Lenovo Thinkpad X120e User Review

Brian,

Congratulation on getting your processor to 3.8 on WEI, guess it's stupid of me to think that the WEI benchmark will run when the power is not plug-in.

By the way are you going to get an SSD for your X120e? I am debating whether or not it is worth it.

 

I'm still on the fence as to whether or not to put my 60GB OCz SSD in this computer or leave the 7200RPM 320gb drive in it. I like having all my music on this little machine. And now with the BIOS update applied, I am finding this computer a lot more peppy than it was before.

According to an old program I still use (CPUMark 99) I gained 25% of a boost in performance. I know CPUmark doesn't measure actual performance, but it's a rough idea. I went from a score of 101 to 126 after the BIOS update.

I'll let you know if I go to an SSD in it though. One thing I am considering, is another 2gb of ram. I think 4gb would be the sweetspot with Windows 7.

 

@Brian10161: Interesting that a BIOS update would boost CPU performance that noticeably. Which revision were you on before, and which did you update to? I recently flashed from 1.08 to 1.11, and didn't really notice any difference.

 

I have edited my review to reflect the resolution of the audio stutter issue with the new BIOS revision 1.11. After flashing from 1.08 to 1.11, the issue appears to have been resolved.

Get the latest BIOS revision from Lenovo's website here.

See the discussion thread for the audio stutter issue here.

 

Hey man, wonderful review, I am too, pretty soon will be owner of x120e,
I ask you to help me with SSD installation, my order estimated on 04.21.11
So I was thinking to switch hdd to ssd and to samsung SDD just lik yours 64gb , but I am not Pro about this, what do you think, should I do:
1) get hdd cloner and clone hdd to ssd without first boot up.
2) create recovery disc ( windows image copy )by buying DVD player.
3) or something easer and safer you would suggest to me

I have no clue what is CLEAN INSTALL
AND where can I buy ssd samsung 64g (amazon is good?) and RAM 2gb.
I'll be greatful for any help and advice.

Furkat

 

I recommend a clean install to make sure the SSD is properly aligned. A clean install would be using a Windows OEM disc and using the COA on the bottom to activate Windows. Windows 7 should get most of the drivers.

Newegg is a good bet (really depends where in the world you are located).

 

Thanks Kaso. Does the default install come with other ThinkPad wallpapers (like the time zone one)? I remember having those on my old T61p.

 

Check here: ThinkPad Wallpapers on Flickr

 

Clean install will also tweak the system to take advantage of the SSD (turn off hdd defrag, fetch, etc)

 

I saw that noone answered your question from earlier, so I'll try and explain a little. The answer to your question is painful at best, and impossible at worst. Lenovo whitelists wireless cards in the bios, and if you use one not on the whitelist, your computer wont boot. There are quite a few ways to hack your bios and enable the card, but they can be considerably risky if you dont know what you're doing. Most involve you having to take a hex editor to your bios image (which is editable through windows, oddly enough) and manually adding the deviceID of the 6300. I haven't heard of anyone successfully doing this yet, but my thought is that the thinkpad abgn card is so good that to me, I couldnt care less.


Hope this helps, and dont let it deter you from getting this machine, it's pretty freaking awesome.

 

There is a working whitelisted bios out there already, as I am using it and have successfully installed an Intel 6300 card in my x120e. However, getting it all to work is a bit tricky. Also, there's obviously some risk involved, as you can't be certain the person who made it didn't mess it up.

 

I would advise against cloning, as other posters have mentioned. You don't need to get an external ODD for a clean install, though, as you can use the Windows 7 .iso file obtainable here and use the Windows USB tool to transfer that .iso file to an SD card (must be larger than 4GB). Because the X120e is bootable from an SD card, you can then use the SD card to clean install Windows 7, by following the directions in the thread I linked to earlier.

One important note is that if you want to avoid activation issues, it would be advisable to use ABR to backup your W7 activation status before doing a clean install, and restoring it later from a USB drive--that will save you a lot of time and energy. Again, that process is described in the linked thread.

As for the Samsung 470 64GB SSD, I got mine on eBay, as that's where the prices are generally the best if you're patient, but occasionally you can snag one for a great price from Newegg, Amazon, Buy.com, etc.

Yep, I believe there are some links on the (massive) SlickDeals X120e thread--I'm not sure if there's a whitelisted version of the new 1.11 BIOS that fixes the stutter issue, although I'm sure there will be soon if there isn't already.

I can definitely understand the motivation for installing an Intel 6300. The WiFi card is probably my largest annoyance with the X120e now that I've gotten the fan noise under control (thanks to TPFanControl) and the screen colors to be more accurate (thanks to some CCC color settings tweaking, with brightness and contrast). The Realtek card consistently gets lower signal than my T500's Intel 5300 ABGN card, and takes longer to connect--this is a bit of an issue for me in some areas of my dorm and certain lecture halls where signal strength is relatively weak.

 

There's an updated version of the whitelisted BIOS out now, but I'm hesitant to upgrade, because someone in the thread said that the 1.11 whitelisted BIOS wasn't allowing their card to work. I'm not sure if updating the whitelisted BIOS is going to be simple, where it will just immediately work, or a huge pain. So before I try it, I'm waiting to see if someone else can get it working.

 

yea i know but the price.... as the screen thing . its fine for me however when i used the seagate xt drive i had to install everything then after a while i noticed the lines. i installed the bios and never saw it again.

This happened to me. i re ran it a few times, maybe 5 times but it fixed itself

 

Buy.com - Lenovo ThinkPad X120e 05962RU 11.6" LED Notebook E-350 1.6GHz - Matte Black - 1366 x 768 WXGA Display - 4 GB RAM - 320 GB HDD - AMD Radeon HD 6310 - Bluetooth - Webcam - Windows 7 Professional - 6 Hour Battery - HDMI

is that a good deal?

is there a better deal out there?

i would appreciate it, ive been waiting months to buy myself a laptop and i think ive come to a conclusion

 

Where are you located? For US, this price is okayish, it's not all that great. The base E-350 Lenovo configuration now includes the 6-cell and 320GB 7200RPM drive at a price of $449. Manually configuring it with BT and installing more RAM later will bring your total price to about the same as your Buy.com price.

Add in Lenovo coupons, though, and you could potentially get it cheaper from Lenovo. So no, the price is not all that extraordinary, although the X120e is a pretty solid machine.

 

Alot of good nfo here, thanks to all that have contributed.
I'l be receiving the X120e tomorrow.

Two questions, what key is used to access the bios during boot up?
and I will be putting in a SSD, how do you enable AHCI in the bios?

Thanks

 

Press F1 to enter BIOS setup.

AHCI should be enabled by default, but you can check in BIOS. Go to Serial ATA (SATA) > SATA Mode Option, or something like that, and choose "AHCI." "Compatibility" is IDE mode.

 

I'd give the deal a bit more credit. From Lenovo you have to pay sales tax in basically all states. That's near 10% for me. I think the buy deal adds, W7 Pro vs Home, 4gb vs 2gb, Bluetooth and finally no tax. If I wanted those upgrades I probably couldn't beet that price from Lenovo. However, since I don't care about BT or W7 Pro the memory is the only perk for me. Even without tax I could beet that deal by going through Lenovo.

 

Thanks for the quick reply.
Is the card reader limited to SD only? I can't find any specifications about it. (type of cards or size limitations) I saw where it is bootable.

 

My Sandisk Extreme 3 8gb works, don't know the max but thats the fastest and biggest card I have. I used it to boot Win 7 clean install. (I had to RMA my usb stick) Other cards I am not sure about.

 

Maybe. For me, though, Buy.com also has sales tax, so it works out to be pretty much the same. One advantage of buying through Buy.com, though, is that you'll probably receive the laptop faster than through Lenovo.

From the Tabook (PDF), the 4-in-1 media card reader supports the standard MMC, SD, Memory Stick, and Memory Stick Pro.

I would imagine the SD card slot on the X120e is an SDHC slot, so it will likely support up to 32GB.

On another note, one interesting thing I found in the Tabook is that Lenovo lists the X120e as supporting dual-channel RAM. Seems like an error, since as far as I know, AMD's Zacate platform only has single-channel support.

 

Thanks again Midnightsun & moloc.
I will be doing a new install of w7, do you have any suggestions as to the sequence of installing the drivers after w7 is up & running? any thing to watch out for (hate surprises).Is Lenovo support the best place to get current drivers? do they have all that is needed?

 

Bojack I would recommend downloading the following and store them on a USB stick:

- Video Driver

- Network Adapter (Wireless or Ethernet driver depending on how you connect to the Internet.) Wireless adaptor can vary on X120e but its either " ThinkPad 1x1 11b/g/n Wireless LAN PCI Express Half Mini Card Adapter" or " ThinkPad 2x2 11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN PCI Express Half Mini Card Adapter".

- Thinkvantage System Update

Once you got your graphics going and the network connected you just run System Update which pretty much does the hard work for you by detecting and downloading any missing drivers/utilities on the system.

 

Yep, Hearst555's post pretty much covers it. The only thing I'd do differently is get the graphics/APU driver directly from AMD. The newer version from AMD performs slightly better, fixes some bugs, and all-around is better than the original one Lenovo supplied. The X120e's hardware is standard AMD Fusion Zacate, so there's no problems installing AMD's package versus Lenovo's.

To get the driver, go to AMD's homepage, hover over "Find a Driver," and select "Notebook Graphics," "E-Series APU," "E-350 APU," and your OS. Download the Catalyst Software Suite package, and install.

 

Thanks folks for all the suggestions.

 

Something new to me is this "system reserved of 100 MB" on the c: drive, whats that about? is it needed?

 

That where they store some boot code. I don't think you can delete it, unless you take a complicate route. Personally I don't think it's worth it to go delete it for 100mb of hdd space.

 

The right click buttons on my X120e does not work in Windows Explorer and Freecommander all of a sudden. This happened after a Windows Update. Anybody has a solution? Thanks.

 

I would highly recommend anyone who bought one to check all their mouse and keyboard buttons..

I thought it was only the trackpoint mouse buttons that didn't work, but it looks like the DOWN arrow, F11, and Insert doesn't work neither.

 

Maybe you could reinstalled the driver for the Ultranav and the Power Manager driver.

 

Mine right hand click buttons worked fine for a few days. Now the error "Windows Explorer" has stopped working comes up. So my problem is not hardware.

 

How do you reinstall these software?

OK, I just booted from the Boot Disk I created earlier. There is no option to restore just the OS only. It gives me two choices:

1. Restore the Windows partition only

2. Restore to factory default state (all data on the system hard disk will be lost).

It looks like I will have to install all my software afterward.

 

I went to the lenovo site and downloaded the Ultranav drivers again but still no luck.

 

I went ahead and did a complete restore. Everything is working fine now. I even turned off Widows Update for now. Oh, I also disable Lenovo power management, which I should have done before doing a restore to see if that was causing the problem.

 

This is my first laptop & first go at w7, been a adjustment to get up to speed.
Have a couple of issues now after a new install on a ssd.
1) The audio output seems weak ? all drivers are installed no issuse in device manager. Is this the norm for X120e?
2) Can't get bluetooth mouse microsoft 5000 to work. BT drivers are installed Fn f5 works but no mouse working.

 

1.- Yeah, the speakers are not particularly loud on the X120e; they're certainly quieter than my T500's. One reason for this is that they're angled downwards--make sure you don't have anything blocking the speakers, which is common if you're using it on your lap or in bed.

2.- You have to go through the whole device pairing procedure: to do so, you have to make sure the X120e is actively looking for connections and the mouse is in discoverable mode.

Eh, you may not want to do the last part outside of debugging reasons--Power Manager is the only program that can interface with the chips in the Thinkpad batteries to set charge thresholds, give the most accurate power estimates, etc.

 

Speakers are actually loud but too high pitch and quality is not so great but it gets the job done. Unfortunately I just sold my x120e because the cpu felt really anemic to me although the Fusion E-350 is definitely faster than any single or dual core atom netbooks and i felt the difference vs my former Asus Vx6/1215n with the d525 atom.

 

What tasks are you running? I've been using mine for web surfing and it basically feels just as fast as my Dell Precision M4400. The Dell has 8gb of ram and a Core 2 Extreme X9100 CPU which, while not very power efficient, is not far off the fastest laptop CPUs on the market today. By the specs of the E-350 I certainly can see it feeling slow for some jobs but I haven't noticed yet hence why I asked.

 

I can sort of second benchmade42's comments. In my mixed usage, with note-taking, some light coding, web browsing, some spreadsheet work, etc, I can definitely feel that the X120e is ever so slightly slower-responding than my T500 (Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53GHz). I assume this is likely due to the weak CPU, since the SSDs that I have in both laptops perform roughly the same.

Am I bothered by the slightly slower speed of the X120e? Nope, not at all. But do I notice it compared to my T500? Slightly, but yes.

Also, a user on the Lenovo Forums put together a nice compilation of common X120e issues. Thought I'd repost this link, since many forumers here have mentioned having some of these problems.

 

Midnightsun, I saw where your using a ssd,
what drivers are you using ?
I put in a corsair F60 & seems ok, installed AMD driver 1.2.1.282 dated 1-28-11

 

I believe I am using the same AHCI driver that you are. The drivers of version 1.2.1.263 and later all support TRIM, however, the default Lenovo version is a bit behind, and therefore lacks TRIM support. With an SSD, it would be important to install that update.

 

I spent the whole day yesterday trying to clone my HD with clonezilla. I have used clonezilla before and am fairly familiar with it. But for the life of me, I cannot get clonezilla to boot from the x120e with the dvd/cd usb attached. I went into the bios, to check. Boot order is cd/dvd usb, ffd usb, hd wd , etc...so it should boot but it doesn't.

I know clean install is the recommended method but I just want to know why clonezilla could not boot from Lenovo x120e. I burned 3 ISO cds for clonezilla and tried them in my desktop and hd laptop, no problem, 32bit and 64 bit clonezilla both boot with no problem. Just the Lenovo x120e.

I would suspect very few people used clonezilla, just wonder if anybody has an idea why a iso boot disk would not boot.

I tried to change some bios setting but no dice. logical and uufi priority, etc..

Would appreciate any comment.

 

I had this problem too until I switched to the USB port to the right of the power button. Then it booted up just fine. I've ran into this kind of problem on some desktops as well. I guess not all USB ports on a given machine can be booted from. Hope this works for you.

 

I tried all 3 usb ports, no dice.

I went over the bios again, cannot see anything obvious. So I made a ubuntu cd 10.4 no boot either. Funny because my dvd/cd usb is working fine. Changed usb cable same thing.

 

Well that's a bummer!

When you're in the BIOS does the USB DVD drive show up in the list? I know whenever I have my HP memory stick plugged in to the correct USB port it lists it when in the BIOS.

 

Some external drives are just plain incompatible.

Out of curiosity does it use USB port power or does it have an AC adaptor as well?

 

I have a rosewill dvd/cd super thin external usb drive which has a TEAC drive in it. The drive does not use or need an external AC adapter. It works fine as far as reading and burning cd/dvd. I made the recovery cd and dvd from it. It's just when rebooting into the dvd drive with the ubuntu cd in it that it does not boot.

Did any of you boot from a cd/dvd drive with the X120e or am I the only one with this problem?

It could be that this particular drive is incompatible with the X120e. However it boots up fine from my HP in my signature.

 

I have an external LG DVD drive with it's own A/C power adapter. I used that to boot from a windows 7 disk. It wouldn't work when using the yellow USB port but the other one on that side worked fine.

 

This is the Rosewill that I used, 5 stars from newegg:

Newegg.com - Rosewill USB 2.0 Slim8x DVD Writer External Optical Drive for Mac and PC Model ROD-EX003 Gloss Red - External CD / DVD / Blu-Ray Drives

Everyone raves about its compatibility that's why I bought it.