My Lenovo Brick... uh oh I mean T410S is still sitting on my desk. Within 2 months of getting it, the screen started having large white lines in it. Within 4 months the plastic started cracking, and within 7 months I got a fan error. I just won't trust a lenovo again.
You were very unlucky. I rarely see so many issues. I don't have recent models, but own a dozen from 2002 and 2009 which are all still in great working condition. I hope they serviced your warranty promptly though.
I've been a Thinkpad fan for about a decade now. I bought a W500 to replace a stolen T60p a couple years ago. Aside from having a better GPU, it was not an upgrade.
* There's less metal in the frame, I assume to make it lighter. It also makes it less sturdy.
* The screen is 150px shorter, but only 80px wider. Net loss.
* The screen is much lower quality: TN vs IPS, lots of light leakage from the backlight, poor contrast.
* The keyboard is worse; it flexes more.
* The plastics aren't as durable.
* The audio ports are on the front. That means no sitting in a semi-reclined position with headphones plugged in. It's enough to make me wonder if the people who designed the thing have ever used a laptop away from a desk.
After about 18 months, I started having problems. First the keyboard died. Then the hinges started getting loose, and eventually broke entirely. The plastics cracked in several places. The internal screen stopped displaying video (not just the backlight - there's nothing). My girlfriend has a T400 and also had problems with plastics cracking.
Now I have another T60p, but with a T61p motherboard in it so I can have 8gb of RAM. It's the best laptop I've ever used.
Sadly the control shift to Lenovo full time was indeed a regression. IIRC IBM ThinkPad engineering division in Japan is part of Lenovo, they're probably tied to stupid constraints and market decisions. I thought it was fixed by now...
The <60 era had a lot of great features in terms of human interface, if I could retrofit a x200 mobo in a x40 shell I would. I'm not demanding in terms of speed but consumption, heat, virtualisation .. hard to ignore.
About LCD panels, it sks hard, so hard sometimes I use my crap sony tv as a monitor to have decent contrast/color. Anything is better than the default panel.
I've said that before but there's a little market for pre-lenovo quality laptops. Everybody complains about laptops nowadays, if someone release a single good model he'll get a lot of silver.
I guess it's an enterprise contract, machines being from the same batch and unfortunately will all have the same failing components and symptoms. Did Lenovo give you new ones ? if so how are they doing now ?
The T60p's were absolutely fantastic machines. I used mine (got it early in 2007) fulltime until a couple of months ago when the fan died (for the second time. Made very loud grinding noises whenever it tried to spin up.) I still use it on occasion without the fan, making sure to suspend to ram as soon as I see the temperature go past 75C or so. I didn't bother fixing it this time since the price of a new fan/heatsink assembly and a new battery would have been more than the cheapest eeepc I could find on newegg, but I've wanted to get another thinkpad ever since.
Heatsink/fan assemblies are under $10 on ebay, and these laptops are straightforward to disassemble. The official hardware maintenance manual will tell you step by step. It should take less than an hour to replace.
If you haven't yet, you may want to try opening the case and cleaning the fan with compressed air. I fixed the infamous "Fan Error" on my 3yo x61s this way.
Some people in my office still have their T60's. Lenovo used to make some great products. I just had a really bad experience with them. My entire team got screwed with these T410s's and their support (despite having paid extra for better support) has been bad. They replaced my bosses screen 3 times. 2 months later, the LCD goes again.
I downvoted because the OP is drawing conclusion from a ridiculously small sample size (1). This is equivalent to saying you're never buying a Seagate hard drive again, because once, one failed 5 years ago.
Disclaimer: I own, use and like my Macbook Air, no Lenovo "fanboy" here.
small sample size (1)
Wrong, my entire team had the same model. My sample size is currently 10. Still not huge, but significant enough. Each and every one of us had the EXACT same issues.
Nevertheless, the conclusion that you'll "never trust Lenovo again" is a classic bit of idiocy from people talking about laptops. To infer that current laptops are going to have problems because you god a bad batch of laptops several years ago, instead of looking at overall figures, just results in incessant brand-hopping, going from Dell to HP to Lenovo to Apple to Panasonic, swearing off more and more manufacturers and narrowing the set of options more and more without any reference to the possibility that individual products were poorly designed, or a supplier which they don't use any more used bad components sent by another supplier they don't use any more either. In particular, if you all got the same problem, from a set of laptops at one company, it's likely they came from the same batch, and had some temporary problem from one supplier. To simply discount their laptops in general is to ignore the fact that all laptops have failure rates. Granted, there's a reason the list stopped at Panasonic.
