A great baby Thinkpad notebook
I have used this as my main work machine doing office / productivity work for about a month now. It is a great small laptop especially for the price.
Build quality is superb. The X100e does not have a roll cage (i.e. internal metal skeleton) like some higher-priced X and T series Thinkpads but you'd never know it probably because the small size makes it largely unnecessary. The case is nice and stiff; the hinges are superb; and in general the build quality seems to be a cut above the T6x series at least. However I do miss the slightly rubbery paint from my other Thinkpads; this black matte paint is smoother. Still nice but not as nice.
The keyboard is the best I've used on a laptop. It is superior to the ones on my T60 and T61 previously my favorites.
The touchpad is also superb.
I've disabled the camera partly because I'll never use it and partly to save on battery life.
The screen is very nice and bright. In fact I have to turn it down from the brightest setting sometimes indoors as it can hurt my eyes due to the extreme brightness. The resolution is just fine for doing research writing etc. After a quick period of adapting the screens on my T6x series feel huge and overly tall by comparison. It is enough resolution to dock side-by-side windows and work with dual documents barely.
I haven't had any problems with heat. I think this may be because I don't stress the video card much if at all. The bottom gets quite mildly warm under prolonged use.
Performance is just fine in my book. With 9 windows of Google Chrome open two Word documents one Notepad text file Windows Media Player playing an HD movie two Windows Explorer windows Adobe Reader 9 opened to a large PDF file TrueCrypt drive encryption running AVG and Warcraft III-- RAM usage was around 1.2 gigs and processor use hovered around 60-70%.
I am not a big gamer. Playing Warcraft III against my 4-year-old though at full res with all eye candy turned on runs smoothly.
Going further on the performance angle the AMD MV-40 is often roughly compared with a Pentium M 1.6 GHz or thereabouts. That is probably pretty accurate but my machine feels a bit faster than machines of that rough vintage such as the T4x series. This is probably due to the SSD faster RAM faster better everything else etc. in the X100e. So you would essentially get a better-than-X41 performer in the X100e in my opinion for a budget price. Not bad for doing productivity work at all though it is no speed demon by today's standards.
I spent roughly $100 to upgrade to an X25-V SSD which noticeably improved performance. After the upgrade my Windows boot time is 25 seconds shutdown time is under 10 seconds sleep/standby mode time is 4 seconds and resume from sleep/standby is 2 seconds. The 160 GB drive my machine came with went into an $8 enclosure and now serves backup duty.
Battery life easily goes beyond 5 hours for the type of work I do (before the SSD upgrade it was generally around 4:30). I have the processor set to max out at 60% in battery mode and the screen is generally set to around 5-6 brightness which is usually enough.
I still don't have Photoshop loaded on this machine. I think that's where the processor's shortcomings would be most noticeable processor- and ram-hungry applications like that. But this is not a slow machine IMHO.
I also don't think most people would need more than 2 GB of RAM unless using something like Photoshop where they wanted better performance. Simple multitasking that most people would do probably wouldn't need more than 2 GB. Even with music running in the background a slew of browser windows etc. I just don't see how it could stack up to 4 GB. It seems to be an increasing practice to load a machine with 4 GB or even 8 GB of RAM but I wonder how many eager buyers realize that the RAM they're buying will never be used.
Of course I am running Windows in a minimal way. I guess some OS features could consume extra RAM although I wouldn't know what they are. I tend not to like a lot of junk running in the background unless it will actually help me run my programs or the machine.
The machine is very attractive and professional-looking. People constantly ogle it and I've received many questions about it. I personally prefer the size to that of the X200 (the X100e is noticeably smaller).
The lack of an optical drive is definitely a negative for me. It makes it much mroe of a hassle to install things. If you don't already have an external drive take this into account.
The lack of the Thinklight is also a downer. It is one of my favorite Thinkpad features and I wonder why Lenovo couldn't have charged an extra 25 cents or whatever it costs for a single LED light and a bit of wire. I suspect it was intentionally left out to differentiate the X100e more from the X200.
Another really disappointing drawback for me is the tiny half-size media card reader. An SDHC card will only insert halfway meaning I cannot have a built-in always-ready backup device for my most important files. I understand the machine is tiny but they still could have squeezed in an extra few millimeters for a bigger card reader. The card reader also has no documentation apparently meaning I have no idea if any of the formats it supports (which I cannot figure out) would fit completely inside the reader. I plan to follow up with technical support on this.
The ordering process was not so smooth. Lenovo customer service sent me an .xls file telling me to update it and send it back them to start my service contract. Eventually they caved on this after I griped. It just didn't seem fair to make people install Microsoft Office or similar program to get what they bought and in any event I didn't have an office program installed at the time. The machine itself was back-ordered and took weeks to produce and the status was seldom updated. The machine and accessories came piecemeal: first the extra power supply followed weeks later by the machine followed later by the neoprene sleeve.
However I am really glad to be able to take advantage of Lenovo warranty service. I bought next-business-day support for three years. I have never been anything but impressed with IBM or Lenovo warranty service and since this is my work machine I needed it.
All in all this is my favorite notebook ever. I would buy a Thinkpad netbook if they made one but this is not a netbook. Netbooks are characterized by super-cheap price excellent battery life poor performance and usually by poor ergonomics and durability. This machine offers perfect ergonomics great durability enterprise-class service options middling battery life and middling performance. I'm not bothered by the "netbook" name some apply to this machine but I would not could not do my everyday work on a netbook. This machine I can.
The single biggest drawback for me is the battery life. But if I wanted longer than 5 hours of battery life and wanted better performance and even better durability I would have saved up for an X200 series. For what it is this machine is perfect for me.More detail ...
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