Anyone know what the Intel HD graphics chipset is on this lappy? Wondering if it will rly handle games...

Where'd you find this gem, Woot? Not the honking huge 15"! The 16:10! The SSD!

Warning:
The Arrandale i5s are not as intelligent as the newer ones with the multiplier as far as saving energy goes.

Also:
I'm just a little wary of what could be a 2 year old SSD.

gabrielblankenship wrote:Anyone know what the Intel HD graphics chipset is on this lappy? Wondering if it will rly handle games...

No f%$&ing way, it is either hd 2000 or hd 3000. really bad graphic card and not a deal at all. I bought is brand new T420 for only 499. This one is T410 and first generation i5 is like core 2 duo.

Shinespark wrote:Where'd you find this gem, Woot? Not the honking huge 15"! The 16:10! The SSD!

Warning:
The Arrandale i5s are not as intelligent as the newer ones with the multiplier as far as saving energy goes.

Also:
I'm just a little wary of what could be a 2 year old SSD.

basically a 2 year old ssd is crap. Not a deal. Same model on ebay just about 350.

gabrielblankenship wrote:Anyone know what the Intel HD graphics chipset is on this lappy? Wondering if it will rly handle games...

GMA HD is pretty bad. Gaming is not this thing's strong suit unless you're playing something like Half-Life 2.

This is priced about right, especially for a refurb. It's a MOBILE i5 chip which is fairly gimped plus an older integrated graphics chip which is better than nothing but won't do much beyond play videos. The SSD is a nice touch.

I do like Lenovo and a "sale" on a Win7 laptop beats any Win8 deal you're going to find on that spec alone. But I still think you can do better for the price.

Updating the guts, but keeping the same ugly, boxy, semi-tough exterior.

Lenovo Thinkpad - the 90's volvo of laptops.

alextse wrote:This is priced about right, especially for a refurb. It's a MOBILE i5 chip which is fairly gimped plus an older integrated graphics chip which is better than nothing but won't do much beyond play videos. The SSD is a nice touch.

I do like Lenovo and a "sale" on a Win7 laptop beats any Win8 deal you're going to find on that spec alone. But I still think you can do better for the price.

when will it be sent to the customers

My company uses these for employees. I went through 3 of them and I only write reports. Brand new and bad sectors on the HD. Open and email, type a long response and CRASH!!! Sorry this Lenovo laptop is a P-O-S!

Shinespark wrote:GMA HD is pretty bad. Gaming is not this thing's strong suit unless you're playing something like Half-Life 2.

Yea the older Intel GMA like this isn't very good. But, the new Ivy Bridge chip with Intel GMA 4000 is getting to be decent thanks to competition from AMD on integrated graphics.

Shinespark wrote:Where'd you find this gem, Woot? Not the honking huge 15"! The 16:10! The SSD!

Warning:
The Arrandale i5s are not as intelligent as the newer ones with the multiplier as far as saving energy goes.

Also:
I'm just a little wary of what could be a 2 year old SSD.

On top of that, the actual casing looks like an old brick.

taimeili wrote:No f%$&ing way, it is either hd 2000 or hd 3000. really bad graphic card and not a deal at all. I bought is brand new T420 for only 499. This one is T410 and first generation i5 is like core 2 duo.

That's what I figured, didn't have time earlier to google it for performance. Thanks for the heads up.

danwat1234 wrote:Yea the older Intel GMA like this isn't very good. But, the new Ivy Bridge chip with Intel GMA 4000 is getting to be decent thanks to competition from AMD on integrated graphics.

It benches well compared to 3k but I don't forsee serious GPU competition until Haswell, and even then it's only slated to have 20 pipelines/cores in the next GMA.

comstock1869 wrote:My company uses these for employees. I went through 3 of them and I only write reports. Brand new and bad sectors on the HD. Open and email, type a long response and CRASH!!! Sorry this Lenovo laptop is a P-O-S!

I guarantee you this will not have a HDD with bad sectors. Or any HDD at all.

mmk1220 wrote:Updating the guts, but keeping the same ugly, boxy, semi-tough exterior.

Lenovo Thinkpad - the 90's volvo of laptops.

If you will be erasing Windows and installing any Linux distro (in other words: If you are sane), you can do little better than a Thinkpad, particularly an older one like this.

Linux support on Thinkpads is excellent. Everything except the fake modem works out of the box.

If the SSD drive is too tiny or slow, upgrading it is cake. You only need to undo two screws to get at the drive bay, where you can swap in any commodity 2.5" SATA drive.

Thinkpads of this generation also have one of the finest keyboards available on laptops anywhere -- excellent feel, key pitch, and reliability. You will also learn to love the ThinkLight -- a small LED in the top edge of the screen bezel that shines down on the keyboard. (Sadly, Lenovo chose to abandon these proven design elements with something cutesey for the T430 generation. The jury is still out on this one.)

Also, kindly note that the display res is 1440 * 900. Most laptops you will find today are (inexplicably and infuriatingly) 1366 * 768. So, more text in your Web browser and in your EMACS window.

Or, to put it more succinctly: Don't be too quick to sneer at this. 8GiB of RAM plus Intel ThreadHype make this a decent workhorse machine. If you're not a gamer, this black slab should serve you well for many years.

mmk1220 wrote:Updating the guts, but keeping the same ugly, boxy, semi-tough exterior.

Lenovo Thinkpad - the 90's volvo of laptops.

I had an r series back when IBM owned the line. You learn to love the exterior. Especially when 90% of non-ultrabook PCs are made out of the shittiest plastic on earth. While thinkpads may not have the looks of other laptops, they hold up for at least twice as long...

We issued a few thousands of these at work, along with T400s, t420s, t430s, t61s, t60s, t42s, blahblahblah.

These have recently starting popping up with fan errors. Just the 410's, none of the others. Some have failed within a week of being issued (and being new out of the box), but they seem to make it about 2 years before most of the fan errors pop up. Other than that, it's just as good as the rest of the thinkpads.

rill2503456 wrote:I had an r series back when IBM owned the line. You learn to love the exterior. Especially when 90% of non-ultrabook PCs are made out of the shittiest plastic on earth. While thinkpads may not have the looks of other laptops, they hold up for at least twice as long...

I concur with that assessment. Had a T61 just come back with intermittent fan error ... that's 4 years of continued service before failure. If I needed one this would definitely be a contender for me.

gabrielblankenship wrote:Anyone know what the Intel HD graphics chipset is on this lappy? Wondering if it will rly handle games...

I have one of these. It's your standard Intel HD graphics of the Arrandale era.

I've played Bioshock on it.

T410 will probably be my last ThinkPad.

As I've gone form the 600X -> T22 -> T23 -> T42p -> T410, there's not anything too terribly special about Thinkpads anymore. This one in particular is bulky, screen is horrendously dim (as with many ThinkPads). The docking station is crazy expensive (Minidock III) And the layout of USB is somewhat annoying. 3 on the left, one of which is under the DisplayPort port. The DVD drive can get very noisy and can be excruciatingly slow, especially when writing.

Do NOT miss that the digital video out is DispayPort. There is no DVI or HDMI here. I've been using a DispayPort to HDMI adapter (probably got form Amazon). Works fine.

But for what you get from this SelloutWoot, I think this is a pretty good deal anyway. For instance, IBM CPP has these for no less than $520. For $28 more get half the RAM, a mechanical HDD instead of an SSD. But also a slightly faster 560M and 1 year warranty and they throw in an 8 GB thumbdrive.

I'd recommend this to persons who may have been schlubbing along with a Netbook or similar low power portable or if his current computer or laptop is more than four years old. Or if you work from home or are starting a home office and need a dedicated remote / telecommuting workstation.

gabrielblankenship wrote:Anyone know what the Intel HD graphics chipset is on this lappy? Wondering if it will rly handle games...

They call it HD Graphics, but it's actually, I think, a later generation of GMA or some such. Not overly fancy. Don't expect modern AAA games to run well, or at all. Most indie games and older games will run well enough though.

ewhac wrote:If you will be erasing Windows and installing any Linux distro (in other words: If you are sane), you can do little better than a Thinkpad, particularly an older one like this.

Linux support on Thinkpads is excellent. Everything except the fake modem works out of the box.

If the SSD drive is too tiny or slow, upgrading it is cake. You only need to undo two screws to get at the drive bay, where you can swap in any commodity 2.5" SATA drive.

Thinkpads of this generation also have one of the finest keyboards available on laptops anywhere -- excellent feel, key pitch, and reliability. You will also learn to love the ThinkLight -- a small LED in the top edge of the screen bezel that shines down on the keyboard. (Sadly, Lenovo chose to abandon these proven design elements with something cutesey for the T430 generation. The jury is still out on this one.)

Also, kindly note that the display res is 1440 * 900. Most laptops you will find today are (inexplicably and infuriatingly) 1366 * 768. So, more text in your Web browser and in your EMACS window.

Or, to put it more succinctly: Don't be too quick to sneer at this. 8GiB of RAM plus Intel ThreadHype make this a decent workhorse machine. If you're not a gamer, this black slab should serve you well for many years.

I think they still put thinklights on some thinkpads. Somebody else will have to provide the citation, however. Aside from that, I agree with this post completely.

I've had this laptop (with only 4GiB RAM [work bought it for me]) since November 2010, and it's served me extremely well. Most of the time it's run a current Ubuntu, but I occasionally put Windows on it. At the moment it has Windows 8 on it, and it is supported extremely well by both operating systems.

If that was the best example they could find it looks pretty beat even for a refurb, no? Looks like it wasn't even cleaned up from the keyboard pics...

I've been issuing the t4xx series out to users for the office for quite some time now. the 1440x900 resolution, the thinklight, and the feel of a lenovo keyboard, is all awesome. supposedly, the keyboard is spill-proof as well, though i cannot confirm this. I've not had a single issue with them hardware-wise. they could do without all the lenovo think-crap-ware installed. they look like crap at first, but after you realize the matte finish overall is fingerprint free, you learn to love it.

would i buy this for gaming? probably not, because a) i am not a gamer. b) if i was a gamer, i'd use a desktop.

would i buy this for programming, light media editing, web browsing, general productivity? hell yea.

plus, these things run Linux, and several VMs simultaneously like a dream.

If you are going to have this laptop on a domain make sure you update the driver for the wireless card. Otherwise any user that connects to the domain via wireless will have problems, if you update the wireless card driver it will fix the issue.

CPU Mark 2467. Something close to 4K would have been respectable enough for me to pull the trigger (i.e. close to the current crop of ultrabooks).

I've been using ThinkPads since the 1990s - a 600, then a T23 and an X31, a T61 and now a T420s. All have been excellent machines with great keyboards (for a laptop - when docked with a large monitor, I am using a 20+ year old Northgate OmniKey, one of the two greatest keyboards ever made -- the other being the IBM Model M) and excellent service.

They're not for gaming, but for daily use for anything else, they're solid.

taimeili wrote:basically a 2 year old ssd is crap. Not a deal. Same model on ebay just about 350.

you are wise to question the ssd...does anyone know which brand lenovo used for their ssd's 2 yrs back...and if replacing it with newer, improved ssd would be needed to max hard drive potential? thanks in advance

...does anyone know which brand lenovo used for their ssd's 2 yrs back?

The laptop used in the pictures is missing the covers for the LCD screws (Keyboard picture).

Makes me wonder if these were "refurbished" by Lenovo or just some company that bought a bunch of them.

The keyboard picture has junk all over it! Bleh!

gabrielblankenship wrote:Anyone know what the Intel HD graphics chipset is on this lappy? Wondering if it will rly handle games...

Lenovo website has it as "Intel HD Graphics, 256MB NVIDIA® Quadro® NVS3100M"


http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail.page?LegacyDocID=MIGR-75387

conman77 wrote:The laptop used in the pictures is missing the covers for the LCD screws (Keyboard picture).

Makes me wonder if these were "refurbished" by Lenovo or just some company that bought a bunch of them.

I can't speak for these ones, but I have one of these at work and there are no screws there. That might be the microphone location.

nleep3 wrote:I can't speak for these ones, but I have one of these at work and there are no screws there. That might be the microphone location.

Per the teardown instructions from lenovo: there are two screws per corner holding the LCD bezel in place.

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/63y0535_01.pdf

Page 135

conman77 wrote:Per the teardown instructions from lenovo: there are two screws per corner holding the LCD bezel in place.

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/63y0535_01.pdf

Page 135

I was looking in the center, I see what you're talking about now. Sorry.

I've been using this laptop for past 2 years at my work. Piece of junk. Replaced fan 2x, replace keyboard, and of course battery went bad too - replaced. Ever since Lenovo bought IBM, the quality of Thinkpad build is "MADE IN CHINA."

A truely awful machine. As I type on my Thinkpad (work machine), I regret not going to school to become a long distance truck driver.