IBM ThinkPad T60 by Lenovo
I recently bought an IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T60 to replace my four year old Dell Precision laptop. You would think that moving from a 2.0 GHz Pentium M to the latest dual core 2.15 GHz processor and going up in RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB there would be a major difference in performance but if there is a difference I haven’t seen it yet.
There are numerous reviews on the internet which praise these notebooks and award “Editors Choice” for performance, value and usability. What a load of hogwash. This is the most over-rated item it has ever been my misfortune to own. Here are some of the problems that I have found with it.
- Washed out screen. I bought the best model that I could find and it came with a 14.1 inch SXGA+ (1400 x 1050) resolution screen. My old Dell had a 15 inch UXGA screen at 1600 x 1200 and I was prepared to sacrifice a little resolution for portability so I won’t complain about that. However the screen on the new laptop has a much smaller acceptable viewing angle and the colors are washed out in comparison to the Dell’s screen. Remember that the Dell is over four years old!
- A ton of resident software, most of which doesn’t work worth a damn. I have not been able to get system update to work and when I contact the help staff by telephone none of them seem to know what error 75 means. The Migration Assistant did not work at all, saying that there were problems with the system on my old PC. The Help Center and Message Center are pretty much useless with the help center providing less help than even the built in Windows help and the message center urging me to use all of the other software which I have tried with no success.
- Slow bootup. The built in security chip seems to be the main cause of this problem. On booting a message pops up that the system is checking the status of the security chip . . . for over 30 seconds!! How can it possibly take that long to check the status of a chip? Does this chip run at 1Hz?
- Poor recovery software. I include this even though I have managed to recover the system once from the backup that was created by the software. When I bought the machine I asked that they provide a Windows CD and a driver CD but I was told that this was not possible. The system was backed up into a special partition and could be recovered from there. I asked them to burn the recovery disks and they did so, luckily as it turned out. I had to restore the system after having a problem removing a certain item of security software and the restore image on the partition did not work. I booted from the disk marked Recovery Disk 1 and then when the system asked for disk 2 I inserted the disk so labeled. The system told me that this was not the correct disk and instructed me to reinsert disk 1. I did so and was told that this was the wrong disk. I tried disk 2 again and it happily continued restoring. This may be logical to somebody at Lenovo but made no sense to me. After installing all of my programs for the tenth time after many other assorted problems I finally decided to try the backup and recovery software on the system. The next time I had a problem I tried to recover the entire system but it would not work. Back to the recovery disks again. After a factory restore from the disks the machine would then recognize the recovery data so I managed to get it back up and running properly. It has not been needed again since so I hope that it will be okay next time.
- Diagnostics that don’t work and cannot produce a bootable diagnostics CD. I tried running diagnostics on the system when I had problems with the modem as described below. They wouldn’t run on the modem. I tried to burn the CD (an option) and was told that there was a missing file. I informed the service center about this and they promised to get me a new set of backup disks to fix this but so far nothing has happened.
- Pathetic modem. I had coveted the modem in a friend’s Toshiba a couple of years ago when he could consistently connect on dial-up at 19.2 KBPS while my Dell could only manage 14.4 on the same line. When I got this machine home the modem was dead, no dial tone. I tried various things and finally downloaded a new driver using my old laptop and installed that. Still no joy. Finally took the machine to the nearest service center which was over three hours drive away and they checked it out and found a bent pin in the socket. They were able to show that the machine could dial-up and connect from the shop. On getting home I could also dial up and connect, after about 10 attempts on average. Several calls an lots of yelling led to an offer to exchange the modem, which meant the entire motherboard. It is better now, it only takes an average of six attempts to connect. The line where I live may not be all that good but two other computers with older modems can connect and only once a week or so does it take a second attempt. My four year old Dell managed to connect first time on twenty out of twenty attempts and each time it would connect at over 50 KBPS while the newer IBM could only manage a maximum of 46.6 KBPS at any time. So much for four years of progress.
The machine has a couple of good points. It is light and has long battery life. It is however far from speedy as I have had a lot of temporary freezes and the booting time is abominable.
Some of you may think that I don’t know what I am doing and have caused at least some of these problems myself. I am no guru but I have built many systems from bare metal and installed complete software suites both for myself and for others. I have installed Linux on a number of machines as well and have never had as many problems as I have with this unit.
I will be replacing it as soon as I can convince my wife that she needs it. Hello Dell, I’m back.
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