On January 29th 2009 I bought a new laptop. My old laptop (Dell E1405) was showing it’s age (3 years old). The battery was broken and only lasting 5 minutes but the processing power still performed well for my daily tasks. It had an Intel Core Duo T2300 (1.6ghz) processor and 2.5gb of DDR2. I biggest complaints on the E1405 was the screen and the battery. The 14.1″ screen displayed colors horribly.
I do web developement which can range from backend PHP to front end user interface development. I’m great with graphic design and colors but I can tell you that the screen on that dell had a hard time with light blues and grays. Honestly most LCDs have trouble with these colors but the Dell screen was especially horrible at this even with the 1440×900 upgraded screen.
Anyway, enough griping about my old laptop. My new laptop is a Lenovo R500 and so far it’s ok. Yeah, you would think that I would be very excited to get a Lenovo aka IBM ThinkPad successor, but if these laptops truely excited you I think Lenovo would consider it a failure. These laptops are designed to be as utilitarian as possible and excitement is not a viable solution to productivity to Lenovo. I’ve had this laptop for almost 2 weeks now and it has served me well.
What my Lenovo R500 is:
- Rugged when compared to the Dell Inspiron
- Powerful Intel P8400 2.26ghz 3MB of L2 Cache
- 3GB of DDR3 (there are 2 slots available)
- Intel 4500HD (ick but does this laptop is not for playing)
- 80GB 5400rpm harddrive
- WUXGA screen (has good color range)
The performance of this computer is great in the processor area but terrible in the 3D graphics area. Of course I realize that I’m saying this when I have the crappy Intel 4500HD card, but it performs horrible enough to note.
With this graphics card I can run Half Life 2 at about 25-35 fps where my old laptop (intel GMA 950) could only run Half Life 2 at about 7fps. Also, when booted into Ubuntu 8.10 with glxgeras I get around 1000 fps, compare that with Trevor’s Dell Studio 1537 with the ATI 3450 which gets around 3500fps and my desktop which has the ATI 2900pro which gets around 8400fps. I hope those numbers put things into perspective.
Ubuntu has fairly good support for this laptop. Everything worked right off except for a few things which I’ll mention. I bought the 9 cell batter with this laptop and I expected to get ~8 hours of battery life. Unfortunately with Ubuntu’s poor power management capabilities I’m only able to get ~6 hours if I turn off compiz and use powertop and laptop-mode. The power consumption gathered by powertop is roughly 14-17 watts when I set everything to minimum and the wifi on. So 85 watt hours / 17 watts = 5 hours. If anyone knows how I can lower my power consumption please contact me!
The bluetooth in Ubuntu is flakey to say the least so I won’t bother mentioning too much about that right now.
The screen switching function key didn’t work form me, but I believe there are scripts out there that will make that work.
Thinkwiki.org has tons of great resources for linux on ThinkPads.
One thing I have to mention that is amazing about this laptop is the rigidity of the case and the amazing keyboard. I simply love this keyboard, it feels solid, has great feedback and is a joy to type on. The case is very nice as well, one of the most rigid I’ve seen next to an all metal laptop and the T series.
I have yet to talk to Lenovo support so I can’t gauge how well I’ll be treated by them but I will write about it if I do.
I highly recommend this laptop for someone who doesn’t want to spend a lot but wants to have a solid business oriented machine.
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