Lenovo

This micro-series explains how to turn the Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Gen 6 into a smart workstation that consumes only 5 Watts when idle but reaches top Cinebench scores while staying almost imperceptibly silent. In the first post, I showed how to silence the machine by replacing and adding to Lenovo’s CPU cooler. In this second post, I’m listing the exact configuration that achieves the lofty goal of combining minimal idle power consumption with top Cinebench scores.

This micro-series explains how to turn the Lenovo ThinkCentre M90t Gen 6 into a smart workstation that consumes only 5 Watts when idle but reaches top Cinebench scores while staying almost imperceptibly silent. In this first post, I’m showing how to silence the machine by replacing and adding to Lenovo’s CPU cooler. In a second post, I’m listing the exact configuration that achieves the lofty goal of combining minimal idle power consumption with top Cinebench scores.

2019-10-01: with the 2019 September update KB4516045 BitLocker uses software instead of hardware encryption by default. Likely reason: the security of software encryption can be controlled by Microsoft. Hardware encryption in the drive may be buggy.

Having made the switch from my trusty Lenovo T520 to the W540 here is my account of what works well and what does not. If you wonder what made me choose the W540: read this.

Contrary to what Lenovo wants to make you believe, the T520 laptop is not limited to 8 GB of RAM. I own this reliable workhorse and made the mistake of buying another laptop because I wanted something more elegant, but mainly because I need more than 8 GB of RAM. As it turned out, the other machine was not as business-proof as I thought.

I have been using Lenovo laptops for more than seven years. They never failed me - not a single hardware fault or software instability in all those years. OK, not everything was great - I distinctly remember the R60 which had an atrociously bad screen - but apart from a few glitches here and there IBM come Lenovo delivered great quality again and again. And yet here I am ordering my first laptop from an entirely different manufacturer. How come?

Disassembling the Lenovo Thinkpad T520 is easy, which makes upgrading the device a simple procedure. As described in my previous article I bought a T520 with only 2 GB RAM in order to replace the shipped memory with two 4 GB modules from Kingston. I also bought Intel’s mSATA SSD 310. This is a short description of the upgrade and installation procedure.

For a geek, one of the most fun things is choosing a new toy. I experienced this once again when I needed to buy a new laptop computer. The selection process was a lengthy one, during which I looked at and considered practically every model on the market. The benefits of that are twofold: I get a new device, whose strengths I appreciate and whose weaknesses I accept because I know there is no other model better suited for my needs on the market. You get this: a very personal laptop computer buyer’s guide.