[ltp] More war stories about Lenovo build quality
Dom
linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:11:54 +0200
David A. Desrosiers wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> 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.
Horrified to hear that, knowing how I recommend ThinkPads to everyone. I
have to say I have no such build quality problems with my 4 months old Z61m.
>
> 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.
Until that happened, you had a working fingerprint reader under Ubuntu,
right?
I use Debian unstable and never got to really try to get my fingerprint
reader working there. I think ThinkFinger couldn't enroll my fingertips
and I quickly gave up on it. Looking at libfprint, I'm hoping I'll be
able to have a stable solution for KDE.
(I can still however use fingerprint reader when powering on my
ThinkPad, after I enrolled my fingerprints under WinXP)
>
> 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.
And what about battery under Linux? As a side note, have you tried using
powertop?
>
> 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 have a somewhat loose wireless switch too, but not that it can switch
states without me doing it of course... What you have is really bad,
can't believe it's a ThinkPad...
>
> 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.
As it appears, fingerprint solutions are still heavily under development
so you might want to think about what you need your fingerprint reader
for. For example, I can live with using it only when powering the laptop
on (and I suppose that's working because I setup fingerprint reader
under WinXP and either because I still haven't removed WinXP or IBM
Rescue partition - sorry, but I won't be testing to see what's the cause
of it working :) )
>
> 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.
Richard mentioned trying top to see if it's a software issue - I think
powertop is a better tool for the job.
>
> 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.
Regarding both, points 3 and 4: It scares me to hear about experiences
like that on Linux. Given that it is an unstable operating system, one
could understand that, but I have never had any major problems with my
unstable system. I'm not the man you should talk to but you should
definitely try to find what's causing it by checking Xorg log and maybe
trying a different graphics driver. (I use ATI's card BTW with ATI's
fglrx driver)
>
> 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.
Again, not trying to piss you off by saying oh well, it works here, but
I really don't have any troubles with NetworkManager, except that
there's still room for improvement, for example with notifications, but
that's minor annoyance... Ethernet works when plugged in, Wireless works
almost without problems (I sometimes have to choose the network twice,
it won't connect at first attempt)
Since mine is also an unstable distribution, you should really either
try to track this down in Ubuntu, or consider either a stable or
different unstable distro -- does that make sense?
>
> 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.
>
> </rant state="end">
Hope you get your ThinkPads as they should be and that Lenovo gets it's
grip soon and prevents this from happening again with ThinkPads...
Good luck man!
--
Dom
http://domdelimar.com