I’ve been working on the new Lenovo T400 for a little over a week now with some minor hickups and issues. The laptop has a T9400 Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, the Mobile Intel 4 series video card, and the 2GB speedboost Intel memory component that’s supposed to act as the At this point I’m contributing many of these problems to Vista and not the laptop itself. When I first received the laptop, and opened up Vista, rundll32.dll decided to crash on me as well as some various other minor crashes in Vista.
With those glorious issues in mind, I figured I’d see how the hardware run under Ubuntu 8.04 before I got too comfortable with Vista. I had an 8.04 CD laying around and had no luck with the graphics drivers successfully loading so I did some digging and realized they had an 8.04.1 CD out which worked fine. I was able to proceed with the installation. Once Ubuntu had gotten itself off its feet I realized it hand’t found the wireless card. The wireless card in this T400 is the Intel Wifi link 5100 AGN and I assume that it’s too new for the driver sets in Ubuntu. I played around with recompiling the kernal following some directions posted here. Unfortunately Ubuntu was still pretty flaky. I don’t use the default wireless application, I use WICD.
Ultimately the combination of everything still wasn’t very solid and there was a lot of flakyness with Ubuntu environment. I reloaded Vista but went with Vista Ultimate to see how some of the additional features performed. The first install of Vista Ultimate failed miserably, from the start of the finished installation I was getting Rundll32.dll errors and on the second day the system crashed when I attempted to create a second tab. After bringing the system back up from a hard shut off I got the blue screen of death and a reboot. The second installation attempt has gone better so far. It seems that there’s some issues with the new hardware with Vista too.
The laptop performed well through both installations and held up well when I pushed it to the limits. Even with the Intel card World of Warcraft and a couple other games handled very well. I’m hoping that Ubuntu will hurry up with the driver updates though, Vista just doesn’t feel right.
October 9th, 2008 on 4:37 pm
Thanks for the review. I just ordered the T400. from what I’ve been reading here and elsewhere I’ll start off with 7.10 and install the drivers where I have to.
Since you say everything is now running it may not be this, but all that installation and ‘flakyness’ issues sounds like faulty hardware issues or corrupt installation disks?
October 9th, 2008 on 6:12 pm
Sully,
I wouldn’t do any Kernel changes to Ubuntu and you might want to consider waiting till 8.10 comes out before putting Ubuntu on the laptop. There’s been issues with latest kernel and the Intel chipset.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/263555
August 30th, 2009 on 4:51 pm
its not Vista. My brother just bought this machine for med school and it blue screened in the first week of use. Google reveals many people having problems. It seems to be a combination of the bios and harddrive that causes the problem, but I’m still trying to find the 100% cause. The below remedy should help. This seems to be a hardware issue because all OSes seem to hang, not just Vista.
1. in BIOS set hard-drive “compatible” then install Vista as usual
2. then download “Intel Matrix Storage”, unzip (e.g. C:\Drivers\Win\IMSM\), go to “prepare” folder, click “install”
3. restart, in BIOS set hard-drive “ACHI”, then Vista will work fine
4. update the driver for SATA controller in Device Manager – Disk Driver – SATA Controller, choosing the path your just set (e.g. C:\Drivers\Win\IMSM\)
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