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lenovo T410s, Portege r700, or wait?

Which laptop option? R700, T410s, or wait?

  • Toshiba Portege R700 (i7 cpu)

  • Lenovo Thinkpad T410s

  • Wait for next gen mobile cpus to hit the market

Results are only viewable after voting.
F

flensr

Member
I have an ibm T41p and it is a great laptop but despite a 2ghz dothan cpu upgrade and a new reasonably fast hard drive, it is getting too slow. I'm wondering what to buy, and when. Here are my thoughts.

I got my wife an i5 based toshiba portege r700, and it is very nice except the keyboard is awful. It is a poor chicklet design. I love how my T41p keys feel. The thing is, the R700 is very small/light, has an internal optical drive which is a requirement of mine, and with the optional i7 cpu it would also be very fast.

On the other hand, I could get a lenovo t410s. This thing is built like all thinkpads, well constructed and field serviceable. It weighs barely more than the r700 but the fastest cpu is an i5 and it must use only 1.8" drives which means no easy HD upgrades and I would have to use an SSD for it to be reasonably fast. The good stuff is that it would be very durable (My t41p is 7 yrs old now) and I can fix it if it breaks, but the downside is no i7 cpu option and extremely limited HDD options.

Or, I can wait until mobile forms of sandy bridge cpus come out, and just suffer with my T41p until then. I like the lenovo t410s design better than the r700, but the internals of the r700 are vastly superior in almost every way. Better cpu, ability to use normal HDD, etc. The only negative to the r700 is that it uses intel graphics, but I don't game at all with my laptop so that is simply not a selling point. Better graphics would be nice if they are available, but it isn't a deciding factor unless everything else is truly equal.

So... any thoughts? R700 with i7, thinkpad T410s with i5 and SSD but minus some features the r700 has, or wait until the next gen mobile cpus come out and hope either toshiba or lenovo updates their products quickly?
 
I've got a T410. It's not a bad laptop. It's definitely a 'step down' in quality tho ever since Lenovo has taken over. Only qualm (sp) I have is the headphone output volume is stoopid low. Other than that, it's been running quite well for me. And yeah, the 510's are huge (as are their power 'bricks'). Reminds me of the 770's back in the day.
 
mrblotto said:
I've got a T410. It's not a bad laptop. It's definitely a 'step down' in quality tho ever since Lenovo has taken over. Only qualm (sp) I have is the headphone output volume is stoopid low. Other than that, it's been running quite well for me. And yeah, the 510's are huge (as are their power 'bricks'). Reminds me of the 770's back in the day.
Click to expand...

Really? What percentage do you have to have the volume at to have it at a comfortable listening level?

My current laptop (Asus W3J, circa 2006) has a stupidly high output. You can have it blasting through headphones at just 10%.
 
Brainonska511 said:
Really? What percentage do you have to have the volume at to have it at a comfortable listening level?

My current laptop (Asus W3J, circa 2006) has a stupidly high output. You can have it blasting through headphones at just 10%.
Click to expand...

On my old laptop (T61/Win7), I would have my external speakers turned up about halfway and it was 'normal' level. Now they're turned up to a little above 3/4 and not nearly as loud.......meh go figure. Did the driver update song and dance, no change. I need to try it out of the port replicator as well, just to be sure it's not that. I dunno, maybe its just a headphone jack thing.
But, at any rate, I'm liking the T410 pretty good.
 
mrblotto said:
...And yeah, the 510's are huge (as are their power 'bricks').
Click to expand...

Is 14.6 x 9.75 x 1.25 "huge?" The power brick is 5 x 1.25 x 2 - the same as my old T60. The T510 fits in the same travel case as did the T60. For air travel overseas, it weighs the same - no real portability difference.
 
I'm sorry, I mistakenly referred to the W510's instead of the T510's. My bad. We dont see any T510's here, only T400/410/W500/W510's.
 
Cool, thx. The T410s is a sexy beast and I am really hoping they'll put an i7 cpu into it. I'll have a heck of a hard time not buying one right away if they manage to do that right.
 
You might be interested in the Lenovo X120e. The Zacate platform might be a bit underpowered for your needs, but otherwise might fit your needs well, at a low price.
 
I need a full featured laptop but *want* lots of portability. That means at least 13" screen, internal optical drive, and a fairly fast cpu. I looked at the X series laptops but they're all missing at least one of my requirements. Lots of people have gone away from internal optical drives, but it's a requirement I can't do without, and I'm not going to lug around an external drive. That's how I ended up with my choice of the R700 or T410s...

I think I'll end up waiting until the T series gets the new cpu, and cross my fingers hoping that lenovo can manage to get the i7 cpus into the T410. If they can't make it work, then I'll probably end up with whatever replaces the R700 as the lightweight full-power laptop from Toshiba.
 
Thanks! Some good things in those discussions, some not so good. The 16x9 screen isn't a good development, but usb 3.0 could be useful. I hope they update the available drives too, since the 1.8" drive options they currently offer are sort of crummy.

I also can hope for built-in SD card port, but I doubt that is a priority of theirs. My wife's r700 has both an expansion card slot AND an SD card slot, so it baffles me why lenovo can't figure out how to put both in the T410 models. Maybe they'll have that fixed with the 420s but I'm not holding my breath.
 
Well, the T510 has the SD carde slot and an Express expansion slot as well as eSATA.
 
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