Hate my new Thinkpad T410

It has been an interesting thread! But despite prazt09 replying at length, I still struggle with the initial claim that their thinkpad is so slow compared to older machines with slower components...really, any reasonable modern cpu with any reasonable modern HDD and Win7 with adequate physical ram should be almost immediate in mundane tasks like running software like Microsoft Office. In my experience, if cpu and ram are adequate, the most common dramatic go-slow that is hardware-based would be a faulty HDD. Any healthy 7200rpm should be fine (yet a SDD make should transform it - it did for my machine).

Once set up properly in software, I have never had a new generation laptop slower than an earlier one! There are so many variables that one could think of, most software, not hardware...if I had the slow performing new laptop as has been presented I would first check software issues like processes running in the background that make any computer crawl, like too much software active, or an antivirus program doing a system scan, or an active restore-point creation process, or an actively running defrag - or things in that area. Anything that causes the system to access the HDD. Software is more likely to slow a modern healthy system than native hardware...One way to check if it is a software issue would be to install ubuntu [using a wubi install within windows partition itself so it can be easily removed later - takes an hour or so, depending on internet connection] and see if it is still going slow...my dollar...None of us has an answer yet - it would be nice to find one (other than "it is a piece of junk")

 

Well, to be honest I woule like to see OP model number and date it was made, perhaps there was a bad batch ?
I mean, mine boots in 55 seconds, quite slow for EE laptop Perhaps there are some driver issues/too much of bloatware going around even tho even after clean install boot times didnt change at all. Other than slow boot time mine is running fine, perhaps faulty HDDs?
Just curious...

 

It's a problem of perception. There is no way Office 2010 starts slower on an i5 than on a c2d, all other factors equal. Just no. If it is, then it's not because your i5 is slow relative to your C2D, it's something else and you just haven't figured it out yet.

Where did you come up with that 1.5 times faster number...?

I find that perfect laptops are rare. It normal and often expected to have some quirk or another. But to have a litany of problems like that probably indicates that your laptop is uniquely screwed (= defective) or you just didn't research your purchase enough.

Processing power of the i5 IS at least equal if not more to your old C2d.

Wireless antennae's don't scale up in a linear fashion like that.

The screen is no more or less difficult to clean than any other matte screen. Rubbing alchohol and a microfiber cloth is all I've ever used on any of my laptops and it works fine.

The CD/DVD drive can be adjusted for performance or quietness via bios or power manager.

The speakers ARE useless... but this is an accepted fact of most of the thinkpad line.

The FN/CTRL swap... whatever. Switch it in the bios. Did you not see the picture of the keyboard before buying it?

Anyhow, don't expect pleasantries when you post up ambiguous problems that probably could've been avoided or foreseen with a bit more effort on your part.

Return it, pay the restocking fee, and welcome to NBR.

 

Ha ! So I think I need to do a quantitative analysis of my PC to tell people that it is slower ! 1.5 figure is approx, if you have used Laptops for more than 6 years, you can figure out an approx number to explain the factor of its slowness.

I never complained about its boot time. What I am saying is FACTS. Development IDE's are slower than C2D (not so bad to trash the the whole thing) and MS Office suite application start-up is slow. Is it a crime here to tell the truth ? I just wanted to help prospective TP buyers to be wary of these facts and while purchasing make sure you deal with the sales rep properly.

Its funny - Lenovo's return policy is that you can return the laptop within 21 days of "invoice date". I bought it online, recieved invoice immediately and laptop was delievered 12 days later (1 day before schedule) and I wanted to give this laptop some time to "warm-up".

Anyways - Thanks for your inputs. Most of them I knew (BIOS, background processes, anti-virus, and driver updates). I did a stress test of the laptop using ThinkVantage utility and the performance results were quite impressive.

So bottom line is - You gotta give Windows 7 atleast 2 weeks to figure out usage patterns and it configures system cache accordingly there on. Same goes with MS Office suite applications. With my HP, Win7 knew that I use Word, PPT, and OneNote extensively so they were faster and other applications were upto normal speed. I believe with TP this will be true.

I saw the layout of the keyboard - but did not know I have to count the keys and see if every key is at its own place. Oops, Sorry for that. I read reviews on NOTEBOOK REVIEW. com and it said good words about the keyboard layout and it is true. Layout is pretty good. But as a developer I would have liked the Contrl key at the corner (if you know what I am saying). As I said its not a deal breaker and I am getting used to it.

Seriously, who defraggs HDD within 2 weeks of purchase. My current usage of HDD is 60Gigs, more than 220 Gigs is free space. Most of the space is taken by Visual Studio, Oracle, Sql Server installation.

Again, thanks guys for participating.

 

Me again. =P

Actually, the necessity to defrag is greatest in the first week or two of ownership; installing all of your requisite software would dump the files haphazardly onto the drive in a much less than optimal drive layout.

What happens to compile speed if you set Power Manager to Maximum Performance?

 

Maybe I missed it, but have you provided the specs for the T410 and the HP DV2000?

I am interested in the GPU in each, hard drive makes, model and rpm, and the CPU in each. Also, how much RAM is in each machine and what OS is being run?

 

O'Neill - You are the man ! I see.. Point taken. I will run defragg this coming weekend then. Makes some sense.

Compile and more importantly debugging has improved a bit over time. Interestingly, I just downloaded IE 9 (is a bit risk for testing purposes, but depending on compatibility mode of IE 9). Debugging is significantly faster in IE 9 than IE 8 and exceeds HP's performance now. Can't figure out exact reason for it though.

I think this point of Defraggin in initial weeks of purchase should be put in a sticky at some higher level. Could be helpful for new TP users. Just a thought.

Hmm.

T410 (integrated graphics):

4 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz SODIMM Memory (2 DIMM)
300GB HDD - 7200rpm
Intel Core i5 - 560M Processor (2.66Ghz, 3MB L3)
Windows 7 Professional 32 bit
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 5700MHD - AMT
Intel Centrino 6200N wi-fi card

HP dv2000

3GB DDR3 SDRAM Memory (1 DIMM)
250GB HDD - 5400 rpm
Intel Core 2 Duo (Ahh, I dont remember its freq at the top of my mind)
Windows 7 Professional 32 bit
No Media Acceleration
Dont remember which wi-fi card (but it was default which comes with dv2000)


HP had couple of serious problems. It used to get over heated. Esp at the place where you keep your left palm. It was getting harder to work continuosly on it. (I bought an external keyboard then). It was noicy all the time, rarely use to get cooled down. Then one day its screen started to get blurry (probably because I use to carry it in my back-pack a lot - and it didnt had strong hinges like TP) - so that was it, I had to replace it.

 

I am not a fan of Intel's video chipsets and drivers. Your HP appears to have had a NVIDIA discrete GPU. The T410 and T410s I have both have discrete GPUs and are plenty speedy.

Running the 32bit version of Windows 7 is senseless with 4GB of memory. You really should switch to the 64bit version.

 

Please consider these for your T410:

1. Spend ~$80 for 2x4GB RAM sticks. (Your development tools will love you.)

2. Install Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. (See 1 above.)

3. Intel Centrino Ultimate N-6300 is more stable and faster than the 6200. (It's not about the antennae, but the "thing" itself.)

The T410 is a great notebook. You will appreciate it.

 

1 & 2 - I have to keep 32bit development environment. Its a necessity, no questions asked. BUT, I will switch to 64 bit development environ may be in next 6-8 months, hence I chose 4GB RAM. 64 bit OS requires 4GB minimum.

Once I decide to switch to 64 bit, I will upgrade RAM to 8 Gigs.

Interesting - No body pointed that one out earlier. Centrino 6300 looked far too advanced from this country's wireless technologies and networks. So I circled it out from the options. I expect to use this machine for next 3-4 years, and thought I will upgrade to new machine anyways when we reach next gen communications.

Make sense ?

 

I highly doubt that. My HP was like $540 everything. I have hard requirement of keeping 32 bit, while buying this machine, I had option of choosing 64 bit pro with no additional cost, but couldn't help it.

 

32-bit dev env runs great on 64-bit Windows, unless you're have other specific requirements.

 

"I have hard requirement of keeping 32 bit, while buying this machine, I had option of choosing 64 bit pro with no additional cost, but couldn't help it."

What's the necessity?

Renee

 

This is incorrect.

As far as performance comparisons to your HP: I'm still baffled. The T410 absolutely is a more capable machine than the HP that you listed, so I can only assume that you've got a botched software config somehow. Without knowing exactly what software you're using and what has changed (both in terms of performance and configuration) between the two machines, I can't speculate as to what exactly the issue is... but I can say that it's almost certainly not a hardware issue, and thus isn't really a problem with the T410 itself as it is your OS/application configuration.

Maybe he's doing driver development? There are a few reasons that one might want to run a 32-bit OS and can't use a VM, although I must admit: they are few and far between.

Personally, I run a 32-bit userland on a couple boxes that I use for kernel hacking since I need to test that I can build and boot i386 images. That's obviously not the case with the OP, but still...

 

I agree with everyone else here that the HP dv2000 can't hold a candle to a ThinkPad T410 in proper operating condition; further, it's not constructed anywhere near as well.

With that in mind, here are the questions I can think of:

What background processes are running? Maybe we have some software running in the background that's slowing you down. This includes some of Lenovo's pre-installed ThinkVantage software. I uninstall a number of those components immediately; I usually only leave Power Manager, the UltraNav utilities, and anything necessary to support hardware (like a fingerprint reader or webcam).

What antivirus software are you using? Some products take far more overhead than others; some versions of Symantec's Norton Antivirus and some versions of McAfee Antivirus can be particularly resource-intensive.

Defragmenting has already been mentioned, and that's a good thing to do once you've installed any new software, and removed any Lenovo software you don't want.

Instead of using the latest wireless drivers from Lenovo, get the ones from Intel, found here (new as of March 4):
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19861&ProdId=3200&lang=eng

Use only the basic drivers, and don't install Intel's Proset software; use Windows 7 to manage your wireless connections, it's cleaner and uses less resources.

Onboard graphics for the Core i5 should be suitable as long as your development doesn't involve anything GPU-accelerated. Still, make sure your drivers are up to date.

ThinkPad speakers are average, but that's just a laptop thing. Few, if any laptops have excellent speakers; you're best off having a set if you want to present with audio, or a set of headphones if it's for yourself.

If you've optimized everything and it still seems slow, you may wish to go into BIOS setup and run a hard drive diagnostic, just in case. Do it when you have enough time to be without your laptop for a bit, since the diagnostic can take an hour or two.

Feel free to keep asking us questions. There are plenty of folks here who would like to help you ensure your T410 is running the way it should be.

 

I ran 64-bit Windows 7 on my 2GB RAM T400 for the better part of a year when I first got it. Also ran 64-bit Windows 7 on my X100e on 2GB of RAM. Both had no actual problems other than 640bit taking up more of the available RAM than 32-bit would.

As far as I know, the Centrino 6300 does not come with WiMax, so you'd just have gotten a much better wireless adapter with the 6300. The 6300 also has the benefit of working better with 3x3 routers.

When you run your compile task, open Resource Monitor and load the CPU tab; see which processes are taking up the most CPU.

 

The problem is, once someone has already made up their mind that they hate something, especially after using it, it's usually hard to change one's mind.

 

I honestly don't care what degree you have. I also have a BS in CS and I'm about to get an MS. It doesn't mean that you know anything about system administration. Most of my colleagues have PhDs in CS but I'm still the one who ends up fixing their machines when they won't boot. That's because CS has very little to do with the skill of administering or maintaining computers.

Anyone who has bothered to do research on the topic can tell you that brand has almost nothing to do with the performance of the machine. Unless there are serious defects, a Dell machine and a Lenovo machine with the same CPU/chipset/disk/etc. should perform identically. Any differences come from component selection (e.g. one brand of hard drive vs. another), defects (e.g. the BIOS throttles the CPU too aggressively - this was a problem on some Dell Latitude models), or software (crappy background programs sucking up CPU/memory/IO time).

I have not heard reports that the T410 throttles under load. And your i5 is way, way faster than any mobile Core 2 Duo. So that leaves us with a couple of options:

- Your ThinkPad is defective. Maybe the heatsink isn't making proper contact. You can use tools like Prime95 and RealTemp to determine if this is the case. If it is, Lenovo will fix it. That's the point of the warranty.
- There's something screwed up in your software. A fresh install of Windows will fix this.

You can either try to get to the bottom of the problem and fix it, or you can flaunt your irrelevant credentials. If, in your first post, you had asked why the T410 is slower, you might have gotten helpful feedback.

 

Some of your complaints are ridiculous. Screen is difficult to clean? How about you don't touch your screen with your greasy hands. CD/DVD too noisy at work? Have you heard of a usb drive?

Also I have a hard time believe that laptop with a core 2 duo cpu is going to be faster than a laptop with an i5 cpu.

 

you got the point!!! no such thing as perfect. you can try to clean install your laptop. if it's still the same just bring it to service centre.

 

It's not entirely impossible. I can actually think of scenarios in which it would, but they're pretty far-fetched and neither of them are congruent with the workloads that the has OP described.

For the curious, one such scenario is as follows. The Core 2 Duo is not SMT-enabled, but the Core i5 is. As such, it's possible that a naive scheduler would place two CPU-intensive threads on logical CPUs 0 and 1; on the Core 2 Duo this would mean that each thread is running on its own physical core, but on the Core i5, 0 and 1 would actually be on the same physical core. If the Core 2 Duo was a fairly fast one, and/or if the threads caused a lot of cache churn, it's quite possible that the Core 2 Duo would out-perform the i5 by a good margin.

The above is pretty contrived though. For starters, this ain't NetBurst: the SMT implementation is much better and the pipeline isn't nearly as deep. Furthermore, most sane schedulers are SMT-aware and will try to avoid the above stupidity. It's not impossible for SMT to harm performance, but it's also less likely to have the disastrous performance hit that it could in the Pentium 4 days.

 

ThinkRob, I think your line of reasoning is sound.

I haven't worked with the T410. I have worked with Dell's counterpart, the Latitude E6410, and I've never found the Core i5 there to be slow, even with integrated graphics. As you said, Intel took SMT to the next level when going to the Core series, and it's pretty rare these days to have apps that slow down because of it. Also, most of the performance hit during P4 days was issues with branch prediction along a very long pipeline, rather than SMT (though there were some issues due to programs that lacked SMT-awareness).

I'm honestly sorry I couldn't see both the dv2000 and the T410 side-by-side in front of me. This is one I'd love to fix.

By the way, Pratz09 --have you gone into the visual effects settings and disabled the fade effects and the animations? Kinda silly I know, but it always makes my systems feel faster when I turn them off. I keep the transparency turned on and Aero Peek, but I prefer my Start Menu and my desktop items to "snap to" when I tell them to, with no fading.

 

Yeah, a 20 (and later 31)-stage pipeline didn't help. There were a few cases where SMT could conspire with the long pipeline to make life difficult (aided and abetted by a dumb scheduler), but for most part it did a good job of keeping it filled.

The branch predictor on the Pentium 4 was clearly a big concern of theirs, and with good reason: pipeline flushes *hurt*.

 

The speakers on this thing are without a doubt completely useless. I have no idea where lenovo gets the idea that business machines don't need speakers. If anything, they need better speakers.

The speakers on my thinkpad T410 are so bad they may as well not even be there. If I want to make sound happen on this thing I outright NEED external speakers to even be able to hear.

 

I replaced mine with some Craig 6x9's.

 

There are many reasons people still use CDs and DVDs.

 

Yep. I do the same things.

For All - Performance is getting better. Esp. There is dramatic improvement in MS Office suite performance (esp, OneNote). WOW, it is much snappier now. Hoping for better Visual Studio performance after fragmentation this weekend.

ThinkRob - Yep, I am developing 32 bit driver for windows. I think this would be my last driver development project. Plus we have Cisco VPN software at my department which is only available in 32 bit as of yet. The software does not run on 64 bit machines. And I do VPN when I work from home or if I have to remote into virtual servers behind the network firewall from home.

 

I figured as much. There's pretty much no other reason that I could think of that one would need a 32-bit dev. environment but couldn't use a VM.

 

Your technical knowledge is sound. I want to be like you. In college you do not learn real stuff, I do programming and thats about it. Nothing fancy, but I should participate in such forums (with decent titles ) more. I wish if I could experiment more.

Thanks guys, everybody are pretty helpful here. I think my bad choice of title for this thread pissed many people out. My apologies. ThinkPad is a great laptop, with immense power (and some scope of improvement). I guess when you expect more, there is no limit to it. But I accept, T410 is right on ROI.

 

It depends on the university. There's tremendous range in the CS programs offered by universities both in the US and abroad; some are very keen on theory, others are more practical. The best offer a mix of computer science, higher math, software engineering, and plain old coding.

No worries. I'm glad you enjoy the laptop. I hope it serves you well for years to come.

 

Couldnt agree more. Both my brother in law and I have computer science degrees, but his is more algorithms based and mine is a mix of hardware, software, networking and algorithms. He is great with writing algorithms, in fact much better at that logic then I am, but managing a system? No. With my hatred for supporting computer systems aside my background and experience is totally different then his more pure computer science background. Could we do each others jobs? Sure, but not even close to the efficiency we do our own jobs. Even though Ive been a sys admin for many years and given my degree, I would still to this day bow out to a pure IT degreed person with similar skills and experience.