My Lenovo T520 experience

Summary:  An overview of my experience with a Lenovo T520.  This machine is no joke.  It's seriously fast/powerfull, everything seems to work between Windows 7 Pro x64 and Fedora 16 x64.  I have not booted into Windows very much, but that seems to perform flawlessly.

My system:

• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.40GHz
• Integrated Intel VGA, secondary Nvidia VGA (optimus)
• 750 GB Scorpio Black 7200 RPM, 16MB
• http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/516398 - GeekBench of 13338 

Why: I'm having a bit of a career focus shift. My primary goal/focus is to become as proficient as I once was with Solaris, or even more so. This will provide credibility and experience to leverage with my customers. I felt it doesn't represent my undying devotion to Linux, if I walk in and plop a MacBook Pro on the table. I needed a laptop to run a reasonably new Red Hat (read: fedora) release. I talked to a friend who works for Red Hat to see what his experience. He indicated that they use Lenovo T520. He was pretty indifferent on the whole topic. Before I had consider talking with Ryan, I was on the fence between a few different rigs.

Dell Inspiron 14z or the 15z.

Alienware M14x

There was some Samsung in the mix also. I wasn't seriously considering that one, however.

So, I have grown bored with the HP offerings as their machines still seem to have the same look-and-feel from 5 or 6 years ago.  I wanted at least 1600x900 resolution - if I was not planning to use my 15" MacBook Pro (1680 x 1050) as my primary workstation. I definitely did the up-sell when I purchased my MBP last May.  I hand picked the i7 model, hi-res screen, 8gig of memory. It pretty much rocks. Pulls a GeekBench score of almost 11000 (http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/403107 - 10947) and can play Portal 2 rather well. It also carries a price tag north of $2200, so I suppose it had better be bad ass.

Lenovo happened to have a 10% off special just for visiting the Lenovo website. I have to say that played a factor in the decision. In addition to the discount, they have a very active and seemingly well-representing forum, and specifically a section devoted to Linux.

On with it already...

When UPS updates their status page to state that it will be delivered by the "end of day", they apparently aren't messing around. It arrived at 5:08pm. I had to wait until 6 to start unpackaging the laptop. It was surprising how minimalist the entire package was. Basically a printout telling you to insert the battery, plug it in and power it on. Simple enough? Well, not really.

I went to power on my new laptop and I got NOTHING. No light, no beeps. Hmmm? I thought perhaps it had some failsafe to detect that it was transported from a cold environment to a warm one. However, the thing had been inside for over an hour now. So, I called Lenovo support - feeling moderately defeated and increasingly frustrated. (one interesting thing to know, the introductory voice on the support call  states that I was directed to technical support in Atlanta, GA.  - Cool) The phone rep takes my information and creates a case. I was thinking I would have to RMA the thing and wait a few more weeks. I was really bummed.  He then starts with the "troubleshooting voice" and says, "Alright, pull the battery and the power supply.  Then, push the power button 20 times, then hold it for 5 seconds."  Just as I was completing this nonsense, my phone dropped the call. At this point I was like ... whatever... I put the battery back in (and I might have plugged it in to the wall).  Either way, I hit the power button and sure enough, it came to life.  Huh?  As this is going on, the tech actually calls ME back.  I am seriously amazed with their support.

Cool... moving forward again. Within an hour of that call, I'm pretty sure I have invalidated any warranty I had ;-) I burned the restore media for the machine, all FOUR dvd's and shut the machine down. I had a Seagate Momentus 500Gig Hybrid drive out another machine. I pulled the cover and drive out of the T520 and installed the Seagate. Why? I'm going to install Fedora 16 on that drive. I'm hoping that I can USB boot the original drive. If not, it was reasonably easy to swap them around. I would just need to purchase the drive kit, which can't be terribly expensive.

So far the Fedora 16 install has gone without issue. I'm hoping it proceeds to do so.

Once the install is complete I need to transfer my "identity" off my Mac and start testing. One thing I will miss is - Spotlight. For some reason Google stopped development of their Desktop search product (people claimed that they were worried people would reverse engineer it and discover their proprietary search algorithms. OK?) And the Open Source tool - Beagle - is no longer shipping. There may be something else doing the work and I'll have to wait and see.

First Login Screen looks pretty cool. I'm pumped.

UPDATE (2011-11-17): Even though I believe my machine could boot to Windows via a USB/eSATA enclosure, I decided it would be better/easier to have a dedicated Windows partition instead. So, I stopped at Microcenter and picked up a new 750Gig Scorpio Black 7200 RPM, 16MB. After another hour-and-a-half of screwing around, I have a rather awesome setup. And this laptop amazes me how fast it is. 13338 for a GeekBench score!  That smokes my i7 Mac Book Pro by 3000 points.