Any alternative laptop to X220?

Hi everyone, after having had two of my orders canceled by Lenovo UK and waiting a month, and now that I see people's feeback on the reliability of this laptop (multiple DOA reported with even one who had his motherboard changed and again it died, screen edge bleeding, FAN running continuously, HD dead after a few days etc etc) I am seriously to give un on Lenovo and go to another brand. The problem is I only had IBM/Lenvo laptops in the past and not familiar with any other brand. I had a look at Sony VAIO SB, but the build does not look as solid as Lenovo X200 series and there is speculation on New Z coming in September which is going to be a major in the Z series.

Anyone can provide a real altervative to X220 with a decent support?

 

forgot to mention, price is not a concern..I don't mind to pay the price for the right quality.

 

Sure there have been complaints about the X220. There are always problems when any new design goes into mass production. But you only hear about the tiny minority who have been unlucky. The rest are too busy using their new notebooks to come here and say how happy they are.
Before you consider another manufacturer, go and look at their support sites and you will see at least as many complaints.

 

I agree with Sally4, I for one LOVE the x220.
The thing to remember about these new release posts, people are much more likely to post when they are unhappy with something. Also discount the posts where people are complaining about heat and noise during game playing, I would say, because most gaming laptops have the same issues.

My ONLY issue is minor edge light bleed when during the boot post screen. Can't see it anywhere else. and the screen being so awesome it doesn't bother me one bit. No fan noise at all.

noise heat build every other aspect is 100% fine.

I love it. I may marry it.

 

there is more than a few unhappy... it seems there is a serious problem with this laptop hardware build so actually I may have been lucky to escape.

My own Lenovo is a X200s that I bought end of 2008 and it worked great for almost two years...then it was just shutting itself randomly, I did change everything HD, FAN, the thermal grease, and now it still shuts down randomly.

X220 has been out for about a month and people are starting to complain about the quality, So I guess give it a few months down the road and you will see many more posts about the build quality...

 

again I have the X220 and love it, actually its replaceing BOTH my MBA's and my MBP 13" with it.

people with problems tend to complainandwhine more. itsthe nature ofthe forums. dont let one bad build deter you.

not going THAT far, my husband may disapprove

 

agreed, however the reported issues with the hardware are reinforcing my opinion that the Thinkpad build quality has changed..but after my own experience with X200s which is randomly shutting with no warning after two years, the feedback of those people how have hardware related issues , I think I was too much in love with Thinkpad and blind to consider others candidates..

the new Sony Z seems promising, it is a shame that it is realy overpriced..I think I will wait until September to see how it looks like and by then I guess we will see more issues with X220 reported

 

thanks the keyboard seems like Dell from a Video I just watched..I have the "cheap" feel of Dell laptops and this HP seems a bit similar...any better keyboard there?

 

I agree completely Sally. Every single one of the manufacturers forum here has threads regarding some issue or another with a laptop. The more a laptop sells the more common the complaints will be.

 

I don't recall that many hardware issues with the old IBM Thinkpads..that was all about build quality that made Thinkpad reputation. It does not seem to be the case anymore. Lenovo Thinkpad has become cheap and the quality is cheap too.

A good phrase that Lenovo new owners should think of:

“I do not prize the word "cheap." It is not a badge of honor. It is a symbol of despair. Cheap prices make for cheap goods; cheap goods make for cheap men; and cheap men make for a cheap country.”

 

While, I am really upset with some of the decisions made about the newer x220 and t420 model lines, it seems as soon as new model is launched by any maker (especially lenovo) people come out and complain about it more than when you are into the model a few months...

Either the initial quality is really bad... or people are pickier in the beginning, or both.

I have never had a problem with my laptops, and I would recommend you re order this laptop if you like lenovo.... I almost despise HP so I would not be someone to ask about their product line.

Also if you are worried about quality and can afford to pay a bit more, get the extended warranty.

I am sure there are a few people who are looking to the X1 to fill the gap, but I would stay away from it , solely based on the fact it has a glossy screen.

 

The backlight bleed on the IPS display isn't uncommon on IPS displays in general. I have a nice old desktop Samsung with an MVA panel that bleeds like someone who had just had a limb severed, and it's not noticeable in normal usage. My x220 bleeds a bit and it's not noticeable unless it's a black screen.

That's not a Lenovo issue, though, it's an LG issue. LG, who is also selling Apple bleeding IPS displays for the iPad2.

The fan on the x220 is pretty quiet, but high pitched. It's not bad if you're in a room with any noise at all. It can get noisy under load, but any full voltage ultraportable is going to get noisy under load.

It seems to me like the x220 is going through some typical "new product" pains that need to be straightened out. These pains are not related to build quality (which is great), but to component issues, largely; the backlight bleed doesn't mean the laptop isn't built as well.

Most of the reported issues I've seen on here are related to the screen, a couple DOA (which is normal).

Just get the in-home warranty in case you have any issues if you're that worried about the higher incidence of problems that seems to be happening.

 

Hah, I was strongly considering the previous-gen Z for the longest time before finally smacking myself in the face and talking myself out of ever buying a Sony laptop. Their support is abysmal (worse than Lenovo and especially Dell) and the quality of their products is good but with occasionally very questionable aspects.

And the Z... well, the previous generation Z anyway, it produces its own nasty set of concerns. Nevermind the intermittent reports of screen failures, cracked hinges and plastic cases, and failed RAID arrays and SSDs. Instead, I am even more concerned about the fact that TRIM is not supported by the Intel firmware when RAID implementations are used. And while the drive system reportedly has its own garbage collection mechanisms, they supposedly don't work all that well over the long run.

I am not going to spend nearly (or more than) $2K on a notebook which has such a serious design problem. Worse, Sony's support is consistently reported to be terrible--they even break or damage laptops during repairs and then blame the consumer!

The next-gen Z will have the same SSD RAID configs as standard (and non-optional). Fast, but problematic. No thank you.

 

New Lenovo slogan: We make the tools. You make them do. Work harder, customers! Tweak 'em, fix 'em, make 'em do as they should!

 

Youre rarely going to see a thread with someone reporting they love their new computer on a forum. The majority of posts are made by those seeking help or venting about hatred for something.

As for replacements there are a few. Check out dell business, hp business and apple.

 

I think the i7 throttling issue is more than just a "niggle" - would you buy an i7 if you knew whenever you wanted to do anything that pushed the gpu for more than 10 mins that your 3.2ghz i7 would become an 800mhz machine until you rebooted your laptop?

Petrov.

 

You're the only person I've seen note this exact issue.

 

Apple is NOT a replacement .... see sig

 

Have you checked out the Lenovo forums? Teff, have you got an i7 version?

Petrov.

 

Well I was considering the X220 too so am not bashing it. I am sure it is a really good laptop and i like it a lot too. The OP may just be tired of waiting. Having your ordered cancelled twice and waiting a month is not a pleasant experience at all, even if the laptop is really good.

So let's just suggest some alternatives. He/she can decide for himself/herself.

Toshiba Portege r830/r835

The portege is a really solid laptop and has won its share of good reviews and Editor's choice awards just like the X220.

The main differences:
-- X220 obviously has the better screen with the IPS though the portege display has a good display too. x220=12.5 inch matte ; portege= 13.3 inch glossy (gloss is not a sbad as some glossy laptops out there)
-- Portege weight is 3.2 lbs, X220 is 3.3 lbs ; both weight with 6 cell battery. It is 1 inch thick
-- Build quality : both should be pretty solid; portege is magnesium alloy
-- portege trackpad is good, no issues there and the keyboard is also supposed to be really good, though maybe not as good as the famed thinkpad keyboards which are still the best
-- portege also comes with dvd drive
-- battery life almost matches the X220
--for $1000, you can get the portege and buy separately a 128gb ssd to go with it. You can get the portege preconfigured with core i5-2410m, 4gb ram, webcam, 640 gb drive for 799 at the microsoft store- ships within 2 days. i dont know if you have microsoft store in uk though. It is also very easy to upgrade. You can pull of an ssd install in 5 mins and other parts are easily accessible too.

I asked a similar question over in the Dell forums too. I have searched extensively for the last month and the closest comparing laptop in performance, build, weight and battery life was the portege r835, so I will recommend that to you.

You may want to check the Sony SB or SA series.

Cheers

 

Nope, and nope, only here. A BIOS update will probably fix the issue, and I can see how it'd me off if I had it.

 

@ Teff I think the i7 issue is legitimate, I'd be pissed if I shelled out the extra 200 dollars or whatever for the top of the line processor only to find it has an issue. As much as I hate Apple that's the one thing they do right that I wish other companies did better; it works out of the box mostly issue free.

I don't think the Toshiba Portege can be called good value. At 799 + tax, compared to the X220 I ordered for 776.79+ tax, you get a bigger hard drive (but really, hard drives are cheap as dirt this should not matter), glossy screen, worse keyboard, no trackpoint, 6 cell instead of 9 cell battery. I don't know about the r830 but I saw a r700 in Best Buy and the chassis is so weak I could press the panels into the components by squeezing the case. Definitely something I'd be terribly frightened to pull out of my bag. The metal casing doesn't help, my friend's r500 looks really beat up and scratched, just from regular usage.

 

For those who like apple or those who want that style and feel it is. For me they completely lost any interest I had in them a loooooong time ago. But for the threads sake they are an option.

 

The R700 is the last gen portege. The r835 fixes all of last years problems while maintaining all the things that were good about it. There is definitely no horrible flex of the sort you are mentioning even while lifted by the corner with one hand.

I don't know where you are looking, but in the lenovo site, the X220 with same configuration as the portege and six cell battery comes to 900 USD - and that's INCLUDING the visa card holders discount, current free upgrade to 4gb ram and 320gb hdd and an additional 5% off coupon. 800 bucks is the price of the core i3 processor.

I am not saying the portege pwns the X220. I really liked the X220 too and I would have gone with it if I din't decide to go for the free xbox offer. But as far as ALTERNATIVES to the X220 are concerned, the Portege is the closest thing you can get.

 

Sigh.

If you go by the negative reports here and elsewhere, there have been major reliability problems with every single ThinkPad design for the better part of the last decade. Same for Dell, Apple, Sony, etc.

If you don't believe me, try this fun little experiment:

1) Go to your favorite search engine.

2) Search for "<manufacturer> laptop" "low quality" where <manufacturer> is the name of a major laptop vendor.

Examples: Apple, Sony, Dell.

So's the X220.

From the tabook:

 

There are plenty of ultraportables out there, but the X220 is far and away the best for me due to the keyboard/trackpoint combo. Sure, HP, Toshiba, and Dell have similar options, but the other companies lack the Thinkpad execution. Either the trackpoint sucks or there's only two mouse buttons (no middle). Of course the X220 will have the better keyboard. With the IPS option, the X220 has the best keyboard and screen (two major user interaction points) making it a joy to use.

 

I've got an R700 and it feels very solid. My biggest issues are the flat-topped shiny keys and a fan which gets very noisy when under load (but the X220 seems to be no saint in that respect either).

John

 

Thanks for the advice. There is one review on youtube of r835 who says that the build is not what Toshiba pretends and it may have heating problems down the road.. other than the new sony S looks great too...

 

Yes, Sony laptops always look great. They spend a lot of their time and a lot of your money on the appearance.

 

All beauty and no brains?

 

While I agree that we should not even have this throttling issue at all, I feel your claim is an exaggeration. I ran 3dmark06 twice in a row followed by over an hour playing games such as Portal and SC2. During the entire time I was monitoring my CPU temp, load and watching for throttling with various apps. My i7's temp peaked at 84c and never throttled. The clock stayed above 3 Ghz for most of the period.

I'm pretty sure if I used enough synthetic stress tools I could trigger throttling and yes this should not happen, but the x220 in most cases doesn't show the throttling problem in most real world situations. Also I am not sure if the issue even has to do with temps or hardware, based on what I have seen and what I have read, it seems like it may even be a software triggered problem.

Regardless, I will be contacting lenovo to get some answers for this issue.

 

Then it would seem you've not spent much time with them.

 

I have had serveral IBM laptops since 1998, including T61, T43, Z60m, X200s and more thta I don't recall from my work ( I work in IT) and never ever had any hardware failure EXCEPT with X200s which has got the Lenovo stick on it.

 

Fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Yep I think the fallacy is also from the other side, people who have bought an X220 and whatever you tell them they say it is amazing! the Screen Bleeding, not an issue. The resolution, they actually prefer the lower resolution to higer resolution, I7 running at 800MhZ, untrue, the multiple DOA and hardware failures, that is fallacy. yeh!

 

I think there's this myth among those who do not know the brand well that older ThinkPads were somehow bulletproof and never had any issues. If you knew the brand well, you'd know that IBM produced its share of clunkers. My X220i is supposed to be here later today(crosses fingers) and I expect it to be every bit as good as my older IBM ThinkPads. This is of course at 1/3 the price I paid years ago. I'd call that fairly impressive.

 

• T43: ran hot, fan sounded like a hairdryer, HDD whitelists caused many headaches
• Z60m: discolored lids on titanium models, broken plastics
• T61: nvidia GPU issues, SATA locked to 1.5 Gb/s, flexible keyboards
• X200s: poor display quality, authentec fingerprint reader unreliable

yeah, none of those had any issues at all.

the reason why you hear more about issues today is because of social media.   from 1992 until 2004, the best thinkpad owners had were BBSes, mailing lists, and IRC.   in 2004 notebookreview.com and thinkpads.com finally produced actual forums where thinkpad owners could discuss this stuff.   lenovo bought the brand in 2005.   in that time social networking tools have given users the ability to post their complaints worldwide and in a matter of minutes.   couple that with the fact that happy users rarely post and you have a formula for why what you read online is mostly complaints.

you can choose to see the flaws in everything or you can choose to see the bigger picture.   since you've never actually seen or used an X220 in person, i would first look for flaws in your approach.

 

See below. Add to that T4x gpu solder cracking, T60p and X61 with actual heat issues. The screen bleeding in the X220 is real, albeit rather minor from my pov since it's only visible on black screens in dark screens. i7 throttling is the most serious issue so far. The most vehemently complained about issues can be fixed in BIOS updates (fan speed and i7 throttling). I'll take software issues over hardware any day, and in a matter of days within being reported they've both been escalated to engineering. We've had what, one DOA and one or two screen failures? And finally your desire for higher resolution has nothing to do with the product's quality.

 

I was specifically referring to hardware failures, none of the above applies to that..when X200s started shutting itself abruptley I was almost shocked that an IBM/Lenovo thinkpad could do that after two years...Then I was happy to have my noisy T43 which as robust as a real Thinkpad..Z60m broken plastic?? Mine you can throw it from the 3rd floor and it will survive...the only reason I changed was it was too heavy.l

• 
  
  agreed however if you see everyday someone posting a DOA and/or hardware failures, I guess you would change your mind wasting 1300£ to a broken laptop and end up getting choppy images when palying a movie because i7 is running at 800Mhz like people have reported
  
  
  Great so to know the brand well you should work in a laptop repair shop? I have been heavily using laptops and had no hardware issue with Thinkpads, at least they did not die in the middle of my work with no warning after 2years of use.
  
  
  
  “I do not prize the word "cheap." It is not a badge of honor. It is a symbol of despair. Cheap prices make for cheap goods; cheap goods make for cheap men; and cheap men make for a cheap country.”
  
  William McKinley quotes

 

First of all calm down and learn how to edit your post. You'd rather post a pithy comment than respond to what I have to say? The problem with your methodology is that you presume the people here represent a wide swath of the ThinkPad buying population. They do not. They are anal retentive about their ThinkPads and are much more likely to complain at the slightest flaw, perceived or not. It's one of the real problems with forums like this. People come here and see a few bad posts and presume, particularly the uninitiated, that's how they all are. No product is perfect. Perfection at $1k seems kind of cheap.

 

You really do need to account for "luck" here. One of the things I have noticed in not only my purchases of laptops, but of reading the purchasing decisions of others on forums like this is that at the end of the day the laptop that you end up with (regardless of cost) is a matter of pure chance.

Sometimes you will luck out and land an excellent machine at a cost that is OK with you; sometimes, you will not - which is when how good the After-sales-Service and the warranty systems are tested. My personal experience has been that a ThinkPad warranty has been - in the long run - better than my experiences with Compaq, Sony, and Acer.

This is a fact that you will have to accept one way or another - you could choose to rationalize this any which way you want, but the crux of the matter remains this.

And, in the wider scheme of things, the folks represented here (and at other forums - including the Lenovo forums) as buyers/ users of ThinkPads is at best miniscule.

Apologies for perhaps coming across as being a tad rough - that was not and is not the intention.

 

Obviously you know Thinkpad very well, you are initiated, guru and you are calm, just a Lenovo super-model helping people to get an un-biased opinion on a cheap and perfect laptop. Thank you.

 

The new Samsung Series 9 900X3A is getting reasonable reviews. Mostly for style, weight, and battery life. Probably worth seeing up close before you purchase. Check the features carefully. It has limits.

 

As an aside, every single one of the machines that you referred to was produced by Lenovo (with the actual manufacturing being done by Foxconn, Wistron, or Quanta depending on the model.)

But yeah... I'm sure it's the sticker that made the difference...

 

Just think about it how come the prices have been divided by 3? and how about all those entry models which came out of Lenovo, N100, Ideapad and so on...so if what you say is true, I guess it took sometime to transfer the decision center and engineering to China... low cost and high quality just don't fit in the same package.

 

Sony Vaio SA

1900x600 screen. I'm watching carefully, since these issues with the x220 are really getting to me.

 

I think you mean 1600x900. The SA comes from a company with a track record of nice design, but the build quality won't be as good nor will the service/support.

 

CNET review is giving 2h40 battery of worst case scenario and no slice battery option unfortunately.

 

Why not get one on eBay?

 

A friend of mine just ordered an x220 and he loves it. I think its great as well. The only reason why I don't have one is that I can't justify buying another laptop when my current one runs fine.

If I was in the market for a thin and light notebook, I'd be deciding between the X220 and X1.