[ltp] More war stories about Lenovo build quality

[Theodore Tso]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 01:41:03PM -0400, David A. Desrosiers wrote:
>
> 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.

Hm.  I have my X61s for about 2-3 months, and I haven't had any major
problems for it.  No hinge problems, no finger-reader problems etc.  I
am wondering if you have a fan problem; that might explain the CPU
temperature and Fingerprint reader issue.  That being said, my CPU
temperature is currently 50 C; it only goes up to 70C if (a) I'm doing
a kernel compile or (b) firefox has gone crazy again and has started
burning huge amounts of CPU.

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

Stupid question --- you have used the Windows Task Manager to make
sure you don't have something burning huge amounts of CPU time in the
background, right?

> 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.

Have you considered a using a debian unstable chroot?  That's how I
test things.  Given what I've heard about Ubuntu Hardy shipping
Firefox 3, the experiences some have had with it, I may not upgrade
from Gutsy for quite some time, and indeed I've been seriously
thinking about going back to Debian unstable.

> 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.

Um, how are you configuring thinkfinger?  It should have access to
your typed password at all?  I have it set up to bypass password
checking if successful, but it doesn't store a copy of my password at
all.

> 	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.

At least with Ubuntu Gutsy and running a bleeding edge kernel (on an
X61s with an Intel graphics chipset), I haven't had any issues....

> 	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.

I use crossover office and the Intel drivers on Ubuntu Gutsy and I
haven't noticed any problems.

> 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.

You might want give some other distributions, such as Fedora or Open
SuSE a try before you give up on Linux.  Things will be quite
different if you are very much used to a Debian-based system, but some
of these issues may very well have been some decisions that Ubuntu
made.  (For example, I very much wonder about the decision of
replacing FF2 with FF3, given some of the usability issues I've heard
reported regarding FF3.  But that alone has made me hesitant to
upgrade to Hardy except on a crash and burn box --- and some of your
reported difficulties are also reasons for concern.)

						- Ted