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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.

The past two years at the University of Maryland, Baltimore school that I work at we provided Dell D620 and D630 laptops to the students. We require this purchase of the laptops due to the direction that the curriculum is going in that we’re doing more lecture and teaching through media oriented tools, such as Mediasite, Blackboard, Questionmark, and Flash. With today’s youth learning better through multiple mediums instead of one solid source, we wanted to provide the students with as much information as possible and the tools to take advantage of them.

Dell had come to us with a fantastic price and package for the D620′s and D630′s. They promised us strong support and a solid product. If I had known then what I knew now, we would have run as far away as possible. Dell’s price was too good to be true. The laptops that they’ve sold us have been nothing less of a disaster. The problems started when students were complaining about horrible battery life. The laptops would report that the battery would need to be replaced as early as 2-3 months after purchase. Almost ALL of the batteries were worthless as of a year after purchase. Many of the techs that we spoke to would refuse to answer as to why and swore it was not possible but they’d still replace the batteries. Eventually we were able to dig it out of one tech, it seems that the batteries were chipped in that they wouldn’t allow more than 300 charging cycles. Essentially Dell was limiting how many times you could charge a battery so that you were forced to buy a new battery at their cost of $199. It’s an ingenious way to rip off your customers, have your support department deny it and then offer them a replacement part option that is extremely over priced. We’ve been forwarding all of our students over to Duracell Direct for all battery purchases because they’re about %25 cheaper.

Another problem we’ve experienced with the Dell D620 was horrible hard drives. Close to %50 of the class that recieved Dell Latitude D620′s experienced hard drive failures as of a year after purchase. At one point when Dell was contacted, based soley on the service tag, they had a list of defective hard drives and would immediately replace them. This was frustrating because this means that Dell KNEW that they had defective drives out in the market but failed to contact the customers about the issue and would just deal with it after the fact. The shear lack of customer care in this situation has made me as well as anyone else that I can convince realize how far Dell has fallen.

The new laptops that we picked up for our students this year are Lenovo’s. One of the schools on our campus have been using them for about 6 years now and have had great success. Granted the laptops were a bit higher priced than the Dells but the quality should far out weigh the savings. The T61s were fully accessorized and also include the same warranty as we bought with the other laptops which was 4 year bumper to bumper and accidental. Are hopes are that we won’t have to take advantage of it but we know in the end we will.

I’ll continue to update as we work with the Lenovo’s. I feel though that they’ll do much better than the Dells have.