ThinkPad W541 - essentially a W540 with the few differences?

[br0adband]

I have a chance to get a W541 tomorrow (i7-4810QM, 8GB but not sure if it's one stick or two, 250GB hard drive which is probably not the factory storage device and not really a concern, original 170 watt power adapter, etc, good condition overall) and was doing research into the model and learned it's basically a W540 with the altered Trackpad to get the 3 buttons back and not much else is different.

So, the question is this: is it safe for me to presume that most any thread discussing the W540 is relevant to the W541? I did a search for topic titles with W541 and there's only a small number while the W540 obviously got the lion's share of content and the W541 was a minor upgrade to address the Trackpad buttons people wanted returned.

Thanks for any input, really hoping this machine turns out to be a good purchase and for the $200 asking price - don't ask, the guy just decided to go Apple and get a MacBook Pro, I have no idea why - so I fully intend to get this W541 if he shows up to sell it.

[RealBlackStuff]

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Th ... 450.0.html

[TankPad]

A W541 is a steal at that price, given the processor etc. I'd snap it up!

[br0adband]

One last thing: can anyone that might have owned or does own a relatively stock W541 tell me what the 256GB SSD inside it is? Standard 2.5" form factor I'm guessing because of the m.2 slot I might make use of later, but I wanted to know if anyone knows precisely what SSD it is, what brand, model number, etc? I can't find that info anywhere in the searching I've done and since the laptop is roughly ~3 years old (or less since they came out in what, 1st quarter 2015) I have to wonder about the wear on the one in this laptop.

The owner got called out of town so he may not be back till Thursday, I asked him the same question and some others for more specific details but I'd really love to know which brand/model of SSD Lenovo chose to put in the W541 at the factory. I got the actual FRU from the current owner which is 20EF000LUS so w00t for the 2880x1620 IPS display panel, it doesn't have the Pantone Colorimeter however, never used a properly calibrated display so it'd be interesting to see things "correctly" for a change, might try and find someone in my area to help me do that.

Thanks for any info...

[TankPad]

I've seen a couple of them with Intel SSD's in them, though they weren't brand new at the time so I can't be sure they were original drives. The machine does have an m.2 slot though, that'll take an SSD, even though Lenovo don't officially say so.

[br0adband]

So I got the W541, not a mark on it at all, practically mint condition really. Was curious about the battery of course and just checked: Power Manager shows it's got basically 99.9% capacity, and BatteryBar backs that up so, awesome there. It's still got 4+ months left on the warranty, everything is working great. Just made the USB recovery stick but I'll get the DVDs made as well here in a bit at some point when I figure out how to resolve that "one recovery media" thing issue.

It's got what's labeled as an Opal SSD in it but the CrystalDiskInfo shows it as a Samsung drive which I knew when I pulled it to check the label on it. Pretty low usage in terms of read/write wear (just under 3TB for both), and a fairly high number of powered on hours and power on counts so I'm guessing it was literally plugged in somewhere for ~101 days and it just kept going to sleep mode, works for me.

So far so good, quite pleased with the performance.

For $250, I think I got a fantastically good deal. Wish it had 16GB of RAM because the single stick of 8 cuts the memory bandwidth in half, literally, and for some stuff I'll be doing that's gonna hurt performance. Currently looking for good prices on 4x8GB to max it out but again so far so good. Images might appear a bit blurry 'cause I have it set for 1920x1080 operation; the 2880x1620 native resolution is just going to take some time to get used to with Windows 7 and the rather poor OS scaling but I won't ever use 8/8.1 and absolutely never will I use Windows 10.

/me is a happy camper.