combine to one really big thing which I would say is a deal breaker.

* Microphone doesn't work - I have to use an external cisco device to attend any voice meeting (on Windows - better on Linux)
* Speakers are useless - can't hear anyone but then again I can't use if for conferencing or skype because of the crappy mic.
* CTRL key placement - you have to know about the BIOS setting and frankly I didn't expect there to be one. And really, why do I need to do this in the first place.
* CD tray pops out avery time you pick the laptop (assuming you're right-handed).
* Nvidia Optimus - I cannot complain here but I can complain about the fact that lenovo haven't made Nvidia provide a Linux solution. They have the power to force Nvidia to write some software for linux or they could do it themselves.
* Several times the laptop is unbootable - not even BIOS. First time this happens is frankly scary especially if you have a deadline or important work the next day.
* On my DELL laptop I use the scroll on the touchpad all the time. On Lenovo it is unusable. I would have slid my finger all the way across the right edge before it realizes I want to scroll down.
* No camera cover? From a Chinese laptop manufacturer? Seriously? Not that I trust a US manufacturer more but at least the US legal system is not completely corrupt and broken.
* Price tag...the W series is the most expensive (mainstream) laptop series out there and is more expensive than Apple's MacBook pros and those are not cheap and over priced.

If I had to nitpick - mine came with only 4GB of RAM. My friend's MacBook had 16GB. For a $3000+ laptop, I'd say 16GB should be standard...Hell, I have 16GB in my desktop and I haven't powered this machine since 2012 (I mean it's not like RAM is expensive).

So really, this laptop is suited for Windows only, and then it's mostly suited for light work. It's not got the best battery life and it's not the most portable so what market is it really targetting? It's not targetting the linux market, or the portable market, or the graphics design market - it just doesn't excell in anything. Considering the fact that the W-series is their most powerful laptops and I usually go for power as I need to compiler code all day and run various VMs for testing, I'm not touching lenovo again.

[debianized]

You want the T series and never the W series. T series is business class, which means a sturdier and higher quality build. I have a T410 and truly love it. I wouldn't recommend it though, because it has the second generation Intel graphics. Get a T420 or later. Used T series are quite affordable, because they constantly come off lease from corporations.

[confuseling]

For what it's worth, I have an X201-T, which I bought unused but as older stock. I'm very happy with it overall. It has a bad touchpad (works fine, but too small to be useful) and an overheating problem if you run 3D things on it without a cooler / stand, but other than that it's been solid.

Apparently they recognise up to 16GB of RAM too, which future-proofs it somewhat. Google to find out your Thinkpad's max - apparently often the number widely quoted is how much Windows will recognise, other OSes can use more.

[twoflowers]

For free? I already have some X61 with LED mods and SXGA Mod, and Frankenpads (T61 Intel Mainboard in the housing of a T60 4:3 with IPS and LED Mod), all non-glare ... I wish they'd make these today. These babies ork like a charm on FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Wheezy .. well, even on Win7 but that does not count as as an OS

[rovernut]

I bought a used ThinkPad T430 2342-6QU last September and haven't had any issues with Wheezy.
It installed fine and everything worked.
I will agree about the Ctrl key, I'm always messing up copy and paste.
The only issue I've had is watching DVD's on it (still haven't gotten it flawless like my desktop), but I rarely need to do that, so it's not a big issue for me.

[keithpeter]

As others have mentioned, older T and X series thinkpads seem to be OK with most Linux/BSDs.

I have a Thinkpad X60 and an X200.

The 5 year old X200 was around £90 delivered off ebay from a supplier who sells refurbished corporate laptops. Runs Wheezy/Sid/CentOS/Whatever but needs the Intel wifi card non-free firmware. Little underpowered on Windows 7 with 2Gb RAM so I just popped the hard drive out and put a hard drive with Debian Sid in. All toastie, reasonable battery life, you won't be editing HD video on this thing...

The older X60 runs slackware 14.1 at present (I swap my hard drives around, one advantage of Linux) which has the non-free driver for the wifi card installed. The X60 is not a power house (early core duo, not 64bit capable) but can run Slack with KDE 4.15 fine on 1.5Gb. Has run OpenBSD great as well.

[oswaldkelso]

Lenovo.... On one hand The X60 and the X200 will run libreboot http://www.libreboot.org/ on the other http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02 ... nnections/

http://www.fsf.org/news/libreboot-x200- ... ur-freedom
http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/ibm- ... -coreboot/

[rovernut]

I bought a used ThinkPad T430 2342-6QU last September and haven't had any issues with Wheezy.
It installed fine and everything worked.
I will agree about the Ctrl key, I'm always messing up copy and paste.
The only issue I've had is watching DVD's on it (still haven't gotten it flawless like my desktop), but I rarely need to do that, so it's not a big issue for me.

I was looking for an old post for some information and came across this thread.
8 1/2 years later (9 1/2 if you count from when I bought it) and my T430 is still going strong (a good bid dustier and worn) In fact I'm about to install bookworm on it (still has Stretch ).
It does seem the speakers have gotten weaker, but not a big deal to me. I'd say I've gotten the $250 purchase price of use out of it.

[cds60601]

I bought a used ThinkPad T430 2342-6QU last September and haven't had any issues with Wheezy.
It installed fine and everything worked.
I will agree about the Ctrl key, I'm always messing up copy and paste.
The only issue I've had is watching DVD's on it (still haven't gotten it flawless like my desktop), but I rarely need to do that, so it's not a big issue for me.

I was looking for an old post for some information and came across this thread.
8 1/2 years later (9 1/2 if you count from when I bought it) and my T430 is still going strong (a good bid dustier and worn) In fact I'm about to install bookworm on it (still has Stretch ).
It does seem the speakers have gotten weaker, but not a big deal to me. I'd say I've gotten the $250 purchase price of use out of it.

I agree, I have 2-430's and 2-530's picked up off of ebay a year ago and they are still running. Maxed out the ram in each and popped in SSD's where I could. All running Debian and Arch