[ltp] More war stories about Lenovo build quality

[David A. Desrosiers]

I've had my shiny new Thinkpads (T61p/X61s) for 2-3 weeks now, and 
they're already going back to the depot for repair/replacement. I'm 
shocked and dismayed at the horrible build quality of these units.

The X61s is going back first. It currently runs WinXP, so I can use 
the internal WWAN card to get on AT&T to work while on my 5 hours of 
commute per-day into the office.

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The issues with the X61s so far are:

 	1. Loose/floppy screen and hinge. I can pick up the laptop
            gently from the base, and the LCD will slowly lean back and
            flop over. If the LCD is anything but perfectly 90-degrees,
            it will either slowly close itself, or slowly lean
            backwards until it is horizontal with the table surface.

 	2. Fingerprint reader overheats and stops working (and because
            of that issue, I can no longer log into the machine _at
            all_, because it deleted the stored fingerprint data, which
            confuses the ThinkVantage Access Connections app, and forbids
            me from re-enrolling my fingerprints. I literally log in
            with a password, and it immediately logs me back out, even in
            Safe Mode). GRRR! Now I can't use it to work at all.

 	3. The LCD currently has 3 bad pixels, up from 1 bad pixel a
            few days ago. When it was new, there were zero bad pixels.

 	4. The battery life with the new battery (FRU/42T5247) using
            "Maximum Battery" strategy in WinXP is 45 minutes, tops.

 	5. The external wireless switch is loose, and tipping the
            laptop will engage/disengage the switch all the time. While
            on the train, the switch vibrates itself to the Off position
            dropping my VPN connection constantly. I've had to tape it in
            place to keep it from moving.

I can't believe for laptops that are barely a month old, I've already 
run into this many problems with it.

The T61p has its own share of issues, many of which are due to moving 
to the latest Ubuntu on the machine. I require the latest 
bleeding-edge distro, so I can test my FLOSS code against it, before 
distribution packagers go shipping broken packages that contain my 
code to thousands of users.

The major outstanding issues with that are:

 	1. Fingerprint reader overheats excessively and then fails to
            function. Thinkfinger has some serious bugs related to
            this, which exposes my typed password in cleartext if I'm
            not careful.

 	2. The CPU regularly runs at 157F or higher, with nothing at
            all loaded or running. Because of this, I have to set the
            fan on full-speed at startup through APCI, which sounds
            like a jet engine in meetings and in the office.

 	3. At some random interval, the keyboard decides to "forget"
            how to use ctrl/alt/shift keys, and thus I can't function at
            all in X. I can't open new applications, because typing in
            them crashes the app. I can't use keyboard shortcuts, I
            can't function in existing shells. The only way to fix that
            is to go to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard, change it to
            something else (without typing anything, or I'll crash the
            Keyboard applet), then change it back again. It happens a
            few times a day, every day. VERRRRY frustrating. I don't
            know if this is hardware-driven or some bug in Ubuntu.

 	4. X is wildly unstable. I can reproducably get GNOME + X to
            completely crash back to a shell, recycling gdm, by simply
            trying to run anything in Wine. Sometimes if I just leave
            the machine idle with X running and walk away, I'll come
            back and be at a gdm login prompt, because at some point X
            dumped and recycled gdm again. This may be due to the
            unstable, proprietary NVidia drivers or something else. It
            was a huge mistake selecting NVidia as my graphics chipset
            for a laptop in Linux.

 	5. Wireless is only enabled via shell scripts. NetworkManager
            in Ubuntu does absolutely nothing, except take up
            resources. In Gutsy on my T42p, wpa_supplicant would start
            at boot time, read its config, and wireless would be
            enabled without logging in. With Hardy + NetworkManager, I
            have to physically log into the machine, open a shell, run
            a script to start wireless (basically modprobe, iwconfig,
            ifconfig commands), and then it starts.

            That isn't a Lenovo issue, of course. It's an Ubuntu issue.
            With each new Ubuntu release, more features are removed in
            favor of replacing them with broken applications which
            serve no logical purpose. Gutsy had no need for
            NetworkManager and networking worked flawlessly there.

I'm about to give up 14+ years of working with and developing 
on Linux because it seems that with each new year, it gets more and 
more unstable, more and more things cease functioning, and I spend 
more time fighting the configuration of my own environment than using 
it to increase my productivity.

I'm probably going to just cut bait and buy a Mac soon. At least I can 
still run all of my FLOSS packages there, and not ever have to worry 
about the hardware or functioning drivers/support.

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