# IBM Thinkpad Support Question

## alok

I am about to purchase a brand new T - Series Thinkpad, and am having trouble deciding which one to buy. My top priority is 100% hardware compatiblity (especially 3D acceleration and sleep/power functionality). Here are the two I'm wrestling with:

1) Thinkpad T41 2378DHU  

Intel® Pentium® M Processor 1.40GHz

Microsoft Windows XP Professional

256 MB

40 GB

14.1"

1024x768

32MB ATI Mobility RADEON 7500

4.5-4.9

UltraNav

Ultrabay Slim

CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo

Intel PRO/Wireless Network Connection 802.11b

IBM Embedded Security Subsystem 2.0

$1421.10

2) Thinkpad T42 2378FVU

Intel® Pentium® M Processor 735 1.70GHz

Microsoft Windows XP Professional

256 MB

40 GB

14.1"

1400x1050

64MB ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600

4.6-4.6

UltraNav

Ultrabay Slim

CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo

Integrated Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet

Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG

IBM Embedded Security Subsystem 2.0

$1664.10

I know there are a few people on the forum with working T41's, but they all seem to be having some problem or another.  There seems to be little to nothing on the forums about T42's, but my hunch is that they are virtually the same.

Please give me some advice and insight.

Thanks in advance.

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## ben

Hi,

I have a t40p (2373-G1G) and I can say this:

power/sleep under apm was working good for me from day one. Under acpi, it finally is good too (gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.7 and corrected DSDT).

3D accel: I use xorg and I get 1100 fps in glxgears, but I don't play games, so I can't comment further. The xfree/xorg radeon driver is able to drive the radeon card with 3D accel up to the radeon 9000 (M9). For other ones, please refer to xfree/xorg doc, or you have to use ATI proprietary drivers.

I have googled quite a max for the suspend to ram under acpi and I saw people overall very happy with the t40, t41 and t42 one (except for that particular point, which is now running quite well)

HTH

Ben

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## alok

Do I need 3D accel to run X? Because I wouldn't use this laptop for gaming, I just don't want to be using a command prompt because my video card isn't supported.

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## ben

of course not,

3D acceleration goes like this:

If you have applications which are dense with 3D images, there is a lot of computing involved. The graphic card can take a whole lot of this particular type of computing load, and thus save some computing power of the cpu to do other things. This is really needed for games and maybe for 3D developpement.

X, on the other hand, is 2D and gnome and kde works flawlessly on this machine, although I personnaly use none of the above desktop, but enlightenment.

HTH

Ben

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## cpunchin

Alok:

Where did you get these price for the 2378FVU ? 

I am planning to get one

 :Laughing: 

 *Quote:*   

> 2) Thinkpad T42 2378FVU 
> 
> Intel® Pentium® M Processor 735 1.70GHz 
> 
> Microsoft Windows XP Professional 
> ...

 

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## alok

cpunchin,

i'm using an employee discount with the www.ibm.com price.

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## pdr

I just got a T42 a few days ago, using gentoo-dev-sources (2.6.7). ACPI seems to work well, but I haven't tested my "battery" runlevel that I set up yet. I emerged ati-drivers and the fbcon works fine (use vesafb and vga=834, NOT radeon), and xfree+kde looks good (I think I have 3D accel running, but all I ran was glxgears).

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## olli.bo

 *pdr wrote:*   

> I just got a T42 a few days ago, using gentoo-dev-sources (2.6.7). ACPI seems to work well, but I haven't tested my "battery" runlevel that I set up yet. I emerged ati-drivers and the fbcon works fine (use vesafb and vga=834, NOT radeon), and xfree+kde looks good (I think I have 3D accel running, but all I ran was glxgears).

 

Is your suspending working with acpi?

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## pdr

Suspend will be one of the last things I work on - to suspend, I just type "shutdown -h now"   :Cool: 

BTW - don't have the link, but there is a Gentoo page discussing using cpufreqd, a "battery" runlevel, etc - works fine for me going into battery mode (unfortunately if I plug back in my CPU freq isn't maxing out - gonna work on that this weekend).

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## olli.bo

ok... ;) If you test ist... Can you please post your results here?

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## pdr

Battery support working pretty good. First, I noticed that "button/lid" support - as far as blanking the screen - seems to be supported in hardware, because my T42 does it with no setup.

I had to modify /etc/init.d/cpufreqd and /etc/init.d/speedfreeq because their stop() functions did not stop the services - if I plugged in AC these would still be running. Changed them so they send SIGKILL to kill the instance, and that works. (if I sent them a SIGTERM from the console they didn't die either)

I've still got the problem that when I unplug, the CPU is scaled back to 1GHz (which is good); when I plug back in it is not going into full-speed again (which is bad). That'll be next.

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## olli.bo

Wat is with suspending?

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## pdr

Search around - I've seen a few posts about suspend and people getting it to work. As I said, that is pretty low priority for me.

BTW I did get it to revert to full speed when ac is plugged in; again, had to modify /etc/init.d/speedfreq stop() function to do check_battery (so it knows its current state) and then call speedfreq to set it to "performance" level (ie full speed) before it kills the daemon.

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