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Testing Lenovo's ThinkPad W700ds Dual-Screen Notebook
MojoKid writes "Lenovo's ThinkPad W700 is a unique product, targeted squarely at mobile professionals who require the power, features, and performance of workstation-class product in a notebook. The machine has a few stand-out integrated features, like a Wacom Digitizer Tablet and X-Rite Color Calibrator. In addition, the ThinkPad W700ds version and adds a secondary, slide-out 10.6" WXGA+ display, which increases monitor real-estate by 39% spanning across its two panels. HotHardware's video demonstrates the machine's arsenal of toys for the graphics pro, in a somewhat portable desktop replacement notebook."
As usual, Portability = $$$$$$$$$
I'm sitting in front of a hand built desktop that runs at 3.2 Ghz (Lenovo runs at 2.53) with 4 gigs of RAM and a terrabyte of hard disk space. I'm using an IBM model M keyboard (long live the king!) with dual 27" monitors from Dell, with S-IPA panels.
Total cost? about 2 grand, and I put together the CPU unit 2 years ago.
When the Thinkpads began doing our thinking for us, it really became there world, not ours anymore.
I thought it is dual screen as in.. one on top and another at bottom. *cough* Nintendo *cough*
Not more than 4 months ago I was thinking someone should make a note book with slide out screen. In fact I would mind 2 slide out screens. More and more often I an very greedy for additional screen real estate.
Working with a standard 15" notebook screen is like drafting on a napkin with a magic marker. Its good for making notes. but not for serious detailed work.
Think Deeply.
Yo Dawg, we heard you like LCD screens, so we've put an LCD screen inside your LCD screen. So now you can look at things while you look at other things.
We also heard you like pointing devices, so this baby has three of them!, with two sets of buttons!
What the fuck is wrong with you? Stop spamming this shit all over the place, you pathetic man.
From the specs:
Operating System: Genuine Windows Vista Business 64
It's a good thing the put "Genuine" in there to clarify things. Otherwise people might assume IBM was shipping this $6,000 notebook with a pirated copy of Windows to keep the price down.
Better known as 318230.
How do you know it is a man? It is women who generally tend to go on and on about things...
Well, could your grandmother use it?
Unless your grandchild is reading the article, your entire point is invalid, since the implication of your post seems to be that you're a grandmother and able to use it.
Calm down - it's just an expression based on grandparents (usually) being less tech-savvy than their 16-30 yo grandchildren. I have a feeling that you're well aware of that, but somehow - in a self-righteous fit - convinced yourself could be ignored.
I've heard the expression "so easy your grandparents could do it", is that better? (But my grandparents are dead - they don't even get a chance to do it, you insensitive clod! Discrimination! Bloody murder!)
And "agist" - please... You think you can just add -ist to anything and start screaming "oppression!"? Get over yourself and find another hobby than arguing semantics.
And this time it is no meme, but a real question. What good are slide-out screens and fancy fingerprint readers if they are based on such obscene hardware hacks that a normal operation system would be unable to use it all.
That is something reviews would actually be useful for.
Troll post and you fooled for it.
I am sick of lenovo and their customer service. I remember how I used ot get knowledgeable reps for thinkpad services with IBM. with lenovo it has hit such a low point I dont think I will be continuing my loyalty to thinkpads anymore.
The screen is on the wrong side. Because of the numeric keypad, the home position for typing is to the left side of the computer. This means that you are facing the left side of your screen while typing instead of facing the center of the screen. Putting the second screen on the right makes this even worse. You'll type while always looking slightly to the right. If the screen had been placed on the left side, at least a user could sit in front of the computer, type, and be facing the center of the two screens.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
See this for more details.
Typical monkeylover ranting. GTFO.
So the engineers at Lenovo have pretty much crammed more "computer" into this laptop than any laptop has had crammed so far. Two screens, nearly full keyboard, two pointing devices, a digitizer tablet, along with a metric crapload of CPU, video, disk, memory, along with the usual gamut of notebook options. It'll set you back between 3000 and 8000 cool US dollars.
And it still comes with a built-in dialup modem inside.
What. The. Hell.
I can understand having RAID-0 on there from a performance standpoint, but it's downright STUPID on its own. For one, there's the obvious pitfalls of running the entire thing on such a setup (queue the old "the 0 stands for how many bytes you can recover if something goes wrong" joke). Secondly, if I'm going for pure performance, I'm NOT putting my OS and my scratch space on the same volume. If they want to be serious about this, they need to ditch the optical drive altogether and have room for another HDD for the OS and non-throwaway things. Granted, you should be making regular backups. But at least if one drive fails, the data is still a lot easier to get back than if it were thrown across two drives.
And yes, this is honest constructive criticism here. I'm a proud ThinkPad owner myself (T60 to be exact).
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Uh, boss. We accidentally put two screens on this laptop. What should we do?
Hm... Charge people twice the price and call it a feature!
For six thousand bucks, I could buy myself a 16 way server, use it as a workstation, and pay someone to carry it around for me.
This is my sig.
Did Homer Simpson just join the Lenovo design team?
Wow, Lenovo made the computer equivalent of the big mac chicken patty sandwich.
http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/
This uber notebook is a total redneck thing. AS a redneck, I'd like to say, that's why I like it. If they shipped it with a good buck knife and a DVD on hunting in the field, then we'd be styling.
This is my sig.
That's all rather cruel. It's just nasty to bully someone so obviously mentally ill. While I don't condone APK's rude behaviour, I think that much worse behaviour can be found in the people hounding him - e.g. this Jay Little character deliberately provoking him and getting his websites shut down. Not pleasant.
Calling this thing dual screen is not too different to calling an old tv with an lcd display of the channel number dual screen. Okay that's a _slight_ exaggeration. Only slight. The second "screen" looks like it's not worth the trouble. Good for task lists and the like but not much else, yet oh so breakable. The headline had me envision something like a tablet pc with a second screen - instead I see something about the size of a size mirror on a combi van. More gimmick than useful. Farq off.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
64G SSD for the OS and bits...
320G HD for Applications/Data/mp3s/movies.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
This would be useful for Gimp and other software with floating tool bars. Put the content on the main (color-calibrated!) screen, and keep the tools on the side.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
It's unfortunate that CPUs have gotten so complex, but clock speed is not a particularly good indicator of performance, even on seemingly similar CPUs.
Once upon a time I was curious to do a rough benchmarking of the various CPUs I have access to, just to get a sense of which ones were faster. What I did was to write a simple single threaded traveling salesman solver (http://morbo.cs.pdx.edu/traveling_salesman.c) and run it on all the machines and see how long it took. (Extra detail: The main part of the TSP solver uses less than 4KB of memory, so it should all fit in the CPU cache.)
I got one of my most surprising results when I compared my laptop to my desktop.
Desktop machine: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.00GHz
Laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53GHz
Both are dual core "Core 2 Duo" CPUs. Intuitively, I would have guessed that the desktop machine would have been faster because the desktop is not designed to be as power-conscious, and it has the faster clock speed. I was wrong.
For this particular test, it turns out that the laptop was about 50% faster than the desktop, even though they're both Core2Duos and the desktop has almost 20% "more GHz".
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
They'll talk up all the other specs, but anyone who works in graphics is going to want an 8-bit panel on this fancy laptop of theirs. That one feature is probably worth more to a real professional than all the rest of the bling.
Modems don't take up much space, nor cost much money. So unless you are dealing with a very small laptop (you aren't) or a cheap one (again not) why wouldn't you include a modem? The idea of laptops is to be able to take them on the go. Well guess what? Some places you go may not have high speed Internet. I know for the geek that has never left the city this might seem impossible but it happens. There are places where high speed just hasn't gotten to yet. However phone lines, well those are pretty wide spread. While it isn't impossible to find a location without a phone line, it is far more difficult than finding a place without high speed Internet.
Thus you include a modem, so that if it is needed, it's there. No reason not to when you've got the space and the $5 for the hardware isn't a major part of the price.
So while I wouldn't get a modem for a desktop, I'm glad my laptop has a modem, I've actually made use of it. My grandma finally did get high speed Internet because my uncle got tired of her not having it and set it all up, but until very recently she didn't. So when I went to visit her, it was dialup or no access.
It isn't as though the computer is just dialup. It also has a wired Ethernet connection, and WiFi. It just includes dialup as a fallback option.
Cannot RTFA. It hurts too bad.
Something is either unique or it is not. It cannot be /rather unique/.
From the article:
"This thing is so well designed, your grandmother could use it."
As a 48 yo grandmother, feminist, and longtime C programmer, I find that offensive. It's agist and sexist. No one would have said "...your grandfather could use it."!!
If you stayed in the kitchen you wouldn't be in any danger of reading offensive stuff on the internet.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Can you also afford to buy enough cable to power it everywhere you go?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Sure would be nice if they had a mirror-image version with the writing pad on the left side of the mouse. Anybody left-handed is going to have a lot of trouble using this toy.
Max out out this one http://www.sagernotebook.com/product_customed.php?pid=29175&action=customize/ for a bargain luggable Workstation
What would really be ideal is Intel's Matrix RAID, which allows you to either stripe or mirror individual partitions. That way you could carve up your two-drive volume however you'd like. Stripe your swap/scratch partitions for performance, then mirror your OS and data partition(s) for fault tolerance. I'm truly surprised Lenovo didn't think to include this versatile chipset.
There seems to be a huge amount of revisionist history being produced by people who don't know theirs in response to your correct use of the term CPU. The term CPU predates the invention of the microprocessor. CPU is absolutely a valid term for the unit that can run computer programs. In fact, with the exception of SoCs (System on a Chip) the use of the term CPU to describe the microprocessor, while prevalent (I do it myself in fact), is actually a misnomer - unless of course you can run a program without RAM, for example.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Maybe IBM did it first, I have no idea - but I know the Macbook Pros, at least, have been doing this for a while now, too.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I don't get it. This is a super-expensive product and the extra screen and digitizer tablet, combined with the high end processors and GPUs available, would aim it squarely at graphics professionals, and successful wealthy ones at that. But isn't that whole industry using Macs anyway? I don't see a graphics art type abandoning his Mac for this. (And yes, I agree with the previous posters that the slideout screen is on the wrong side for most users, who tend to keep tool palettes on the left side.)
One thing about creative types is how appreciative they are of attractive industrial design. I think that's part of the reason these people gravitate to Macs in the first place. But this computer seems to be continuing the old Thinkpad tradition of butt-ugliness. Any creative guy buying it is going to make himself a laughingstock among his colleagues.