Lenovo Thinkpad T460s First Impressions

I recently switched laptops from the T440s to the T460s. I’ve long been a fan of the Thinkpads, both during the IBM period and the Lenovo reign of late. The T440s was a bit of a mistake in my opinion. Sure it performed as you’d expect, but the mouse was a huge pile of dung, and the keyboard wasn’t nice either. My favorite is still the T410s, which had the non-chiclet keyboard, similar or same as the old IBM Thinkpads had. I had a bunch of issues with the T440s over its 2 year and some odd month lifespan. The SSD broke early on and had to be replaced. I broke the keyboard (no fault of Lenovo, but still), and one USB port is unusable (not sure why). Battery life is still good after two years of business use, and it has no technical faults other than the ones I listed. It’ll still serve as my secondary machine, and probably do so for quite some years.

I got the T460s hot off the press, just a week after release, or so. I opted for the 20F9-0043MS model which has the full-HD matte screen, 4 + 4GB of RAM (which i expanded to 20GB by switching out the sole 4GB stick for a 16GB one), Core i7-6600U processor, and so on.

Hardware

First, let’s look at the hardware. We have output from CPU-Z first, showing the features of the CPU:

Then GPU-Z, showing the integrated Intel HD Graphics 520:

 

Then we move on to the SSD, which appears to be an M.2 type drive and not your standard 2.5″ SSD. I’ll get an internal picture later for you, but opening the bottom of the machine (which is much easier than in the T440s which had icky plastic tabs that were too easy to break off), shows you all the user replaceable parts, which are very easily accessible! The SSD is manufactured by Samsung, however the model seems to be something sold to OEMs (the catchy MZNLN256HCHP). Some forums speculate that it is similar to the 850 (EVO?) model, but nothing certain.

Here’s some output from SSD-Z:

 

If you want to compare performance (I’m not saying Crystal Diskmark is the ultimate tool, and these are not official testing conditions, but they are .. comprable I would wager) to some select SSD:s, here’s my Intel 910’s (PCI-E card) results, and here are the Samsung 840 Pro results, the T440s results and finally the venerable T410s’ results. All results with 64-bit CrystalDiskMark version 5.1.2, default settings.

Mobile Connectivity

There’s a 4G/LTE card in this model, which is a Sierra Wireless EM7455 Qualcomm Snapdragon X7 LTE-A WWAN Modem. The fun part was taking out the SIM-caddy, which was surprisingly already occupied! There was a “Lenovo Connect” SIM-card inside. Apparently, Lenovo has partnered up with a number of carriers worldwide (115 countries according to Lenovo). But since those cost extra, and I already have such connectivity in the countries I need to travel to, I took the SIM out. You might want to have a look at it, but it looks like most packages have data caps, which I discard out of principle. The prices don’t look.. bad, I suppose. Here’s the link http://shop.lenovo.com/fi/fi/lenovoconnect/index.html

As for the 4G performance, I tested it in Lapland, which has superb 4G connectivity (probably due to the low amount of subscribers per cell), it works fine without additional software in Windows 10. Speedtest gave me the following results (DNA is the carrier).

WiFi card is an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260, and the gigabit NIC is an Intel I219-LM. Both are bog-standard intel quality and have worked fine.

There is one thing that annoyed the piss out of me. Clicking the Notifications icon in the systray…

You get the otherwise handy Action Center / Notification bar thing, where you can turn off things like bluetooth, wireless, and yes, even cellular (though it is not showing here right now). Well, what happens if you turn off cellular here, and you want it back? Naturally, instinct tells you to open the action center thing again and re-enable it! But, what if it doesn’t show up (like it did for me)? What then? Well the next step is to go to Network Connections, look at the adapters and enabl… oh but wait it’s already enabled. But still it’s off, and you can’t connect? Crap!

So after an unreasonable amount of googling, I found some people with similar issues. Apparently you can’t enable it anywhere in Windows proper (if you can, please tell me in the comments). No amount of enabling and disabling the card in network connections or device manager brings it back, or going to airplane mode or.. whatever. Instead what you need to do is sign out, and in the login screen, click the connectivity icon (the wireless symbol). From there, you can re-enable the radio of the WWAN card. Horse shit I say!

Clean install of Windows 10

I don’t care for manufacture-bloated OS’s, so I did a clean re-install of Windows 10 Enterprise, build 1511. Because I’m a dummy, I didn’t initially realize my mistake and attempted to install from my Easy2Boot USB drive. And that works too, if you’ve read the instructions and understand what you are doing… Here’s what I did wrong, so you don’t have to do the same things:

1. Easy2Boot works fine, but you have to understand that if the install image is of UEFI type (which the windows image is), you can’t just copy the image to the Windows directory like other images
2. You have to follow these instructions and make the Windows install image into an imgPTN image, and then try again.. Follow these instructions: http://www.easy2boot.com/add-payload-files/adding-uefi-images/
3. Or, alternatively, get a suitably sized USB stick (4GB should do, 8GB will most definitely do), and use the Windows Media Creation tool (only for home and pro versions), or use Rufus but select the “GPT partition scheme for UEFI” option under ‘Partition Scheme and Target System Type’, or it won’t boot correctly. Or use the Windows 7-era tool (step 12 onwards) https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ptsblog/2015/08/19/how-to-create-a-bootable-usb-stick-or-a-bootable-dvd-for-windows-10/
4. In my case, it did boot, but failed to find suitable devices to install to, or was lacking other drivers
5. And no, adding SATA or other disk-related drivers during install did nothing to fix this – It’s an UEFI issue
6. Changing BIOS settings between UEFI only, Legacy only, and Legacy first (and the CSM setting) also didn’t help in this case

After learning about UEFI stuff, installation was straightforward. The only Lenovo tool I like to install is the excellent Lenovo System Update, which keeps track of correct drivers and helper software and makes sure it is up to date. Also updates your BIOS, which is pretty useful. As of this date, BIOS 1.08 (or.. UEFI, I guess)

There’s more to write, but so far, I’m very pleased with the T460s. Much more than the 440s. The hardware is easily accessible, it’s performant and the mouse is much improved. To quote Wil Wheaton: “Later, nerds.”