Anyone using an X300/301 for Windows programming?

I was just curious if anyone is using an X300 or X301 for anything more than typical office apps. Anyone doing any Visual Studio development? How about virtualization? Can these things handle any of that at all?

 

if you want to run virtual machines, any laptop with a good CPU and loads of RAM will do. dual hard drives can be a plus as well.

 

Yeah, I know what *will* work. The X301 is just a sexy machine, and I was wondering just how capable it is. Hoping for some field experience from someone.

 

Nobody is doing any Windows programming on one of these things?

 

Visual Studio seems to run fine here.

 

Excellent. You running VS2008, by chance? By "fine", do you mean it doesn't seem sluggish at all?

Do you happen to run any virtual machines as well?

 

I've done microsoft programming since Windows V3.1 however am in hospital since 4 of july. I only have experience on higher end systems.

Renee

 

Sorry to hear that, Renee. Hope you get out soon.

 

Hey Rich,

Hope me post will help you.

I am not using an X300/301 but rather X61s along with a 320gb 7200RPM drive and 4Gb RAM (though Vista only uses 3gb)

I am running VMWare virtual machine inside with another Vista inside. I have Apache server running there. On my machine (not VM) i have SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, Photoshop, Outlook 2007 and many times all are working together. Plus add this: I am using an external 24" monitor driving 1900x1200 (which squeezes the computer even more). Plus still using the X61s screen so getting 1900x1200 + 1024x768.

Also, at the same time I have bluetooth working with 3 devices concurrently. Plus 2 Wireless devices working at the same time one in the VM other the interal WIFI. Also have 6 USB peripherals connected to the computer.

I don't do heavy programming or compiling stuff, but I do work with Visual Studio on light projects and have SQL Server and IIS all running at the same time.

I assume the 7200 RPM Seagate drive momentus drive plus the 4gb makes a difference. I assume the X301 with the 1.4 CPU and SSD will be just as good and probably better.

I am very content with my machine's performance, though I am going to upgrade to X200s soon.

Hope this helps.

 

The differences between 08 and 05 won't be noticed in performance. There isn't a lot changed, unless you get hardcore into .net

 

That's pretty impressive, ComputerMinder. I appreciate the input.

When you say you are "very content" with the performance, do you mean that it excels at running all that stuff concurrently, or that it does struggle sometimes, but you expect that out of this particular machine with the components is has? In other words, do you think your experience would be markedly better (from a performance standpoint) on, say, a T400 or T500 with a Core 2 Duo T9400 processor?

 

I notice it running sluggish at all even though most of the time all the apps are working concurrently. If there's any thing slowing down the machine that I notice is still the HD, even though I have the Seagate newest 320Gb 7200RPM drive. I still sometimes notice Vista struggling with the HD, it may happen if I run two virtual machines at the same time. Like XP and Ubuntu.

I am sure I would see better performance with a T9400, particulately during processor intensive tasks like archiving several gigs. I am going to buy an X200s which I am sure will more than be enough for my uses. Even though the X301 is a bit slower than the X200s, I assume the SSD HD that the X301 comes with would offset any performance difference.

 

Yeah, it's recommended that VM's be run from a separate spindle from the OS when possible to avoid a lot of that HDD contention. That's been another concern of mine about the X301, but I was kind of hoping that using an SSD would lessen the impact of a single drive solution.

From the benchmarks I've seen, it looks like the SSD makes up a lot of the ground lost by using a less powerful CPU. Makes me consider buying a machine with a more capable CPU and dropping an SSD in it.

 

Anyone else ever use an X301 or X300 for Visual Studio development?