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Laptops · Lenovo ThinkPad

Lenovo ThinkPad T510

7owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
1/0positive/negative since 2024
9 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for durability; criticized for performance.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 9 yearsStill going
I frickin' love my 2010 ThinkPad T510. It was my workhorse for about eight years, until I got a desktop PC to use as a daily driver. The ThinkPad is still a secondary machine, and it runs NetBSD now.
Doesn’t like itOwned 2.5 years
Hmmm I bought a T400? And it lasted for 8ish years IIRC. Due to my stupidity I killed it ( I forgot how, it was probably so stupid that I had to erase it from my memory). I bought a refub T510 (2-3 years ago IIRC), there's a dead pixel near the middle of the screen and the headphone jack is going out. There is some flex at the speaker area and cd area, and the power adapter gets hot often (it might be the linux distro drawing too much power for some reason). I think the quality went down hill...
Likes it
> I've never kept any laptop as long as I've kept the M1. I still have a running Thinkpad R60 from 2007, a running Thinkpad T510 from 2012, and a modified running Thinkpad X61 (which I re-built as an X62 using the kit from 51nb in 2017 with a i7-5600U processor, 32 GB of RAM and a new display) in regular use. The latter required new batteries every 2 years, but was my main machine until 2 weeks ago when I replaced it with a ThinkCentre. During their time as my main machine, each of these laptops was actively used around 100 hours per week, and was often running for weeks without shutdown or reboot. The only thing that every broke was the display of the R60 which started to show several green vertical bars after 6 years, but replacement was easy.
Neutral
Ok, well final story is, i rummaged around and found some wired keyboards and mice. It was a little frustrating, but i finally found a pair that seemed to function. I'm still not sure what the point of 3 mouse buttons is; it seems like right and left click do the same thing(that is with the mouse i was able to actually get working - maybe RISC OS doesn't like any of my mice). Also the [FN]+Q,W,E,arrows trick didn't work on my keyboard that actually had a Function key. I guess i could have rummaged more(and maybe i will), but my hardware generally works fine with the linux distros I have used(mostly MX). It seems like some more work could be done here. Also, my wifi dongle seems to be recognized but incorrectly as a usb-ethernet interface, so i have an IP, but no internet, and i can't find a way to change that. riscosopen.org says sign-ups are disabled i need to email the webmaster; maybe i will; i am interested in trying out RISC OS, but it doesn't give me much confidence with my experience so far. ...it looks like MX still publishes a 32bit version, so i guess i can try and run that on my old Model 2 B+? ...but i bet it's going to have the same problem with no web-browser. So i guess all my 32bit stuff is bricks now? on a side note, i noticed some degradation in the desktop experience with the latest version of MX on my old laptop(it is a Thinkpad T510 with an intel i5). It is still functional, but i can feel the walls closing in.
Likes it
Agree that the Trackpad is a POS. Another thing to note: the wireless card is an Intel 7260, which does not play well under Linux (the drivers are really buggy and it drops the connection several times an hour if you are connected to a multi-access point network). The keyboard is not as good as the older ThinkPads (I love my T510), but it's still pretty good for a laptop. The battery life is at least 5 hours of practical use for me.
Doesn’t like it
I'd normally recommend a ThinkPad, but they've been pretty disappointing lately. Two very recent experiences: T410s: * sound doesn't work in latest Ubuntu, need a kernel update for a new PCI ID. * battery charge percentage goes from 0-10%, where 10% is "full". Apparently the embedded controller decided to change which units it reports current in. T510: * black screen when booting Fedora or Ubuntu installers. Caused by lack of drivers for the embedded DisplayPort connection to the LCD panel. * display backlight brightness controls don't work * suspend doesn't work, because it has a USB3 controller which fails to suspend, because the upstream kernel doesn't have any suspend/resume support for USB3 controllers yet. Sigh.
Likes it
I just bought a ThinkPad T510. What caused me to convert was the advertised EIGHT HOUR battery life. Yes, it's true. Under moderate load you can expect to get maybe six or seven; under heavy load maybe four. But that's not bad. Better than many netbooks and this is a full-sized laptop.