16mb radeon 7000?

Hey I'm thinking about buying a thinkpad x32. It's a pretty dated laptop, but I think it is fast enough for me because I'm not going to use it for any cpu-intensive stuff.

I'm a little worried about the graphics card though, as it seems to be very old. It's obviously not for gaming, but what about the 2d performance? How does it compare to intergrated graphic chips from the same period (2005)? I'm replacing a broken laptop, celeron M 1.3Ghz with integrated graphics, and I want something at least as good.

 

I dunno about graphics, but make sure you have at least 1GB of RAM on this model. It's pretty slow with only 512MB doing regular MS Office type work.

 

How can it be slow doing regular MS Office work? I mean, I have done done MS-Office work on regular centrino laptops with integrated graphics and 512mb and didn't find it slow. Is there anything that would make this laptop slower?

 

It would be slow doing MS Office work IF you run it on vista and music playing and multitasking....
There was a time not too long ago when our computers had only 256Mb RAM and Office wroked damn fine back then.

 

What exactly are you going to be doing. If it is just surfing the internet and and school papers or things like that it will be fine

 

This is definitely not a machine that you want to run Vista and Office 2007 on it. It will also be too slow to play HD video. But I think if you install Windows XP and MS Office 2003 (or maybe MS Office XP) and get 1GB RAM, the machine will be fast enough for regular usage (office, Acrobat, internet surfing, etc). 2D display isn't a problem for the Radeon 7000, especially the X series(except the tablet version) have a low resolution at 1024x768.

 

Architecture for 2D engines hasn't changed much over the years, just clockrates a bit. I doubt you'll ever meet the limitations of that thing doing 'normal' stuff.

 

I have seen this laptop in use with 512MB, and it is painfully slow if you are running more than say 2 MS Office apps (Excel and Outlook and Word). Once I upgraded it with another 512 module, it seemed to improve greatly. I'm not saying don't get the laptop, i'm just telling you to buy an additional mem module. The additional mem seemed to improve startup and shutdown speeds. Quite possibly because of the Lenovo soft holding things up.

 

It's a music computer

The purpose of the laptop is to play backing tracks for my band when we're playing live. And when we are in the studio it's supposed to work as a synth hosting a single vsti at the time. I'm using Cubase SX3.

Normally you want a very fast computer for music production, but these two task require very little cpu power. The 1.3Gz celeron M was way faster than necessary.

But I'm worried about your comments, tin. Can't I disable the lenovo soft? The reason I want a thinkpad is the built quality, trackpoint and design. I hate all that thinkpad sofware that comes with is. I like my computer clean.

Even though I don't need a fast computer I need a very reliable computer that runs smooth and doesn't make my music skip and stutter on stage. Come to think of it, the old laptop did make the music skip a few times, but that couldn't be because of lack of cpu-power since the cpu meter in cubase showed only a few percent.

 

Yes, you can take off the Lenovo soft, at least Access Connections, which would help with startup times. I would leave Hotkeys, Power Mngr, trackpoint/ultranav, presentation director, and active protection system on it though. The rest is just junk, like message center, etc.

I'm not sure about teh Cubase part, so maybe someone else could elaborate on that for ya.