A little rant on Thinkpads

I've got to say. For probably the first year I owned my Thinkpad, I always recommended them to people for a more premium laptop. Features like hard drive accelerometers, magnesium roll cages, etc. just make you drool. However I have to say that after owning the T61 for a few years(bought in Sept 07), I am pretty disappointed.

After my first year of owning my T61, my battery had died. Not holding anything against anyone for that, it had a lot of charges/discharged and had a fair run. I mention this to give you an idea of the kind of use this laptop has had afterwords. I didn't replace the battery, so this laptop was an at home computer. I used my netbook for portable use. So, I would say the main place I had my computer for the duration of its life was on my couch. I simply rest it on the armrest and computed right there, with no battery in it, I was advised to just have the dead battery unattached rather than leave it there. So, besides picking it up and setting it down on the side table next to the armrest, it hadn't seen much moving.

Well, one day, after I was shutting my computer down to go out, it wouldn't close. So I inspected it. on the right hinge, the plastic bezel around the monitor was opening when I tried shutting it. Using a flashlight I saw a metal piece inside that should have been turning evidently. So in order to even close my laptop, I took it apart and took out the right hinge so I could use it for school. It pretty much just...well...sloped a bit to the right during use. Oi. This laptop is becoming more and more a desktop. Taking my laptop apart, and looking at the problem though, is that the piece that should have been turning wasn't because the bottom part of the hinge snapped off from the top part. Where this snap occurred, was located where basically the bottom right of the LCD panel would be.

I might get some guff that I let my problems go on for way too long, but I just didn't have the time(school wise) or money really to have this kind of stuff fixed. But this problem happened with a breaking piece of metal, behind an lcd panel, which is still perfectly in tact. So it can't be me being rough on it. Anyways, after a few months of simply using the one hinge, the hinge started to get loose and at one point, my laptop would either be completely 180 open or completely closed. the hinge was stripped pretty much.

Oh well, it had a good run, but I continued to use my thinkpad, with a box behind it to prop up the screen. During these months of ghettoness, I started to notice in the sides of the keyboard that there were cracks forming all over because the keyboard was plastic. Seriously, this computer wasn't even being used for portable use and it's falling apart on me. Finally a week or 2 ago, either opening or closing it I forget, the hinge-less side sort of shifted, hard to explain, and the left hinge monitor bezel, decided to open up...well...there was a crack in the plastic, so imagine it bending itself to let something out, then shuts the door basically so it can't come back in. Well, now my laptop monitor is seriously connected to my keyboard by 2 cords. I know

I let some of the problems go on for too long, but the right hinge problem shouldn't have occurred in the first place. Has anyone had any problems with newer thinkpads like this, or am I special? I honestly don't rough up my computers at all, both of my netbooks are still perfectly functioning as if i bought them the first day, i've got laptops from the 90's that are in better shape than my thinkpad. Did I get a bad batch? Did I give too much credit to IBM's Thinkpad from the olden days? blarg.

And is there anyway I could possibly even get my laptop fixed? Has anyone ever sent their thinkpad into lenovo for repairs, and know how much it may cost? I'm trying to see if it'd be worth it to have it repaired since it's still a pretty powerful laptop even compared to today's laptops, and if it would be cheaper than buying a new laptop for my transfer school, then I'd probably opt for it :/

Sorry for the wall of text. I expect many TL;DR's

 

is it still in warranty? it'll be a hassle to not have your laptop, but maybe they'll fix it.

and think about using that enter key, will ya?

 

Same thing happend to me (actually still is) with my Z60m.
The left hinge snaped (exactly the same way you described), and after two months the right side hinge did the same. Tell the truth, i was kinda rough with the laptop (picking it up from the screen from time to time) so i don't really blame it on lenovo.

i sent it for a fix in the local lab but they wanted around 300$ for the work, so i decided to go for a new laptop (getting the T410) and save the 300$ for a 5 y/o laptop.
Good luck with your

 

Some pictures would make this a much better story
Not implying the story isn't true. I just want to see what happened.

 

the hinge is stainless steel.... it does snap in very rare occasions, just like winning lotto........ i had over 8 T61 and T61p of various flavours, and i still have 3 in my possession. One of my T61 was dropped a lot of times, but the hinge always stayed strong despite all this, the only time it fails when the tension decreased due to the numerous opening and closing, but it never snapped in the way that you described.

But posting a picture of your T61 would be extremely helpful, and probably having more than one year for warranty is something everyone should consider.

 

Bad picture back in march when the hinge thing happened


now some current pictures...

 

your T61 is looking a bit worse for wear...

it looks like your left lower screen corner where the hinge is, experienced blunt force, like it been dropped or something.

The crack formation in the palmrest around the left or right upper corner is quite usual, most likely due to a manufacturing defect or overtightening of screws holding the palmrest in that area.

I think at this point, you could try to buy a new set of hinge, palmrest, top case and restore the laptop to a working condition. Or just sell the laptop for parts.

 

I don't know that I'd give you guff, but you let these things go until it was too late to fix them. It looks like you got a lemon, which is too bad, but I don't know that I see it as Lenovo's fault when you could have remedied it.

 

Woo, that was some pretty heavy usage there.

 

That has to be in worse shape than my thinkpad was when I got rid of it! Well, cosmetically mine was fine.

The batteries in the T60 and T61 seem to ALWAYS fail. Everyone that started college when I did had a T60 from the school, all of the batteries were dead between 10 and 20 months.

The hinge problem is pretty rare and come to think of it, I've never seen a cracked palmwrest like that either ... The hinges on the thinkpads always seemed to be way better than any other laptop, they don't get wobbly after a while.

I think your best bet would be going on eBay and looking for replacement parts for it.

 

I dont know about the palm rest but if one hinge is loose and you are continuing to use it then obviously more force is transferred to the other hinge and the rest of the chasis. kind of like and earthquake, you don't know there the impact will be only the force will ripple. are you a physics major? you would understand if so.

 

Looking at the pictures the T61 is in bad shape, there must be quite a big impact near the screen for it to become dislodged in such manner. Unfortunately the longer you use the lid in its current state, the greater the risk that you will enforce more wear on the other hinge before that fails too.

Seeing that your T61 has the nVidia Quadro 140m chip, personally I wouldn't bother repairing it as it wouldn't be economical. The Quadro 140m chip has a manufacturing defect which at some point will completely fail even if you do manage to fix the chassis, I would suggest selling it as parts and buy a good condition second hand laptop after (T61 with integrated graphics are bargains now, or settle for a slightly used T400 for half of its original retail value). I bought my T61 just last week in very good condition and it only set me back £250 on eBay.

 

waw, even Acer already doesn't have such sort of problem !
At least, it is not expect-able to have cracks on palm rest, it is unbelievable for business laptops.

 

The flash makes the thinkpad look like it's in worse condition than it actually is. The left hinge area looks horrible especially because i put the wrong sized screw in that part and it started grinding the monitor, if that makes sense. But the problems I have are

The crack in the palmrest
The breaking of the metal right hinge
The cracking of the bottom right part of the monitor bezel caused from that hinge occurrence
The crack in the left bottom monitor bezel that allowed the hinge to pop out.

I guess I'll give Lenovo a call or something this week. or maybe do the live chat thing. I've grown attached to it. It is a fast computer, and I loved its standard screen. I'm afraid to go for other thinkpads because my parents have r61s and r61i's, and they are slow beyond belief. IE and firefox both crash constantly on them(seems to be better now that i updated their FF) but still, their thinkpads perform so poorly right out of the box, I'm afraid to get another one. If it is an exorbitant price for repair, i'll simply ebay a knockoff set of hinges from hong kong, try doing the repair myself, and superglue some cracks or something, and see if it'll hold. I'm really tempted to just go macbook worst case scenario. My laptop situation is driving me to that :/

 

this is why Panasonic Battery is so highly sort after by some people.

 

No, you are driving you to that, don't blame the laptop for your laziness. As others have said, you should have had it repaired at the first sign of trouble, and the rest could have been avoided.
I would go so far as to say that you (or someone else) probably didn't use the laptop with care, and as a result the hinge broke, and yet you're blaming Lenovo (well sorry, Thinkpads) for your carelessness.
Nobody to blame but yourself I think.

 

WOW, that is in pretty bad shape.
I've had my T61 (bought new in January 2008), and it has been to Arizona, Connecticut, Kentucky, various hotels around the US, but mainly on my desk. Throughout all of this, to this day it's battery still can go just over an hour unplugged (on the original battery), and has not a mark anywhere on it. This is also after taking it through several airports, having to be handled by airport security (putting it in those nifty plastic God awful bins), and all.
So, I would just say at the first sign of a problem, you should have had it fixed right then in there. If you take care of something, it will take care of you. Heck, I still have that yellow tape on the outside of my T61 (on the bottom left on the palm rest next to the Core 2 Duo sticker) that I never bothered to take off when I opened the box lol
I would just save up some $$, sell your T61 for parts, and buy a new T510.
Just my .02 cents.
Mike

 

What did you do with it for it to end up in such conditions if you don't mind my asking?

 

When you moved your thinkpad around did you have the lid open? If yes, at what angle were you holding your thinkpad?

On the couch, at what angle were you doing most of the computing on that armrest?

How do you hold your thinkpad?


Just some questions that came into mind

Do you hold it with one hand?

 

I dont think you can fault Lenovo completely. Your situation is like finding something wrong with the wall in your house then waiting until the whole thing collapses and blaming the builder. Or knowing you have no fluid in your transmission and then when it finally burns out complaining to the automaker. It shows neglect and lack of initiative on your part more than a true defect in manufacturing.

 

Yeah and with the "slow" R61/i/e's your parents have, that can be fixed with some easy tweaking, a defrag would improve overall program loading speed, and if they ordered slow 1.6GHz Celeron dual cores or something, just pick up a T9300 or T7700 any 800MHz FSB T series basically, there was even this guy running an X9000 in his R61e with no problems and was surprised (because it is a 44W TDP CPU) that the temps dropped and performance was dramatic, since he was going from a 1.6GHz Celeron.

 

If I moved my thinkpad from room to room, the lid would be closed. If I moved it from the armrest to the side table, I would use 2 hands to hold the keyboard part of it, I've never picked it up by the lid or anything, and the only time i held it with one hand was back when I had a battery and I would have my laptop at my side battery down and my hand would grip that or whatever.

And I get your analogy with things like transmission fluid, but the hinge braking is something that shouldn't have happened at all, especially in the location where it happened. I don't know of any physical way I could have possibly caused that hinge to break without damaging the lcd panel along with it.. If i was still in warranty when it happened I would have sent it in for repair, but at that point, I was in school so i didn't really have money to get it repaired, and being a comp sci major, I needed my computer every day for school.

 

Actually I do know the cost /hr for repair.
Asked the warranty guy once and.... *grabs notepad* it costs $195/hr labour to repair.

EDIT:
IMHO I would just extend the warranty like mentioned before.

 

Computer Small Computer Interface major? Were you referring to SCSI? Cause it sounds kinda foolish if you were, and i think you just got a bad lemon, should have ordered refurbished, as they are put to more strenuous tests, and rigorous tests but new ThinkPads have never been used at all...

 

Determine if your battery has been recalled:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=BATT-LENOVO#automatically

http://download.lenovo.com/lenovo/content/batt/082009/LandingPage.html

Hinges from ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.ca/Lenovo-Thinkpad-...ultDomain_0?hash=item2a043712ed#ht_2323wt_991

more...
http://shop.ebay.ca/?_from=R40&_trk...thinkpad+t61+hinges&_sacat=See-All-Categories



I guess you can't really do much about the case... though if you can find a person selling a dead T61 (don't worry, there will be more flooding the used market soon ) then you can swap up the mobo.

Hope this helps

 

Wow, way overpriced. I imagine some of us would do that work for a fraction of that.

 

I'll volunteer myself to generously repair any laptops for 95/100 of that $195/hr labour cost Just giving back to the community (tax not included)

 

In its current state, you can only sell it for parts, as the cost of refurbishing it and repairing it, would cost you more than a new laptop.

Also, why does your laptop have so much dusts and hair/fur on it, especially around the hinge area?

 

I am having Panasonic Y7 for more than 2 years. And the opposite side of such sort of beautiful thing is you will never get a reason to buy a next laptop, I mean the reason that can be approved by wife Battery still keeps almost 4 hours under Linux, it is not scratched, doesn't have crack, feels very solid. I can move it using one hand, sometimes I moved it keeping laptop by opened lid (one hand movement). I have never care about how many stuff I have in my backpack, if it is possible to push laptop here it is ok. That is the best laptop construction I have ever seen.

To be objective, I have to say the screen is crap, laptop is quite noisy and keyboard is not on a pair with what Txxx has.

 

computer science major. as in what i was going to school for.

And I got it new because I got it from my parents for school back when it was a new model.


I'm going to see exactly what parts Ican try to get from lenovo to see if I can deal with domestic shipping, and to see if they have any casing that's in their database that can be ordered. If not, superglue and hongkong ripoffs from ebay here i come. F 195/hr. The hardest part of disassembly/reassembly is using the right screws(which i fail at)


And I had my computer in the corner of my bedroom for the past week since i haven't used it. and i have a dog. and flash shows no mercy.

 

A bit OT, but in a similar vein:

Once upon a time the screen on my relatively new Dell gave out and I called for service. I was on assignment at a client, so I needed a quick fix.

Anyway, the tech showed up the next day with the parts needed and replaced the screen. The entire time he was with me, he sort of ranted and raved about Dell this and Dell that, yada, yada, yada, and how much Dell would miss him if he went elsewhere. He was also sloppy in his work (read: how he handled my laptop and the replacement screen), and though I wasn't overly impressed with his work, I did want my laptop repaired. After about 30 minutes with him, he finished, and we said our goodbyes.

Then later that day, when I needed to use the built-in camera, low and behold, the computer couldn't find the device. So I called Dell Support again, and the same Tech returned the next day to find the connector for the camera disconnected. Naturally, he gave some sort of excuse like it must have come dislodged between the time he left the previous day and the time I discovered the issue. He also continued with his yada, yada, yadas about Dell, which I endured patiently.

The moral of the story: whether $195 or some other fairly high figure, regardless of what one pays for, one often gets what they pay for. But that doesn't necessarily mean they got what they, you, or I would think that they paid for, after the fact.

Thank God for the screwdriver (both the one with a handle and flat or cross tip, and the one that sits in a glass with ice cubes).

 

Same exact issue with me, screws are the hardest thing to remember where each specific one goes, i find the description of what screws look like, and color is pretty vague and general in my T61/p manual. However i think that if the screws are similar enough and have enough length/thread type to safely grab the adjoining material, you can use whichever ones seem to look right. Then if it needs servicing and they claim that they can't repair it cause you messed with the screws, just say the golden sentence "it was like that when i got it"