What Lenovo laptop can replace my three year old Macbook Pro?

[kassimk]

I need an upgrade and because I work extensively with Excel macros and MS Access I want to move back to windows and I prefer not to work within Parallels anymore. So what's my option?

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

is there a particular laptop size that you are after? i.e. 14.1 inch, 15.6 inch, 17 inches, etc.

[kassimk]

15.6" would be ideal.

[ColonelONeill]

That'd be a T510 (hint: get the HD+ screen). The older generation T500 is 15.4" and could also suit your needs if you're on a tighter budget.

[kassimk]

Ok thanks. So the T510 would comparable to my Macbook Pro? How are the sound speakers on that?

[joer80]

Have you tried going bootcamp yet to install windows natively?

[kassimk]

I'd rather not. This machine is three years old and I dont' want Windows 7 to run bare bones.

[joer80]

t510 would be cheaper than the w510 for office work at the exspense of some extra ram slots and a better GPU.  The higher rez screens are better quality than the lower, even if you dont need the extra work room.

If it makes things too small, you can change your dpi with windows 7.

Lenovo changed the screen proportions on the new 510 laptops also.   The did full widescreen, making the screen shorter and wider.   Not many people are happy about that.

The t500 has a smooth trackpad, and the w510 has a textured.  My t500 has good sound on it.  Better than most non gaming notebooks.  I have heard the newer t510 and w510's have better quality plastics, but they are a tad thicker, most likely due to the added thermal load of the processor generation.

As far as boot times go, my t500 takes about 1:30 to 1:40 to boot up.   Removing some of the thinkvantage programs seems to help reduce boot time.

The t500 has manually switchable graphics, but t510 has nvidia optimous auto switching graphics.  The w510 only has a high powered card.

My t500 gets about 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life, but because of the switchable graphics bug in windows 7 that causees both cards to run at the same time after resume from sleep, I leave mine on discrete only mode.   This means I usually get the 2.5 hours of battery life with light duty work on a 6 cell.  

The switchable graphics bug on the t500 has existaced since windows 7 launched about a year ago, and there is suppose to be a fix soon.

Throwing an ssd into that macbook with a new battery would still be a nice machine for the money though.  I usually go about 5 years before I take a machine completely out of the loop, and replaceing the hard drive with an ssd takes one of the most likely to fail parts out of the loop.  Not sure if macbooks case wise, hold up as long as a thinkpad though.

I have $5 per month mozy home subscription though to keep all of my files backed up to the cloud nightly which gives me some peace of mind for running things in the dirt.

I expect the new generation of lenovo laptops will be out at the first of next year.   I am really excited to see what they will release then.   It should be a pretty big step up from the current generation.

Hope that helps!

[ColonelONeill]

Boot times should be a lot quicker on the T500. My T400 with a Scorpio Black boots 7x86 in approximately 40 seconds. It's on a partition that's 64GB away from the fastest outer edge too.

IMHO HDD's don't really fail very often for me despite the abuse I put them through (you should see the battle wounds on my T400 )

The T510 (even non-Optimus) can get 7.5 hours of battery life on a 9-cell. It seems that if you order 32-bit and use nTune to downclock the GPU, you can get the tabook expected battery life.

I honestly prefer the new textured trackpad by a long shot; there's way too much stiction on the smooth pads and it's easy to overshoot when first overcoming static friction.

[joer80]

Statistically, its 1. Motherboard, 2. GPU, 3. Hard Disk. The first two are not easily replaceable.

Was the scorpio black the stock hard drive in your t400?