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Laptops · Lenovo ThinkPad

Lenovo ThinkPad T540p

8owners with an opinion
40%of verdicts positive
0/2positive/negative since 2024
7 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for battery.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 5 years
Could you recommend a thinkpad model you feel is built like a tank? I bought a used t540p 5 years ago and it's been the crappiest laptop I've ever used. Terrible display with about 15deg of visibility. Flimsy plastic parts that broke in multiple places during replacements. Display randomly got damaged while in my bag, keys constantly falling off, even after fully replacing the kb when keys just stopped functioning, worst trackpad ever, RAM just started failing. Honestly the framework is practically macbook-quality in comparison to a used thinkpad IME but maybe I'm looking at the wrong series or era?
Doesn’t like it
As much as I love the old thinkpads, the T540p was my last. The case being entirely plastic means it will eventually start warping, motherboard included, in short order turning your expensive device into a paper weight.
Neutral
Yeah, I replaced the battery on my t540p but it's still sub 1 hour life. Replaced hard drive and upgraded the ram so now it works pretty well as a desktop PC running win 10. It was running super slow for ages, fixed after I banished Google drive backup. Maybe a compatibility issue with newest Google software thrashing constantly on older OS / hardware.
Neutral
I have exactly one windows box in this house and I avoid turning it on but it is a requirement to operate a particular piece of hardware. It takes several minutes before it has completely booted, it runs Windows 7 on what is a perfectly fine machine for that OS. Highly frustrating. That's why you get articles like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 And many others besides. Windows can be such a cycle hog. Probably if I installed 64G of RAM and an SSD I could cut it down to something more decent, but I don't use that machine often enough to offset the expense (and never mind driver/installation media hassles, it isn't broken so don't fix it!). Other machines take on average about a minute or so but they are running Linux, running Windows on them would easily double that. My daily driver is a T540p (mostly to conserve power) and it works well enough. Not exactly a speed daemon in use but maxed out on RAM (16G), a 2.5 GHz i7 and a fast SSD it doesn't perform nearly as well as my 20 year old self would have expected it to. OS and browser will happily eat all of that, and I can't use swap because of the audio drop-outs that would cause. If there was a way to shoehorn in more memory I would take it.
Likes it
If you want something that runs linux well (I currently have Cent OS running on mine, and it comes pre-loaded with Ubuntu), I'd say System 76 is a pretty good choice. Their 15.6" version is pretty beefy ($1400 base), but even their 14" model looks good right now ($800 base). The model I use is a few years old, and is holding up really well. They have native drivers for pretty much everything, even the hardware switches are supported through the BIOS if I remember correctly, so when I loaded up other distros, nothing was a problem. Windows pretty much runs on everything, but my work computer is a Lenovo/ThinkPad T540P. It's base is $800, but the version I'm running is optioned out to about $1500-1800 I think (Core i7 (4 core), 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD). Great computer, I've had about 14 vm's running in VirtualBox running on it at once before memory started becoming a problem (again, with the optioned out specs). (also, I run Windows 7 Enterprise on this, so may be YMMV with Windows 10). both of those are superb, though I guess neither really competes build-quality wise with my 15" Macbook Pro Retina. I end up using that for almost anything that I don't need the GNU C/C++ toolchain for, which ends up being most stuff anyway.
Neutral
I just ordered a Thinkpad T540p for $649 (plus tax, no s/h) from the Lenovo site. "Web list price" is $1,413.00. I don't know how long the deal will last. Obviously, I have not tried to run linux on it, but I don't expect problems. Downsides: It is a heavier machine at 5.5lbs. Battery life is good but not great. The display is decent resolution but not great. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t540p... Make sure you pick the best deal. :-) Processor: 4th Generation Intel Core i5-4300M Processor( 2.60GHz 1600MHz 3MB) Operating system: Windows 7 Professional 64 Display: 15.6" FHD AntiGlare 1920x1080 Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4600 Memory: 8.0GB PC3-12800 DDR3L SDRAM 1600 MHz Hard Drive: 500GB 7200 rpm Optical Drive: Multi Recorder Network Card: Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 Bluetooth: Bluetooth Version 4.0 Warranty: Three year Pointing device: Clickpad Battery: 6 Cell Lithium-Cylindrical