[ltp] What to take care of when buying a Lenovo?

[Hamish]

On Monday 10 March 2008 14:38:26 Chris Schumann wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Phil Shotton wrote:
> > I run a T60 and a T60p - with Ubuntu (Feisty, then Gutsy). The main
> > things to watch are:
> >
> >   * Graphics cards - the main problem. NVidia cards work fine (I
> >     believe) but be prepared for some grief with ATI cards especially
> >     if you want twin-head and/or hardware 3D. With my T60p the only
> >     way I could get decent twin-head graphics support was by compiling
> >     the very latest radeon drivers.
>
> I have a T60 running Fedora 8. Using the ATI driver packaged by livna.org,
> I have 3D, desktop effects, and suspend/resume working nearly perfectly.
> (Lately, sometimes upon resume, the disk thrases for as long as I have let
> it so far, but logging out stops the activity. I don't know if it's
> related to the video driver or not.)
>

Personally, I'd try & avoid Nvidia (Proprietary drivers only, no info 
available for OS drivers), and go for ATI (Proprietary drivers and OS 
drivers, now with some decent programming info available thanks to AMD). 
Sadly Lenovo seem to be trending away from ATI again just when they seem to 
have sorted themselves out.

Admittedly the proprietary drivers for Nvidia I think are slightly better than 
the ATI proprietary drivers. But that's comparing an ATI laptop against an 
Nvidia desktop. I have no idea what an Nvidia laptop would be like (Withr 
egard to proprietary drivers), but IIRC there is currently no OS way to get 
accelerated graphics with the higher end nv chips, while accelerated graphics 
with OS for ATI are being actively developed using AMD's own documentation 
(Which anyone can download & read).

(I'd love to be proven wrong because I have issues with Nvidia drivers 
suddenly consuming 100% CPU when you resize a window too large... This is 
with direct rendering enabled... The app jumps from 2% to 100% CPU somewhere 
inside the proprietary Nvidia driver code (8600GT). And you get about as much 
support from NV as you used to get from ATI (i.e. report & forget).

> I have not tried dual displays.
>

Nvidia proprietary on desktop work fine with dual displays. ATI proprietary 
with dual displays on a laptop work fine, with the caveat that last time I 
did it (Before xmas) I had problems where the backdrop would always lose the 
picture & go plain black when I messed around with xrandr to change 
resolutions, position etc. ATI desktop with dual display and OS drivers work 
fine also (Although that's r300 that I use not the later r5xx/r6xx).

Having said all that, if the T61p is Nvidia only I wouldn't let that stop me 
from getting one... The drivers are in the position of probably good enough 
but with a few annoying bits thrown in there.

> Chris