Hello, I spent part of the weekend setting up a 480GB SSD drive. The local Microcenter dropped the price by $70 after I bought it, so I went over yesterday and got a price match. Good thing I did because the price is back up $70 today! The lower sales price was about what I spent for the 120GB SSD in my T61.
I ran the T530 on battery, using the default out-of-the-box power settings, while doing part of the setup. It lasted slightly over five hours with a 9-cell battery. The DVD drive powered down when it was not being used. The screen backlight will dim down if idle. This is an i7 system with FHD Display and Optimus. I did not check to see if the HD Graphics 4000 or NVIDIA 5400M was being used. The T530 is faster than the T61 with about double the battery life. Mostly meaningless since it depends on the activity and power settings. I will say that it feels like there is longer battery life. The Full HD (1920x1080) display is brighter, looks better, and the text does not look too small for my eyes. There is some shift when you look far enough off-axis. The keyboard works fine. It has a similar feel to the T61. The caps lock indicator is on-screen instead of a status LED, so I need to see if I can set something up in Ubuntu. I backed up all the 500GB drive partitions and managed to get everything over on the 480GB SSD. I put Ubuntu on the SSD and still used the Win7 boot manager. It took a little figuring out, but I managed to keep a working recovery partition, so the little black button (and F11) brings up the recovery program. I decided to do it this way as some operations will trash Grub in the MBR and render Linux unbootable. So far I like the T530 and glad I bought it. Mostly good differences from the T61 and no bad surprises. 73 Eric Smart is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wise is knowing better than to put one in a fruit salad. _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
