W700 Goes Abroad
I recently went abroad for a business trip. My laptop of choice was the W700, slightly lighter than its Dual Screen counterpart, the W700ds.
With a 17-inch LCD and a size of 16 inches (width) x 1.6 inches (thickness, excluding rubber pads), it proudly weighs 8.3 lb. After putting it in its carrying case, there is barely room left to squeeze in some documents. The case has an outer pocket to fit the W700’s brick-sized AC adapter, which is more than welcome. But with a mouse and all other accessories tucked in, it felt like more than 20 pounds on my shoulder.
I am 5.4 ft tall, weight 114 lb. and have a pretty healthy build from my swimming days, but this trip was already starting to feel like a long race.
And so the race began. I hit the road early, but by the time I arrived at the airport, I really started missing my tiny X301 I left at home. I nearly fainted when the W700 dwarfed those trays at the security checkpoint. But I guess I should have been expecting it, since the W700 was even more than my wheeled carry-on could handle.
Everyone, including my colleagues and the local vendors I met, couldn’t believe the size of the machine I had. Well, it gets the work done. And in the end, it was worth all the effort carrying it all the way. During the trip, I used tons of CAD / graphic design software (3D CAD, 2D CAD, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) and the W700’s Quad Core＋GPU didn’t even flinch one bit. Superb performance. But what I really love about this machine is its beautiful LCD screen. Over my trip, I discovered that well-designed monitors can really help reduce eye strain.
Monitor features — 72% Color Gamut, 400 nit, colors calibrated with integrated sensor — are delicately balanced and very impressive. The integrated color sensor is built by X-Rite, a company with color-sample authority PANTONE under its wings. For someone involved in designing, PANTONE’s Color Calibration feature is a huge plus.
Homeward: Maybe my mind was too occupied with my carrying case. An accident was bound to happen. Maybe all the hard work and nightly karaoke sessions finally got to me — I felt dog tired when I arrived home. I put my bags down in my room and took a deep breath, … only to realize that I’d forgotten to return the cell phone I rented.
I’ve always carried a regular mobile PC on business trips, but now when considering work efficiency as a higher priority, I’d say the chances of my carrying a 17-inch mobile workstation again are is pretty good.
Lesson learned: Work out more, so I can actually call W700 a mobile notebook.
February 13th, 2009 at 11:06
i’m already killing my spine with an R60/15″…couldn’t imagine to carry such an all-in-one workstation for a longer time. couldn’t you design something that is huge and lightweight at a time? i mean there’s just a financial point in not using about the same components as in a T400 for example…plus the bigger monitor and some fan…?
February 13th, 2009 at 17:35
Is it just me or am i getting tired of hearing about the W700?
February 21st, 2009 at 02:37
[...] Naitoh over at Yamato Thinking recently took his W700 on a road trip to see if it would be worth it. He chose it over the more portable ThinkPad X301, another laptop [...]
March 1st, 2009 at 23:44
Will it run Linux?
When is Lenovo going to catch up – I’ve been running Ubuntu on thinkpad for at least 3 years. When are you going to offer Ubuntu pre-installed. I would buy a ThinkPad W700 2757 if it was fully loaded and had Ubuntu pre-installed. At least a million other people would too.
I love thinkpads and the combination of a powerhouse thinkpad and linux is unbeatable. I will not buy another microsoft license – ever. This message was entered via a t61 6458ad2. I have purchased about 250 thinkpads for the company I currently work for. Those were all Ubuntu imaged before sending out to customers on a systems order. Our next order will be either Dell or System76 as a poc on saving the imaging time and fully supported hardware. I would prefer to do the same type of orders on thinkpads because of the quality and craftmanship. Please put some effort into offering Ubuntu on all of your major product lines (at least thinkpads.)
March 3rd, 2009 at 17:30
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Elaina
March 15th, 2009 at 08:02
Hi!
I have my very own W700 and I think its the greatest computer I ever had. I am primarily a programmer (C++/Java/PHP and then some), and I bought the W700 to reduce the build times on my larger projects for compiled languages.
I am also using alot of graphics/media software such as inkscape and TV Paint, for which this computer is perfect. Being a perfectionist I love having a color calibrated screen even when working on software development!
Other than that it is my personal computer, and i have all my tv series, movies, family pictures and so on stashed on the computer as well. We have no TV set, so the W700’s high quality display is our silver screen at home.
The build quality is astounding. Sturdy as a rock.
The keyboard is a dream. I had lenovo laptops before, and I own the standalone lenovo thinkpad keyboard, but they are not as good as the the W700 keyboard because the keys feel very differently, the letters look different, some function keys are rearranged/differently sized and the windows keys are missing. On the W700 however its all PERFECT! The numpad is a bonus worth mentioning as well.
Performance is astounding. I sold off my stationary gamingrig, put together from all the topclass parts, because the performance of the W700 is better (while the stationary sounded like a vacuum cleaner and weighed a ton, and produced 650W of heat).
The preinstalled OS and software was a disapointment. This was my first Vista install, and after almost 20 years with windows I know how to keep my windows install snappy and clean with defragmentation, updates, tweakui and the occational regedit session. However Vista didn’t seem to play along.
It was reasonably stable, but it is slow and it gets slower everyday you use it for no apparent reason.
I have replaced vista with ubuntu AMD64, and i run my required windows softare in a XP install from a virtualbox vm. Ubuntu is REALLY snappy on this machine, even with full compiz graphics and all the useless bloated GUI toppings on maximum.
The ubuntu install went extremely smooth. I have installed ubuntu on laptops that required days of hacking to make it work, however everything just worked this time around. Sound, graphics, wireless, bluetooth and even the wacom tablet!
I didnt test the fingerprint reader, and to my dismay I havent gotten the X-Rite color calibration to work just yet. This is infact something I would LOVE Lenovo to fix. I tried pulling of a stunt by installing the driver in a VM and running the calibration from there, however the calibration requires that I close the lid, and linux shuts off the LCD when I do that. Also I was not able to find the driver from Lenovo’s site, and the driver from Pantone was not compatible (either with the hardware or the VM I suspect).
Further I think there is great improvement potential for Lenovo when it comes to Linux in general. Mr. rr in comment 4 is right. I too am responsible for alot of computers in my work, and I prefer linux. If Lenovo got their linux act together there are lots of cash out there (not to mention goodwill!). It’s important to have the goodwill of the IT people, and not just the managers.
Also, the lenovo tools in vista need work. There is no integrity, all the tools look like the were made by different departments without a single quality assurance. No single architect. Clean it up guys! Use coherent names/symbols, install in the same folder and merge/get rid of the less useful tools.
Also, stop writing bloated managed code that produce executables in the 4MiB size range! with 30 such tools loaded at startup you will waste tons of boot time and memory. Use quality toolchains such as MinGW and UPX
There is no reason why most of your executables should occupy more tha a few 100 kilobytes!
Also make it more explisit for the user that you in fact have a software called update manager, because its really good, and it should be the only software you would need to install to get everything in the right version from lenovo (instead of trying to hunt down singular drivers).
Thats my rant anyways. Hope it was useful to both Lenovo and Lenovo customers/potential customers!
–Lennart