ZaraByte Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 So, im sure they all are good but which Lenovo Thinkpad would you recommend if you have used or have personally owned im thinking about getting one of these Lenovo Thinkpad laptops because of their reliability compared to like dell and hp computers. I wanted something that has a decent battery life at least 3-4 hours seems battery life is my mine problem i face with laptops when im out in the field doing testings battery life is not so good im lucky if i get like 2 hours on current laptop now i know i can always get a better battery but i think its time for a laptop change i've been hearing people say they like them Thinkpad laptops so im kinda looking to get maybe a Lenovo Thinkpad 420T maybe. I honestly feel i should hold off buying till the first of the year since i think that prices are gonna drop on all the Windows 7 machines due to what microsoft is planning to do on January 13th 2015. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TN.Frank Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 Depending on what you what you want to run on it you may be better off buying used off of Ebay. Of course if you want Windows 7 then I really can't advise you since I"m a Linux only kind of guy but if you want to run 99.9% of the Linux Distros out there you can get buy with older equipment and save yourself a lot of cash. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sitwon Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 In general, the T Series has always been the flagship of the ThinkPad brand. Start there.I was a huge fan of ThinkPads for many years, even after Lenovo bought the brand. However, I feel like some of the most recent models are beginning to deviate from some of the design choices that originally drew me in. It's unfortunate, but they're just following the rest of the industry. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZaraByte Posted August 20, 2014 Author Share Posted August 20, 2014 Ohhh trust me i plan to run either Kali Linux or i'm start working on my own custom pentesting distro with less bloat ware then Kali Linux not to get off topic but i was working on my own custom distro based off Debian i needed to format my windows system i thought i backed up the right vmware files turns out i didn't so i lost 4 weeks of modding and haven't gotten over the lose yet to restart the build. But yea i need new laptop that has a decent battery for when im out doing some pentesting im not much of a fan of HP or Dell i've owned both and they are just not reliable. One thing that gets me is on that T420 model and half the Thinkpad's is that red button for the mouse and that blue enter button that drives my OD crazy man. I like a nice black laptop i haven't figured out to this day why they gotta have that red mouse button in the middle of the keyboard really gets to me. I'd rather just go with a MSI GS60 and be done with it but don't have the $1,000 to do it. $400 is my budget I should wait till income tax and get the MSI GS60 but kinda need something now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sitwon Posted August 20, 2014 Share Posted August 20, 2014 The TrackPoint mouse is actually one of the main reasons I still like ThinkPads. I could write pages about why it's fantastic, but the bottom line is, if you don't want it, you can pull it off. The cap is designed to be replaceable (in fact, you usually get a couple of alternate caps in the box). Just pull off the cap and pretend it's not there. I don't know what to tell you about the Enter key. Never bothered me. In the IBM days there was a lot of thought given to the color scheme. For example here's a bit of trivia: that TrackPoint cap looks red, and if you ask anyone they would probably call it red, but in the design specs at IBM it's actually labeled magenta. Look it up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZaraByte Posted August 21, 2014 Author Share Posted August 21, 2014 what a shame they don't have a black cap or at least i didn't find any on ebay maybe on other websites they might sell them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TN.Frank Posted August 21, 2014 Share Posted August 21, 2014 Give Arch Assault a look. It's Arch based so you'll have the power of pacman and the AUR with a ton of packages available. It's also probably be lighter weight then Kali too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barry99705 Posted August 21, 2014 Share Posted August 21, 2014 (edited) Or you can install Kali and remove the parts you don't want/need. I won't touch Ubuntu anymore, straight Debian based distros from now on. Edited August 21, 2014 by barry99705 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZaraByte Posted August 21, 2014 Author Share Posted August 21, 2014 Give Arch Assault a look. It's Arch based so you'll have the power of pacman and the AUR with a ton of packages available. It's also probably be lighter weight then Kali too. I've never used Arch Linux before i normally stick to Debian and Red Hat Flavors Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TN.Frank Posted August 23, 2014 Share Posted August 23, 2014 I've never used Arch Linux before i normally stick to Debian and Red Hat Flavors I've been using Linux for about 18 months now so I'm still fairly new to it relatively speaking and I was a "Deb Head" for about 15 of those 18 but over the last 3 months I've really caught on to pacman and being able to find and install just about any package that I want via the AUR. Pacman is much simpler then apt-get and it seems to be more powerful as well. I can go into Octopi or PacmanXG(the two package managers that I use, similar to Synaptic) and they'll actually track down all the dependencies and compile stuff for me using cmake, ect. It's just so much easier using pacman that I doubt that I can ever go back to doing it the "hard way" with apt-get. Check out this great link to compare the differences. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Rosetta Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted August 23, 2014 Share Posted August 23, 2014 Wow. Dependency hunting. I remember that from the pre-Y2K years. In those days the package manager was basically a wrapper around bunzip2. Then Debian came along and showed how it could be done. Interesting that you're now saying they've basically stopped doing what they used to be very good at.So let's see now....I started out with Slackware. Had a very hard time keeping it up to date and it was a bitch to get my Trident card (remember those) to work with XFree86 (no X.org in those days).Tried RedHat - hated it. They'd pretty much wrapped any useful tool with their own version of it or something.Moved to Debian. Loved it to bits, but eventually got miffed that a simple tool would bring in half the universe in dependencies which were optional to the program but the debian package guy decided you wanted *EVERYTHING*.I think I tried something called Pangu Linux or something. Had a horse head as a logo and was compiled with egcs (pronounced 'eggs'), a patched GCC that was said to provide better performance.Dabbled a bit with OpenBSD and FreeBSD for my Gateway/Proxy server and Desktop, respectively. SCSI support was a bit lacking and I once again had a hard time keeping things up to date.Had a go at running Linux From Scratch. Great learning experience but quite literally impossible to keep up to date. The package, if you can call it that, was the source tarball...So I went for the next best thing: Gentoo. LOVE. IT. TO. BITS! I have a config file where I can say for instance I want GTK but not Qt (or the other way around, or neither, or both) and *ALL* packages on the system get (re)built with those preferences in mind. Sometimes compiling takes a while, but who cares? It's not like you're waiting on your machine that often and you can always reduce the priority of the task.I went with Gentoo I think about 8 years ago. Haven't had a reason to look around for something else yet... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sitwon Posted August 23, 2014 Share Posted August 23, 2014 If you know the ins and outs of portage and emerge, you can write/edit complicated ebuilds, you have experience merging packages to a target system which is different from the host system, and you can resolve mutual dependency conflicts ...and you _still_ like Gentoo... then there's a job for you at the company where I work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
newbi3 Posted August 24, 2014 Share Posted August 24, 2014 I have a T410 and I like it, I don't love it but its a good laptop. Battery life is about 2 hours ish running arch. you can always get an extended battery for it. My only gripe was that it only has 4gb of ram and its really thick and heavy (just like all think pads). If I had spent the money to upgrade the ram to 8 or 16gb I would have been very happy with it but I never did Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZaraByte Posted August 24, 2014 Author Share Posted August 24, 2014 I have a T410 and I like it, I don't love it but its a good laptop. Battery life is about 2 hours ish running arch. you can always get an extended battery for it. My only gripe was that it only has 4gb of ram and its really thick and heavy (just like all think pads). If I had spent the money to upgrade the ram to 8 or 16gb I would have been very happy with it but I never did You can still upgrade them computers buy the ram off ebay and other sites still sell the ram but from what i seen possibly cost like $60+ I'm planning to get a Thinkpad T420 model and upgrade it to like a 256GB SSD and get an caddy to put the HDD where the optical drive is. I'm just curious to see what some of you feel about Thinkpad's if i had the grand i'd possibly go with a better model. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Radau Posted August 24, 2014 Share Posted August 24, 2014 I have a T410 and I like it, I don't love it but its a good laptop. Battery life is about 2 hours ish running arch. you can always get an extended battery for it. My only gripe was that it only has 4gb of ram and its really thick and heavy (just like all think pads). If I had spent the money to upgrade the ram to 8 or 16gb I would have been very happy with it but I never did I wouldn't necessarily say all thinkpads are thick and heavy. I bought a Thinkpad X201 (non-tablet) on ebay for $180, a 256gb SSD and another 4GB ram stick (total 8) and it's a pretty fantastic laptop for systems and network administration, especially with how portable the 12.1" form factor is to hold with one arm while working in network cabinets. If you need to run a ton of VMs it might not be the best course but if you have a dedicated ESXi system and Vmware Workstation or something along those lines it's great (I Just VPN to my home lab and spin up my poweredge 2950 over the DRAC for lab work). The 9 cell battery pack I bought protrudes a bit out of the back but doesn't add much heft to the device and really ramps up the battery life (I get about 5 hours on Linux Mint 17). Obvious downsides being the weaker GPU and no disk drive without the dock so gaming isn't a strong point of the X201. I personally love the X201 and don't plan on replacing it any time soon, 12.1" laptops aren't for everyone though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sinn3rman Posted October 15, 2014 Share Posted October 15, 2014 The Company I work for has deployed T440's and W530's Both I think are fantastic but ooh so pricey, the rolls royce really. I'm looking at the w530, I know its expense but I just think there is not alot of zazz in the design of laptops at the moment, they look cheap and flimsy, Lenovo's look at least like that can handle some use. Its that classic feel. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metatron Posted October 15, 2014 Share Posted October 15, 2014 (edited) I have a ThinkPad x201 as my going to con's/hackday's/tech related shit days. Their fairly cheap used, small and have a solid spec for running anything you could want. Mine has the i5 with 8GB of ram and a 256GB Samsung SSD. Boots in seconds and lasts a whole day on the battery. Built like a tank :) I use Coreboot and FreeBSD on mine. Edited October 15, 2014 by metatron Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted October 15, 2014 Share Posted October 15, 2014 I've yet to find a laptop that lasts more than 90 minutes under my typical workload, which says more about the laptop than my workload. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barry99705 Posted October 19, 2014 Share Posted October 19, 2014 I've yet to find a laptop that lasts more than 90 minutes under my typical workload, which says more about the laptop than my workload. Well if you didn't use that shitty ass gentoo, it'd probably work better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted October 20, 2014 Share Posted October 20, 2014 Tsssss.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.