The X series

Well I have lurked around on the forums here long enough. I am in the middle of getting an ultraportable for use at school and work and have pretty much ruled out every other brand than the thinkpad x40 and x41 series (although I am still considering the Toshiba M300 a bit).

My question is as follows:

Is there any real day to day performance difference between the x40 ULV 1.2GHz and the x41 LV 1.4/1.5GHz units?

I guess the ram speed plays a small part in the performance as well but the higher speed probably chucks up some battery life as well.

I'd like the longest battery life possible (need to be able to do 5 lectures in a row which is nearly 6 hours) on one load, so I probably need the big 8 cell battery and maybe even the extended life battery module.

Well, I hope some of you can help.

thank you in advance

 

Not to be a party pooper, I don't think you are going to get six hours on the x41 even with the eight cell battery. The thing that is going to kill performance is the slow hard drive not the CPU. x41s only come with 4200RPM hard drives which will slow system performance. Might want to look at something like the Fujitsu P or S series. They both offer a modular battery for extra battery life. The P has a 10.6" screen if you want to go that small and is a little over three pounds. The S comes in 13.3" and 14" screens and weigh four pounds. Good Luck.

 

well those 6 hours include a fair bit of idling and me falling asleep during class lol

one of my classmates has the small fujitsu p7010 (I think that is the model) and I kinda dislike the small display and keyboard on it.

How long is the battery life on the 13.3" S series??

 

You got to really want to be that small for the P Fujitsu to work for you. If you can find an older s6231 it might be a better choice than the newer s6240. The s6231 uses the older Dothan Pentium Ms which consume less power which leads to better battery life than the newer Sonoma Pentium Ms in the s6240. I'd say about four hours on the s6231 not including the modular battery. Probably closer to 3.5 on the s6240. If you can turn off WiFi that will help with the battery life.

 

You might also take a look at the Dell X1. I picked up a loaded one from the Dell Outlet the other day for $1100. It does use the slower 1.8" drives but this one (60GB Toshiba) seems quite a bit more peppy than the 1.8" Hitachi that was in my X41. It comes with a 3 year on-site warranty and I added complete care for $80. Battery life is about +5 hours with the extended battery. The 12" WXGA screen is a bit easier on the eyes than the P's but is a bit more useful than the standard 4:3 screen on the X41. Here's some reviews:

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2366
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2430
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/74211/dell-latitude-x1.html

 

Well, first of all I have an X41 and am extremely happy with it, it fits my lifestyle of moderate travel and living in a city where I walk around with my laptop in a backpack on my back everyday, it gets bumped by people on the subway and abused and thrown around by me, but the X41 is built to take those knocks. The lightness factor is huge, I'll end up walking at least a mile or two a day and people get angry if you have a large backpack on mass transit and bump them with a 10lb object.

If you're using the X40/X41 for nothing but Office apps and web browsing, then you're not going to notice much difference between a 1.2ULV or a 1.4LV, you will notice improved battery life on the 1.2 ULV of course. Now, you would get slightly slower performance on heavier applications such as loading Adobe Photoshop/Acrobat with various plugins or installing larger applications. Unless you're using media apps, games, or running a bunch of processes at the same time the processor performance difference isn't going to be a huge issue. What zazonz mentions is true about the hard drive, it is slow, especially on bootup. For this reason I only reboot every 2-3 days anyway, just put the laptop to sleep or hibernate and never takes more than 15-20 seconds to come back from that. Bootup is over a minute.

As far as 12" screen ultraportables, I think the X40 series is the way to go. As long as you understand what sacrifices in performance you make that is.

In regards to battery life, I have the 8-cell and with constant but somewhat conservative power settings (4/8 screen brightness and wi-fi on, web and office use) can get about 4-4.5 hours, you'd need the optional extra battery for more or be putting your notebook to sleep during downtime in between lectures.

 

I tought about X1 for a second... but only for a second... IT HAS NO FAN!!! I would have burned it to death trying to install Gentoo Linux... do you think it can withstand 20h of Gnome compilation?

Anyway, I'm planning to use 4cell battery with X41 (I wanted 4cell battery, not 8cell, because it sticks out...) and a bit later I'm going to buy Extended Life battery ^_^

Together it should give me enough battery time ^^

I wanted to have X41 instead of X40 due to the "garbadge" problem in the X40 under linux (well, its not really a problem, but its annoying) and I think that GMA900 should be also enough to play one a little old MMO game from time to time ^^

 

The maximum load I would put upon whichever laptop I end up with is having a couple of word documents open and maybe a pdf document.

That's about it.

I can't see myself gaming on it, although I play a bit of world of warcraft. I wonder how that would run at the lowest settings possible.

I know that I will be putting in an additional 512MB of ram to get 1 GB no matter what.

 

WoW doesn't have any extraordinary graphics... (eh... I dont know why everyone likes this game... Its soooo boring... what happend to the MMO's nowadays)... It should run even on GMA900... In MMO's RAM is usually most important.

Anyway, if I will play any game on it, it will be a preety old game (3+ years old), so it should be fine

I can allways play Doom III remotely ^_^ That would be fun - high res Doom III on TP X41... hehe