How are you liking your Thinkpad X300?

hi, how are you liking your thinkpad X300?

any issue? with vista?

did the computer sleep and wake seamlessly?
how long did it take to sleep or wake?
how long did it take to boot?

is the 1.2ghz processor slow?

is the screen nice?
is it bright enough when running on battery?
is the screen grainy? does it give you headache?

thanks.

 

Hi wobble

I can't say anything about the X300 as I don't own one but the Lenovos are beautiful machines and are very well made. Infact I liken them to the Jaguars of laptops. Are you wanting to buy one? I have two Lenovos and could not be happier with them.

BTW you did a great job in the discussion on the Apple corosion.

Bek

 

thanks bek,

yes, i was interested in one

 

I own a X300 and I love it! Vista boots quicker than on my t61p/2.4Ghz and shutdown/sleep/waking up works flawless. I just installed Windows 7 beta 7000 and my machine boots in ~30 seconds thanks to the fast SSD.

The 1.2Ghz CPU might seems slow on paper but in real life it feels much more responsive compared to my t61p for what I use it for (office/web).

The screen is bright and the resolution is perfect on the 13.3 inch display but I have problems with back light bleeding (most seen with black screen for example splashscreen in bios) but nothing I would call a dealbreaker for me anyway. I would not call the screen grainy and no problems with headache either.

 

did the computer sleep and wake seamlessly? Yes
how long did it take to sleep or wake? 3 seconds
how long did it take to boot? 31seconds with clean windows 7 installed

is the 1.2ghz processor slow? NO, IT'S VERY FAST, but not for video game

is the screen nice? Yes, I don't see why the screen is not good
is it bright enough when running on battery? it's up to you..you can choose
is the screen grainy? does it give you headache? a little bit, because the characters are little small


Con; the fan is noise

 

Most of the performance gains are related to the SSD. Very few applications are bound by the CPU for any lenght of time, but many things depend on a hard drive locating and loading data; this is where a quality SSD kills a hard drive and vastly improves perceived performance.

The screen on the x300 should be very bright as it is a 300nit LED backlit panel. Backlight bleeding is unfortunately somewhat common with LED displays.

ThinkPads in general wake and sleep seamlessly (maybe a momentary screen flicker, but nothing else). Boot time is dependent on your chosen disk drive and automatically starting software. On my Tablet with a 5400RPM drive, and a fair amount of software (some Lenovo, some tablet related) it takes a fair bit of time (about 1 minute to login, and another couple minutes to populate Vista's caches before it really settles down and feels fast). On the x300 with an SSD it should load much faster (<40 seconds), and if you remove some of the ThinkVantage tools it should be responsive almost instantly.

 

wow, that is good news indeed!

your feedback is certainly different from what i researched on the web.

i read the computer is quick on xp but is slow on vista.
i read that the screen would dim very much on battery power.

thanks for the reply

 

of couse, because XP is out-date of OS.

Will you expect the current TV is using less energy than 80's one?

Those people always complain the VISTA is crap , similar as the first lanuch of XP, they complained xp is like a crap than windows 98

 

yes, but they also say that it is "underpowered" for vista.

i played around with my friend's vista notebook. and i like it better than XP. although the software support is not as good, even now, it still not that good. but for this laptop, i plan to only do typing and internet browsing, and things along those line. so app support is not really that important, the security and maintenance software i last check is starting to make vista compatible version.

 

Vista is fine if you are comfortable with tweaking some things and have 2gigs of ram. Out of the box though it can be pretty annoying for a lot of users.

 

Vista seems annoying out of the box to some users because of pre-installed bloatware...

It's a great OS, and it does use a little more memory, but quite the chunk of it is virtual. Plus it handles memory much better than XP.

 

yeah i think vista is fine as long as it can do the sleep and wake things fine.

although i just remember another huge thing.

i heard the thinkpad x300 only has 2 speed mode for the fan. 2000rpm and once it gets hot it will hit 5000rpm and will not come down again. is this true? two mode speed is liveable. but if once it hit 5000rpm and it wont go down again, then that is a huge flaw, imo. does it hit the 5000rpm often? what kind of task load will that take?

 

5k rpm!?! Are you sure? That is ridiculously fast...

 

It's good for my purposes

Network transfers are slower than XP laptop.
UAC is annoying (but a good step by MS, only implemented poorly)
Breadcrumb navigation is not a patch on traditional explorer navigation

Yes.
10s, and 15s (note that I have done regediting to streamline this).
~40s to boot in Vista.

No.

No.
No.
Yes, the screen is grainy. No, it doesn't give me a headache.

Compared the screen side by side with a 13.3" Macbook (new Al unibody) the other day. The difference was quite literally night and day. The brightness, contrast and richness of the Macbook made the X300's screen look like I was peering into a dim, old phosphor-green 8" CRT that was about to die. Of course, the Macbook's glossy screen will probably suffer when brought into outdoor light, but for all practical purposes, the backlight on the x300 is not strong enough for outdoor use anyway, negating a lot of the benefit of having a matte display.

You are somewhat correct. There are 7 speed settings in BIOS for the fan. Unfortunately, the fan is set up to ramp from 2000 rpm (1) directly to 5900 rpm (3). I haven't had the fan ramp up any higher than this. The intermediate speed is 5000 rpm (2), which is still too loud for quiet computing. The fan will begin to ramp up under normal loading and normal/office room temperature, and the hysteresis behaviour makes it stay up for an extended period even after temperatures have come down.

From what I have seen on the forums, lenovo seems unsympathetic/apathetic about the fan issue.

I used a 3rd party program called TPFanControl to override the fan behaviour and run it between 0 and 1 for most of the temperature range and to go to 2 if the CPU exceeds 65C. So far, it has never needed to go above 1 even under moderate load.

In closing, the X300 is a marvel of design but an imperfect machine with several flaws that have not been discussed much in reviews.

 

I've had mine for close to a year now, and I really like it.

I haven't had any hardware or software issues at all (running 32-bit business vista). The X300 has plenty of power to run vista. My only issue is I wish an option for 64-bit vista had been available when I bought the machine -- I've added anothe 2Gb of Ram, but can only address 3Gb.

I don't use sleep much, but mine takes, I'd say, less than 5 secs to sleep or wake. However, for some reason the laptop seems to lose quite a bit of power while hibernating and it drains the battery even overnight or after a day. Not sure if this is how it should be, but I haven't bothered to try and figure it out.

My boot time is around 1:30 secs with business vista and a few thinkvantage + antivirus startup programs.

Absolutely not. I think people somehow get the wrong idea looking at the frequency. In comparison with 2.16 Ghz Core duo, the X300 takes about twice as long to do floating point operations. I use the X300 quite a bit for MATLAB. In my opinion, the only place where the X300 lacks some power is in the graphics department, as you'd expect from the integrated graphics.

I like mine just fine, and have zero complaints about it. Maybe some other screens are a lot worse...I don't know

I think so (and I find it quite useable outdoors too). By default, the bios is set to make the maximum brightness on battery less than the maximum brightness on ac. You can change this in the bios, but running off the battery at max ac brightness significantly reduces the battery life (to maybe 2 hrs on high peformance for the 6-cell battery, instead of maybe 3 and half hours with the default max battery brightness. (Overall, I'd say the X300 has good battery life, but it's not really outstanding unless you do lower the screen brightness a lot to where it is too dim.)

I see some grainyness against a completely white background, but it's not something I notice at all in normal use.

Only when I hit myself over the head with it.

On the fan, I see the same things as what others report --- the rpm kicks up rapidly from 2000 to over 5000, and it's often over 5000 rpm under normal use; however, when my fan runs at that level it blows air but makes very little noise.

Anyway, maybe I'm fortunate in the particular unit I received --- I don't know --- but,in my opinion, the X300 is a really capable stand alone ultraportable machine with plenty of power and great connectivity (wifi, wwan, ethernet).

 

I've spoken to lenovo sales and tech support. They both tell me that they don't support/offer x64 on the X300. I imagine it is technically possible, but finding drivers may be an issue. Unless you're running 64 bit apps though (I have 64 bit Matlab on the desktop and 32 bit on the X300), the maximum addressible physical ram for a 32-bit program is only 2 GB anyway, so it's not a dealbreaker. And if you're running anything that needs that much power, the X300 is the wrong machine for the job.

You shouldn't be losing any battery in hibernate. Hibernate writes the contents of RAM to disk and then turns off the PC. Have you checked to make sure you don't have hybrid sleep enabled? Hybrid sleep stays in standby, eating up fractions of a watt, and then goes to hibernate when the power runs out.

 

Didn't know that --- I actually upgraded from 2Gb of RAM in my X300 after I found it was pretty effective at running MATLAB, though I guess there will always be other processes running that eat up some of it.

I knew it wouldn't be able to address all 4Gb but I figured I might as well add 2Gb as 1Gb. For what it's worth, the extra RAM increased the Windows Performance Graphics index by a couple of points.

That's true --- still I think of the X300 as a mini-mobile workstation (with poor graphics) rather than as a thin ultraportable with a bigger screen and keyboard and no docking station.

I shouldn't have said "hibernate" since I was talking only about sleep mode; however, plenty of people have reported that their X300 does lose about 1% battery power per hour even when hibernating.

I hadn't looked at this at all before: curiously, no "hybrid sleep mode" option shows up under vista. Following this link

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/...eep-in-vista-power-options-advanced-settings/

I ran powercfg, which says that the only sleep states available are (S3) hybrid sleep and hibernate. Standby states (S1) (S2) are not supported by the firmware.