I purchased a fully loaded Lenovo T510 laptop for my son about 5 months ago. During that time, the charger has failed twice, leaving him without a functioning laptop for several days. Response from the 800 number was fairly quick, but both times the failure occurred on a Friday which extended the amount of time before the replacement was received.

After the second failure, I decided to buy an extra charger and battery as a backup. Unfortunately Lenovo requires someone to be at home to sign for delivery and UPS delivers to our neighborhood only in the morning. In the end, we never received the battery and charger and we were charged a 15% restocking fee. For a business user this wouldn't be a problem, but someone using it at college or at home that policy is a major hassle.

We paid a premium price for the laptop and have been pretty disappointed in the reliability of the computer and the poor service. We've learned our lesson and will not be buying any more Lenovo.

Great review! I have a question regarding the color sensor. I didn't order one but I have that tag. What's the purpose of having that I'm kind of confused about it. Thanks.

One thing to take into consideration is that this unit does not ship with a smartcard reader as an option. I just got mine and I was not able to spec it with a smartcard reader, a unit with a smartcard reader is only available with the W510 class laptops.

I purchased the T510 with a single 4gb memory dimm. I've thinking about upgrading to 8gb. Is the single dimm that is installed under the touch pad or the under the back cover?

I bought a T510 in April 2010 in NY. Actually I am working in Brasília, capital of Brazil, and about a week ago the backlight of my T510 broke, leaving my TP with nothing but a black screen. I tried the IBM online service request form, only to be told after 4 days, that my request was closed, with no comment on why and what to do. So I tried to call the toll free number, where they gave me another toll free number, where I was told to call the first toll free number again. While googling my problem, I found out that I'm not the only one with backlight problems on thinkpad notebooks. Unfortunately that seems to be a common problem. So I opened another request on the IBM online service, asking them to contact me. it's eight days by now, that I am without my computer, unable do do my work, and still no reply from IBM/Lenovo. This is very disappointing, considering that I paid a higher price thinking i would get a good quality product with a good worldwide service (as I was told by the vendor). It seems that only the higher price is left over in this story.

Pascal D. Angst
ibmlenovonuncamais@terrabrasilis.ch

wifi keeps turning off randomly, even with power saver turned off, the adapter that came with my T510 is intel centrino advanced-n 6200 AGN, im still not sure why the wifi randomly turns off, and it becomes problematic because you cannot reconnect unless you disable, then enable it, or restart your computer.

once the wifi turns off once, it becomes more frequent until the next shut down of your computer, in addition if you troubleshoot, the options to solve are totally useless

I purchased a Lenovo Think Pad T-510 in August 2010 and have had nothing but PROBLEMS. One month later the entire system crashed. Lenovo Support was rude and offered no help whatsoever even though I have the 3 year warranty. I have spent over $1,000 on computer maintanence and it still barely functions. The 9-cell battery lasts less that 3-hours despite having it at the recommended settings. I am NOT doing gaming or other heavy media, simply web sites. I plan to take legal action against Lenovo to get a refund of the costs of the computer and my expenses. My next computer will be an Apple!!

First, thank you for the great review. It covered just about all of the questions I have. I must say from an IT support perspective, these laptops are THE best, and have been for years. For those who have had service issues, I understand why they would not buy Lenovo again, but this is not the norm. The screens on these seem dim at first, but I never looked back after a couple days of use. Unless you are out in the sun, there is plenty of back-light.

I have a T61 that is still very fast and am considering upgrading to the T510 for some extra speed and features. I think this review sold me....as the T510 still has everything I want in a faster package. The ultranav is a must, LED keyboard light is fantastic, the keyboard is great for working on all day (I always swap the CTRL and FN keys as the reviewer mentioned). I just can't say enough about the quality engineering that goes into the Thinkpad name.

Spend $1,500 now on a quality laptop and save yourself the need to upgrade every year (more like 3-5). If you use a laptop for any extended period of time or for business, there is no better choice.

T510 - does anyone else think the display has poor resolution. My e-mail is much more pixelated than on the T500

Hello guys,

I was very happy when I saw the review for this laptop because helps me to decide if buy it or not. Though, I found the same laptop but with 4GB RAM and 500GB HDD (7200 RPM). I was wondering (from your experience) if this configuration is ok for working with very large databases (SQL Server)?

For the moment we use a Lenovo which has i5, the processor family is 520M (2.4 GHZ), 2GB RAM and is a real pain the ***. It freezes when we try to run complex scripts on SQL Server.

Any advice is helpful. Thank you.

P.S.: Sorry for my bad english.

You're English is quite fine.

Now I really don't know the hardware requirements for a SQL Server but one thing that stands out for me is that your current system only has two gigs of RAM.

You might want to consider Lenovo's new Thinkpad T series 520. You can configure with not only an i5 processor but you can also choose from four different i7 offerings up to the i7 2820QM @ 2.30 GHz with 8mb of L3 cache.

You can also choose either Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional 64-bit OS, three screen resolutions: 1366x768, 1600x900, or 1920x1080; as well as upwards of 8 gigs of RAM. You can choose harddrive sizes of either 320 or 500 in 7200 rpm or SSD.

Of course this depends on your need as well as budget.

First of all, thank you for answering.

Our SQL Server is already installed on a dedicated server with proper configuration for what we need. The laptop is for my boss who will use it as end user/client (I don't know if I explained properly).

The idea is that he's running complex queries and the current laptop seems to be to slow for this. That's why we were thinking that a i7 core and at least 4GB RAM (plus the 7200 RPM HDD) will be a major salt of performance.

After all, is it worth a laptop from article title but having 4GB RAM, 7200 RPM HDD and i7 core instead of the current one (i5 core, 520M processor family and 2 GB RAM)? Or is just enough to upgrade RAM on the current one to 4GB or 6GB (I don't think 6Gb will count because we'll still run XP OS on it).

We found the specified configuration in shops at 2200-2300 $ and we just want to know if is a smart acquisition or not. Thank you once again and sorry if I was confusing in my words.

I have this laptop and absolutely hate it! Terrible battery life, the touchpad is touchy and every time I type it sends emails before I'm done. It's impossible to have appropriate hand positioning without having the touch pad get in the way. Haven't figured how to shut it off yet. Also too heavy. Hoping my purchasing department will take it back. I've tried for several months to adapt to it and can't. Don't buy this model, you'll regret it I'm afraid!