Anybody ordered T400s yet?

Curious if anybody is waiting for theirs, ordered from Lenovo? I was an early bird on June 23rd with my order which has estimated shipping date (ESD) July 7th. Last week they changed it to July 13th. Curious if anybody else placed one, and what is their ESD?

 

Let us know how its like when you get one

 

yeah, let us know. Take all Lenovo ESDs with a grain of salt. They're better than they were but still only a rough guide to when it'll actually ship. Chances are it'll go earlier than the 13th.

 

I ordered one on June 26 after I was sure about the Win7 upgrade and my ESD is still targeted for July 10.

 

Hmm, interesting. My order was 3 days earlier with ESD being 3 days before yours. But they made a mistake with ultrabay adapter part (ver II instead of ver III). Although this part is separate from T400s order, when I call them last week to update it with a correct one the order page was updated with a new ESD 1 week later. I just hope these are rough *conservative* estimates and order was still in queue as intended from June 23rd. Anyway, will wait and see for any order status updates next week.

 

I got a T400s a few days ago (I didn't order through Lenovo directly, I got preconfigured "topseller" model 2808-C4U). I'm quite pleased with it.

I added an Intel X18-M 80GB drive and put Windows 7 RC on it. Very snappy and a real pleasure to work with in terms of the software / OS experience. The integrated graphics work very well and while I know the lack of dedicated GPU is a deal-breaker, I never got any benefit from a dedicated GPU and love the fact that I can finally stop fighting with that whole layer of drivers.

The hardware is as promised... very light, X300-like profile. The new keyboard is very pleasant to work with. Build quality is very good, no flaws that I can see. Love the new indicator light scheme (there are still plenty of lights but they are presented in different areas of the machine which is far classier, less geeky, and more intuitive in my opinion).

The screen is probably as most would expect... bright, evenly lit, outdoor readable, nice resolution. Offset with, especially coming from my FlexView T60, limited viewing angles and generally muted color palette. The FlexView's colors are so much nicer looking, and the viewing angles are just wonderful compared to the T400s (or nearly anything else). But while the FlexView is perhaps nearly unmatched for normal indoor lighting, it just doesn't work in very bright rooms, trains, outside, etc., whereas the T400s works great in those sorts of situations. I doubt any of this is a surprise to anyone here.

Aside from screen limitations, which IMO are fair all things considered, the only complaints I would have are: 1) a fair amount of CPU whine even when on A/C power (I adjusted the BIOS to get rid of it, and added TpFanControl and now I have a truly silent machine, but it is somewhat of a shame that you have to do a BIOS-level change in order to use the machine without what was to be an intrusive amount of whine, but YMMV); and 2) the combined headphone/microphone jack is cool if you have iPhone-like headphones, but who wants to buy a silly adapter for existing headphones--seems like they could have put the combined jack plus kept a separate mic jack to allow either style, oh well.

All in all, so far I'd call the machine a resounding success. It has a "wow" amount of lightness considering the screen size. That lightness, combined with the the bright, serviceable screen makes it truly portable. Real-world battery life will not particularly impress at 3 hours of "actual work" time, but again I find this fair given how light and powerful the machine is, and it could be augmented with bay battery for times when you don't mind a bit of additional weight.

Very impressed and well worth the money so far. If you want a very portable machine with a 14" screen and don't mind integrated graphics then it's hard to say what would be better (aside from the Toshiba Tecra R10 which I bet is pretty awesome too, but I really wanted a Thinkpad).

 

pavlova, can you use the standard 3.5mm headphones plug on the combined port?

 

As great as the IPS screens are, the 14" screens were mediocre. Perhaps it a step in the right direction.

 

pavlova - How did you mod / "adjusted" the T400s bios for the fan settings? Can you post a link to the guide?

 

@ pavlova: thank you for this write up! Really appreciate it since I'm coming of T60 myself. Without a doubt I can see a difference in my personal T60 (FlexView, 15", discrete gfx) and my T60 at work (14", integrated gfx). I sure hope T400s is better than that 14" And just like you, I found discrete gfx to be unnecessary in my case. I’m a little puzzled by 3 hr battery life. Was that normal use or watching a movie? I have seen a number of reviews where normal use yields over 5 hours while watching movie/DVD last for a little over 3hr.

And, as mentioned above, can you please post here your BIOS mod for fan setting? I'm also curious if you can use regular headphone without an adapter? I sure hope the jack is backward compatible for use with regular 3.5mm headphones.

 

Hi--

Twister and T30power, yes you can use normal headphones in the T400s jack. I just tested and it works fine and sounds good. What you can't do is use a "normal" headphone/mic headset (such as for Skype/Voip calls etc) because they have separate mic and headphone plugs. I assume it's possible to find an adapter.

Twister, yes it is better than the 14" T60 screen, I've seen those and the T400s one is much better than that.

In terms of Bios/Fan tweaks, I only did two things: (1) went into the Bios, then tried different combinations of settings in the Power menu until the whine went away. There are basically two groups of settings in there, one set about SpeedStep and then another group at the bottom which is about allowing the CPU and PCI etc to power off. I found that if I simply disabled the one about CPU powering off (don't remember exact name of the setting but it is third from the bottom) then the whine went away.

The (2) other thing I did was to install TpFanControl, which IIRC is mentioned in the thinkpad sticky on this forum and easily found via Google. This just makes the fan a bit less aggressive than Lenovo's default settings... I was not having any serious fan problems, I just installed TpFanControl because I've used it in the past and enjoy the silent experience. Without TpFanControl the fan does come on but it is not very intrusive or bothersome.

Not sure what to say about the 3hr battery life, other than to say that is what Windows predicts rather consistently. I haven't run it all the way down myself, but i have used it for about 2 hours and it was predicting just over another hour at that point. In fairness this is when I am actively using the machine (doing programming etc). There may be cases where it lasts longer. The BIOS setting above is likely cutting the battery life down some. I could play around with that I suppose and post whether there is a big difference. Also I have not installed Lenovo's power management, just using the vanilla Windows 7 install, so the system can't take advantage of the "power stretch" and other items provided by Lenovo's power utilities. Perhaps I will try installing those to see if that makes a difference. While I don't really expect 5 hours on a relatively small/light battery, I'll admit it would be nice to thave 4 hours. I suppose it is possible that I have a poor battery but it's probably more likely that my setup is the problem. For me it's over an additional hour than what I'm used to so the 3 hours doesn't sound too bad!

By the way, this model 2808C4U is quite a good deal in my opinion, and it's a way to be able to order (from a reseller) and know exactly when you are going to get it--which happens to be important to me because I live in a big city and can't have the machine just show up and be left in my apt hallway or something. It's a pretty bare bones config but it comes w/ a 3-yr warranty for less than $1450 shipped. The only thing I would have opted for if I was ordering it custom from Lenovo would be the camera, that would be nice but I can live without.

If anyone is interested, the ThinkLight works well on my machine and I think it is a bit brighter than on my T60. It does light up the keyboard well enough to see it. I never use it to see the keyboard but have used it a few times in the past to read some notes while typing, etc.

I don't think I mentioned before, but the access to the hard drive and RAM (I inserted a second 2GB of Ram to bump it up to 4, though most of the last gig is not available in this setup) is really really convenient and simple. One screw to get at either, very nice.

I know some folks ask about screen hinges right away, so I'll go ahead and say that they are nice and stable, just right IMO.

I haven't tested the fingerprint reader yet (need to play with that for Windows 7) but I assume it works fine. Speakers are pretty good and it's nice having them facing up rather than kind of down and in front as in the T60 design.

One thing to note is that the ExpressCard slot is the smaller version, it accepts the smaller "34" cards but not the larger form factor. So if you have one of the larger ones for some reason then you should be aware of that. I've never actually seen one of those but I know they are out there (I'm assuming these are things like specialized audio cards but I'm not sure).

 

Congrats Pavlova. Excellent machine you've acquired.
Less than $1450 right? Some €1036.
/start rant

Unfortunately the preconfigured model here in NL (2,53 GHz, 250GB) starts at $3063.
It costs $1524.90 in the USA (coupon applied, total savings $540.10, 1-year warranty).
Damn you, Lenovo marketeers. Damn you.

/rant over
/back on topic

 

Nice first impression Pav, would u also be kind enough to put some pics up pls

 

Update on the battery life.

Background: I'm using Windows 7 RC. Have been using the "vanilla" install, meaning installing practically no drivers outside of what the 7 installer puts on itself. And I've had the CPU Power Management option set to "disabled" in the BIOS because of CPU whine that was bothering me (see posts earlier in this thread).

As an experiment I installed the "beta" Windows 7 drivers from Lenovo's site for their Power Management Driver and Power Management Utility. Interestingly, at this point my battery life seemed to drop by about 1/2 an hour. But it is fair to mention that these drivers were provided during the Win 7 beta a few months ago and don't have anything T400s-specific.

I then backed those out and instead installed the T400s-ready versions of the "Vista" drivers for those two power-related items, thinking that perhaps these would include the Win 7 support even though they aren't saying that yet, and would also include anything relevant for the T400s (the release notes point out that the power utility now provides options to control the "always on" USB port which is only on the T400s at this time, for example). After rebooting I found I had still lost about 1/2 hour (down to 2:35 or so when coming off an almost-charged battery). But if I used the Power Manager tools to go down to the maximum power savings mode, I had gained a few minutes (around 3:10).

Curious, I then went into my BIOS and put it back to the normal factory settings (IOW un-disabled that CPU Power Management setting). Two interesting things happened then. First, I expected the CPU whine to be back, and it is but it is much much better, much harder to hear and pretty acceptable (to me) now. Second, the battery life now seems to be better if I dial Lenovo's power utility all the way down and turn on its "battery stretch" feature, at which point the power consumption goes down to 11-12 watts, and my predicted time remaining is now 3:17 at 79% remaining, which would probably be close to 4 hours at 100% if accurate and linear (probably not exactly).

I don't know how to explain the CPU whine thing, it was pretty pronounced at first which is why I made the BIOS change. I guess there must be something special that the Lenovo drivers know how to do that causes it not to be as much of a problem. I guess I'd have to remove the drivers to prove that out, but I probably won't bother.

 

11-12 watts is too high for those settings. 8-9 would be more appropriate, and I can get 6-7 watts on my Tablet with those settings.

 

Hi Jon--

That's interesting, I saw it report 11 watts for a while and 10 watts at one point but it didn't go into the single digits. Your results are pretty cool.

What do you use to see the wattage? I'm just looking in the lenovo power manager utility (basic view)... but ironically it consumes like 50% of the CPU when open, so it may be giving me a false negative (unless that is intentional to simulate load? seems unlikely).

 

I use power manager (advanced view) as well. It shouldn't use 50% of the CPU, but it's been known to happen. Try restarting your system and see if it changes.

 

Thanks for the impressions pavlova.

I would expect the T400s to use a little more power than the X200t due to the higher wattage CPU and larger display. I wouldn't expect the power usage difference to be that great, but it can explain some of the difference. Maybe the enlarged ESC and DEL keys are responsible.

 

Ha yeah or its keeping its metabolism up to stay slim...

So far have not been able to open up the power manager without it spiking the CPU so I don't think I'm getting an accurate read on the wattage. It's possible that I should uninstall the current, T400s-blessed Vista version and go back to the beta Win 7 version. I'd be curious whether Jon is using the beta Win 7 version of the power drivers on his tablet or just the normal version appropriate for the x200t under Vista. It could be that the T400s just needs a Win 7 ready driver, and until that time it will just have a bit poorer battery life. I can live with that, it's a pre-release OS after all. Still a lot of fun to use.

(By the way Jon thanks a lot for your help and comments about the outdoor-readiness of the tablets... I went for the T400s after I saw the 300-nit rating but I really appreciated your input.)

 

I'm using Windows 7 RC drivers and apps for everything I could find.

 

I hate that we Europeans are always the cash-cows when they release new Notebooks. I hate that too. However, you can get the T400s with s,4GHz and 128 GB SSD for 1790€ in Germany.

https://www.lapstars.de/product_info.php?cPath=582&products_id=4357

Or 1509€ with 2,53GHz and 250GB, if you are a student. Add 50-70 for the new NL Keyboard.

Including the tax the price difference between the USA and Germany is only for student models within "reason" (although 200€ is still hefty). But Lenovo's price poilicy really sucks.

 

You're the man, Ernst.
Thanks so much for posting that link.
I've been browsing sites from Finland to Portugal but didn't come across this one.
Much obliged!

 

Anyone have UK availability?

Would also much appreciate some real-life runtimes + all-up real weight. For various reasons I plan to be Sony-free by the end of the year and the T400s seems to be an SZ replacement in terms of how I realistically use it (I rarely cranked up the 8400M).

 

Volgelbung, if no one else has by then i should be able to post real weights later this week when I'm in my office.

 

As a 3rd data point, I will be able to let you know battery life with XP once I get my lappy. It seems that Vista/W7 needs some tweaking to optimize the performance, although most of the people who reviewed T400s had Vista pre-configured with default setting that yielded 5+ hours of battery life. I’m also looking forward to run benchmark test (Crystal Disk Mark) to find out true performance of Samsung 128GB SSD in my specific config.

 

with a 45 wH battery, I would not expect amazing results at all. I would expect what the x301 got at the very best, which by all accounts was barely adequate. Despite all the LED screen talk, processor, and gpu talk, I find that looking at the wH of the battery is still by far the dominant factor, so I generally have an idea of how long a laptop will last on battery just by that. So I'd say less than your typical 56 wH 6 cell battery, which by my definition is less than average.

 

I'm inclined to agree. In fact, the x301 should probably achieve 5-15% BETTER battery life than the T400s due to the ULV processor and 0.8" smaller display. Otherwise they are extremely similar, right down to the undersized 6 cell battery.

 

Thanks guys. Normally I'd prefer something less slabby and many's the time recently that I've dismissed Lenovos out of hand for making me feel like an accountant or a bearded programmer, but Sony's latest flagships have been resulting in plummeting availability for me - so much so the reliability of my newest Sony flagships have descended to be not dissimilar to Apple, despite less use than my still everyday mobile workhorses, the older SZ's.

I've always thought that if I felt like I actually needed Sony service I shouldn't be buying them. And recently I've had multiple firsthand experience of this. Basically if you went to a sewage works and rolled around in raw effluent for a day, I think it would be a more pleasurable experience than dealing with anyone at Sony - including the head of CS over here, who I had the displeasure of meeting. Given these problems, the newer machines are currently slated for disposal or storage.

So basically, it's Dell, HP, Lenovo or Toshiba. Of which, 'truly premium' while retaining the SZ/Z form factor, utility, etc seems to be Lenovo and more specifically the T400s. While my SZ's have served me well unlike their contemporaries, they are up for replacement so I'd like to make a choice fairly soon - and I need to know that in the basics (runtime, all-up weight, etc) that I'd be looking at similar numbers or an improvement on the SZ (6 hours - VAIO Ultimate Power Saving profile*, 1.79Kgs with the 10.8V/5800mah cell).

* Not sure of the level of throttling, but display at minimum, 16-bit colours, audio off, pretty aggressive sleep etc settings, wifi on, BT off, WWAN off. I can also get 4 hours with WWAN on / wifi off with the same profile.

 

I remember that in some of the early reviews of this machine a GPS device was mentioned.
Does anybody know, if it is installed in all models or is it part of some special configurations?

 

WWAN is required. Either AT&T or Verizon should work.

 

I actually loved my Sony Vaio Z except for its loud fan. I was a little skeptical of the screen, b/c it developed keyboard marks, permanent ones, from normal use. My only problem with the Lenovo laptops is that they don't have great screens (brightness, contrast, black levels, viewing angles) at all except for the x200 tablet, but it seems too heavy for what you get (I wouldn't use the tablet features). Maybe one day.

 

The most frustrating thing is that functionally they're exactly what I want. Styling-wise, the machines are now also too busy IMO but still, it's better on various levels than the Lenovos. It's just the build quality and attention to 'human factors' falling off a cliff with the current generation. With chronic service I can't afford to deal with build quality problems - especially if they are extremely keen to chalk it up to user abuse, whatever the problem is.

So it seems simplest to decamp to a family of duller but apparently still properly screwed-together machines. I'll revisit Sony after the TT/Z are replaced and see if things are any better.

 

Could you do that if possible? Thanks. Still no sign of the 400s here. Any runtime testimonials?

 

I placed my order for T400s on June 23rd; it was shipped out on July 9th, and I received it on July 14th. My system is fully loaded, as you can see from my sig, but initial reaction is very similar to Pavlova review considering I'm coming off T60 myself.

The WOW factor is definitely there when you first pick it up. Very slim, super light and lighting fast! I can’t comment on how it compares to T400 since I never seen or worked with one, therefore my comparison is more against T60. Build is solid!!! Screen does have a little flex if you hold it at the opposite corners and try to bent, but when you close the cover – it’s like a brick. Keyboard is very good, no sign of any flex. Keys are very responsive; the only thing I noticed Space-bar mechanism a little bit different when pressed in comparison to all other keys. @pavlova, have you noticed it? Another thing to mention are the speakers: not much bass, but loud and clear! Touchpad is awesome! I personally never use touchpad (hate it!) and disable it in favor of using ONLY track-point. This one with its bumpy surface is a pleasure to use. Laptop is whisper quiet and stays cool (temperature). Battery with a setting more toward higher CPU speed and better laptop performance still gave me 4hr plus change. I'm sure I can squeeze 5hr with low performance setting. Also, laptop came with all the recovery DVDR so there is no need to burn any backups. Although I did get XPP pre-installed and backups seems to be for Vista. It did have some crapware installed which I removed (MS Office Trial, McAfee). I personally find other Thinkpad utils very useful and will keep those. When Win7 rolls around, I will do a clean install. Laptop itself is about 1/4" wider than my 15" T60, but it’s not as deep, and the thickness feels like almost half of my T60. I already mentioned about performance of 128GB SSD drive in other thread. Will be getting WD Scorpio black (320GB 7200rpm) in a few days as my storage drive, and already received Ultra-bay Adapter III for it. Adapter II doesn’t work with T400s, need to have III.

As pointed out below, coming off flexview screen of T60 (its rich colors unmatched) to this WXGA+ display is a little disappointing, but there is nothing could be done since it seems to be a new common trend among laptop displays. I will get used to it, and finally able to view my screen outdoors and in bright daylight indoors. Flexview was way too dark even at max brightness. Another thing to get used to is ESC/DELETE keys. Since I use TotalCommander with keyboard shortcuts where I have to use Insert key to select files, I keep hitting Delete instead since its one solid key. The same with F1 under Esc which is no longer there.

Overall, I’m very happy with T400s machine. I did choose it over T400 since I wanted something slimmer with newer design and absolutely couldn’t stand headphone jack in front since I use it all the time and need to have it on a side. Multi-touch touchpad is another bonus for me. It’s definitely a huge step up from my T60 (in every single aspect except for screen). If you are not into gaming or 3D intense graphing/rendering and have some spare cash this machine is unbeatable! The screen (coming off T60) and new keyboard layout (ESC/DELETE) are the only negative comments, if you can even call it negative. It just something I will have to get used to.

 

Thanks for that. Could you if possible pop it on the scales?

 

Don't have a precise scale, so I used my wife's digital weight scale in the bathroom Unfortunately it rounds everything off in 0.5lb increments, and scale shows 4.0lbs which means its under, somewhere between 3.5 and 4.0.

 

I went to the post office to weigh the unit (and power adapter etc) precisely for you but the scale was broken (ha). I will try again tomorrow.

 

Man this laptop looks SickkKK!!!

 

looks the same to me, which is the good part.

but yea, it's what's inside that counts

 

I meant like looks sickk like everything about it looks cool. From the components and stuff lol, not necessarily the outside