ThinkPad X220 (i/T) Owners Thread

hows the performance with the i7?? is it worth getting?
hows heat and battery life with it??
the only reason ill be getting the i7 instead of i5 would be bc of usb 3.0(prob dumb reason)...
im also planning on getting this with ips and 9cell battery.
whats the weight with a 9 cell battery?

i understand that some of these questions were brought up before, but I just want more feedback before i make the big move.

 

Updates take a bit of time after the new install. I downloaded the newest Intel ChipSet and burned to a USB along with any drivers that I need first.


1. ChipSet driver first
2. Video driver next

Than go for the WiFi and Update and the rest.

 

I have the i7. My thoughts:

1. Heat: amazingly cool laptop. Really.
2. Battery life: you will get just a little bit less than the i5 or i3. I think I'm getting about 30minutes less on the 6cell, under light/regular usage.

Personally, with that new discount code floating around, it makes total sense to get the i7 and ips. Also, do consider getting an SSD for this thing... You won't regret it.

 

I thought the "N" standard was supposed to be faster than 144 Mbps?

 

yes. this is the order i follow whenever i install a clean copy of windows. intel RST drivers first, then the intel chipset. the order you install the other rest of the drivers isnt as important.

 

I believe my 6205 was 300. Disabled right now so I can't readily check, but pretty sure it was 300.


Also, for these WEIs and comparisons, it is kinda like saying your "boot time". Unless you are a ilttle bit more specific, I wouldn't compare too directly. My Aero Graphics are 4.8 with 2520, 320 7200, 4gb. That is plugged into external monitor... not sure if that makes a difference or not. If anyone with the same specs as me is getting a 5.9 in aero, I'd like to know what you've done ha.

 

Maximum rated speed is somewhere in the 600Mbps range, I believe. But that's a very vague number. To get 600Mbps you'd need both a base and a receiver with 4 antennas, and no interference. I'm not sure anyone even makes a 4 antenna adaptor yet.

In the real world, speed will depend largely on what else is in the area, and what you are connecting to. Concrete is not the best material to be transmitting through: it's dense, and it tends to have rebar in it.

144 is probably above-average with a two-antenna setup, and at or below with a three. Note that the number of antennas that matter is the device with the least amount of antennas. (Between the base and the receiver, at least.)

 

This is strange. I cloned the OS drive onto my C300 (which, by the way, will get stuck in the system if you actually use their supplied tray.. Skip the tray and just go with the rubber drive rails.. otherwise the screws make it too wide and you'll have a hell of a time getting it out like I did). Now, when I hit Fn-F6 (Just a generic way to bring up something that interfaces with the webcam), the app freezes for several minutes, and then later it says something along the lines of the webcam being in use (which it is not, the green LED isn't even lit). Putting the original drive back in seems to allow the webcam to work.. I don't get it. Acronis True Image is broken..? >.>

 

How do you go about doing driver updates later on in the life of the install when there are a number of updates for the drivers already installed?

 

I did this procedure after I had done a factory restore, from the Lenovo image. Then windows update. Then I did the thinkpad system update.

Then I did the steps I listed.

I should also note that I applied this hotfix: Lenovo Support - Windows 7 (32-bit, 64-bit) Update Module KB2397190 (WW) - ThinkPad

Now my all my lcd brightness control issues are gone, too.

 

Did you have rapidboot installed when you imaged the drive? My guess is that rapidboot does some funny things to the startup of windows..... delaying the loading of drivers and other such things.

I did a similar procedure as you, started with the HDD, then imaged onto a SSD. After having issues, a few days later I decided I would just use the factory restore, and rebuild my setup from that.

 

Two other considerations with WIFI. The spec is really only half-duplex. There are only a handful of AP's that support full-duplex transmissions. So, you can cut whatever the highest rated speed is in half. Second, the bandwidth is SHARED between all devices connected to the AP.

And this is only really under the most IDEAL conditions.

 

I literally unboxed it, turned it on and played with some of the multitouch stuff (Microsoft Surface, etc) and then installed Acronis and imaged the drive. I've had random stuttering and freezing, etc like when I rotate the tablet screen, or shut the screen.. I would do the factory restore but I don't have recovery disks, nor access to a DVD burner at the moment. Also my one flash drive is 64gb, and I'm not entirely sure what turning it into a recovery stick would entail (I'm assuming recovery takes around 10GB of space, and I'm ok with losing that. What I'm not ok with is essentially "losing" the entire 64gb drive because it has to be specially formatted to be bootable, etc).

On the other hand, my wifi issues cleared up. Not sure why/how. I did download new drivers, but that was AFTER the problem cleared up. I initially thought the tech who built my laptop might have not connected one of the antenna or whatnot, so I opened the laptop up and didn't do anything. After putting it back together however my wifi speeds went up. *confused*

 

Has anyone gotten their paws on the X220-pound Gorilla yet?

 

I have another question. Right now, in my lenovo power manager, in "Basic" mode, the GPU speed always reads 100%, no matter what power settings I have. Is that the same for everyone else, too???

 

I'm guessing something went wrong in the cloning with Acronis. Probably has to do with the partition resize (320gb HDD->128gb SSD) and the RapidBoot enhancements. The Lenovo toolkit popped up earlier and proceeded to do a hardware scan for problems. Right as it was testing the hard drive (Quick SMART Self-test was the option it was on I believe) the computer bluescreened with a KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR :/ Looks like cloning the drive is out.. I've stumbled across many problems with this route.

For those who might know more about this than me, here are some details:

The "working" HDD drive (that shipped with the computer) has barely been used, just compared against as a reference (for what software should work, and what software was broken out of the box). No software patches from microsoft or lenovo.

The "broken" SSD drive (which I imaged with Acronis from the shipped HDD) has had all Microsoft patches applied, as well as all Lenovo patches. I was experiencing the webcam glitch before running any of these updates (actually that was what prompted me to go update all drivers and etc). Afterwards, even the Lenovo toolbox scan seems to trigger crashes. The only other things I have installed on it are Chrome, Eclipse and the Android SDK, and VMWare.

Any thoughts?

 

What was the issue? I'd like to check if I have it. Was it something to do with coming out of hibernate or something?

 

You will know if you have it. You loose ALL control over the LCD brightness either coming out of hibernate or sleep. The FN-PgUp and FN-PgDn just stop working. The only solution is to reboot.

 

X220 Tablet here, I haven't had this issue at all. (Though I've had a smorgasbord of others)

 

Were I you, I would get my hands on an USB dvd burner, and burn a set of recovery media, and restart from a fresh, factory install. Else, you can get a copy of a retail win7 disc, and do a regular install, and follow the instructions lenovo provides, in order to install the drivers and such.

 

Currently I am hunting down a USB DVD burner. Will do a Factory Install when my 310 mSata drive comes in.. but until then I guess I'm just going to bumble along like this.

 

Can anyone confirm the version of Simple Tap that shipped with the X220T?

I can only find Simple Tap v1 on the official site, doesn't look like 2.0 is released. Simple Tap v1 doesn't list the x220 as compatible.

Sigh, when is 2.0 going to be release!

 

+1. I also have Acronis 2011 and regularly use it to clone 2 HDDs but did not even attempt to use it to transfer the Lenovo image to my new SSD. I used the recovery disk method and than deleted the Lenovo partition to regain disk space.

Perry

 

I couldn't find any about/help screen in SimpleTap that listed the version number. Going straight to the EXE itself and going to Details lists the following:

File Version: 1.3.5.0
Product Version: 1.03.0005.00
Copyright 2010
Date Modified: 2/8/2011 4:36PM

 

Actually, straight from the lenovo blogs:

 

Quick question: I have on order an X220t with 160gb SSD. Would it make sense to get an 80gb in the mSata drive slot as a secondary drive?

 

Damn. Guess I won't open up my image in hopes of finding the installer.

 

I have thought about that and believe the answer is yes; if you need the additional 50% capacity and you get the mSata drive cheaply enough.

I wouldn't use it as the main OS drive as it will be slower than your Intel (probably X25) drive but nevertheless it will be a fast extra 80 Gb.

I may do the same thing. I will see what kind of limitation the 160 Gb main drive poses for me. Likely I won't have near as much "stuff" on the X220 as on my W520 and my Port Replicator 3 or whatever it is called has about 4 HDDs and an optical drive plugged into it so that will be available when I have the X220 at the house (why I didn't get an X1).

So I suppose the answer is a qualified yes. It is not a "need" yes, but a "why not" yes.

Perry

 

I just got my ThinkPad X220.

Core i3 2310M, 128 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM, Win7 Pro

I bought it on eBay (new) for $1159: LENOVO THINKPAD X220, i3-2310M, 2.1Ghz, 8GB, 128GB SSD | eBay

The first thing I noticed when I unpacked it: it's really light. After turning it on I was afraid to hear loud fan, but that didn't happen. It was amazingly quiet. I checked my BIOS version: 1.04.

But when I started installing Chrome, it went so loud, that it would be hard to hear anything else. I was really upset, but then I installed TPFanControl, rebooted the system, and now it's quiet and cool although I'm doing a lot in the background. There's this high pitched noise though, but if I put the laptop on the farther edge of my table, I can hardly hear it.

 

Here's how mine came:

INTCR I7-2620M PROC USB3.0
GENUWIN7PROFES.64
GEN WIN7 PRF64 ENGLISH
12.5PRMHDLDBCLTDPYMBBBRDAN
8GBPC3-10600DDR3 1333SODMM
KEYBOARDUS ENGLISH
FINGERPRINT READER
CAMERA, HD 720P
250GB HRDDSK DRV,5400RPM
NO MSSDRIVE
GMPLS 54MMEXPCRDSMRCDRDLEN
TP BATTERY 29++(9CELL)
CPK NORTH AMERICA
BLUETOOTH 3.0
IN.CENTADV.-N+WIMAX 6250
INTMBBRD GB3000 3G GPS
SIM CRD ATNT: USA
LANGUAGE PACK US ENGLISH

I've found Acronis to be a waste. If I have to clone for some reason, I ALWAYS use Casper which works flawlessly every time, but I never have to clone the original drive.

On my new ThinkPads, I always pull the original hard drive and put it back in the box for re-selling at a later time. Installed a 160 GB Intel SSD (case removed), fresh installed W7 x64 Pro, used the ThinkPad update utility to install all drivers and utilities. If I do need a lot of storage, I just use a Seagate 750 GB drive in the ThinkPad Dock. All runs like a race car so far.

 

Okay so I just read all 73 pages of this thread! It took half the day but I learned a lot and bookmarked a bunch of stuff for later reference. Anyhow, I know this hasn't been asked yet: Has anyone bothered playing any games on the X220 yet?

I'm looking at getting one primarily for weight and battery life. The price/performance ratio is awesome and it's got almost everything I want in a laptop at this point. My only real concern at this point is gaming.

Just to be clear, I have a gaming desktop. I don't need this thing to be GOOD for games. I need to be able to do some lightweight gaming when I'm traveling for work and I'm bored and missing my wife. Think Civ5, League of Legends, Rift, SWTOR (eventually) all on low settings. Is it capable?

For reference, I'm thinking about the i5-2x20 (which supposedly turbo clocks faster than the 2x10 for the HD3000 graphics) with 4gb (currently a free upgrade with one stick for expanding later) and possibly a mSATA SSD system drive.

 

I can't speak about games, since I don't play them, however, Why not just suck it up and get the i7?

 

For a system that costs ~$800, $200 is a HUGE jump and it's an extremely poor value IMO. I'd sooner spend that money on a SSD to get faster boot/shutdown times.

 

I have an x220t with an i7. With the power manager turned all the way up (ie turbo boost +, etc) I was able to get some 30-40fps running around in WoW (no dungeons/heroics b/c i've been out of that game too long to do that.. just ran around and cast blizzard everywhere...). This was with the game on medium at 1366x768. With everything on low at the same resolution, I was easily able to sustain 60-80fps.

In Starcraft 2, I was able to get around 30-40fps as well with all the GPU intensive settings turned down (if you mouse over the options, it mentions which ones are CPU dependant and which ones are GPU dependent) and the CPU ones turned up at 1366x768. (Again, this was just a simple 1v1 map against a computer AI, not alot going on. Don't really have the time this week to actually get into any serious portion of the game to stress the graphics). With everything turned down to the minimum, I was able to get around 60fps.


One thing that alot of people have noticed is, when you do this, your laptop gets HOT. During my normal usage, the laptop draws around 8-9 watts, during any of this gaming, I've seen the power draw hover at around 50-60 watts. Don't expect this to be comfortable on your lap while doing this. (If I were to ever actually game on this laptop, I'd throw it on top of my Zalman cooler and call it a day).

 

I was in a similar position to you. I've now got the i7, with 8gb RAM and a 160GB SSD. Civ 5 loads super fast and is playable on low-med settings at native resolution. No problem for me.

Petrov.

 

I just finished a game of SC2 2 v 2 with decent size armies. It was all right, around 20-30 fps. But, my laptop hit 86C and was hot. Dumb mistake on playing on my lap for the first half of the game. I monitor the heat because it does get hot and IDK if 86-87 degrees is too high, but I got a little worry. It'll be nice if someone can tell me(I assume it's okay cuz no one has complained about this yet!).

But about your question-yes, you can run some games on it!

 

That's pretty hot but not unexpected - extended use with CPU and GPU at max will tend to do that on a small laptop that doesn't have the cooling facilities of a large one.

I've played Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (semi-playable, may not keep it on the machine) and Titan Quest (runs great at native resolution and medium). I'm surprised people say Civ 5 runs playably on it.

Do keep the laptop on a table at least if you're gaming on it, on your lap isn't a big deal when it's drawing 10 watts from the wall, but at load it needs all the help it can get.

I think that as long as your expectations are reasonable, and you plan on playing what you find playable, you will find something that works OK for you. You might not be able to play the latest and greatest, but the sandy bridge integrated video is pretty much on par with a 320M and is actually faster than a lot of very low end dedicated video cards in computers from last year, like the 310M. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised if your previous computers also had integrated video, though you may be dissapointed if you have owned anything with some real video oomph.

 

My factory hdd is on it's way out. HDTune Pro's smart info shows high Reallocated Event Count (I've had three hdd's in the past give this warning/error eventually fail) and while the hdd was inaudible when I first got it, it's now making a sort of buzzing noise when it seeks.

This isn't helping my opinion of Seagate. I wonder if a replacement under warranty would be another Seagate. Either way, I'm still waiting on the Hitachi Z5K500 that's been back ordered for sometime now.

 

That was the first thing that came to mind when I saw that they were shipping with 320GB seagates...

EVERY single one of my Seagate drives (2.5" and 3.5" drives have failed within 12 months.. 8 in total). Every single drive that fails at work is a seagate drive.. Pondering if I should just leave the C300 in there and supplement it with the 310 mSATA...

 

Two SSD's doesn't make any sense. One of the Hitachi 7mm drives is the best option. That 500gb is hard to pass up combined wit the Intel 310.

 

Cannot see any Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500's for sale in the UK.

 

This was one of the first sites to list it, they still don't have it either though.

www.span.com - ISPh5zb500 - HTS545050A7E380 0J11285 - English Hitachi-HGST Travelstar Z5K500 (7MM) HTS545050A7E380 0J11285 SATA-300 2.5" 5400rpm (500GB) - SATA 2.5" 500gb, SATA-150 2.5" 500gb, SATA-300 500gb, SATA-3gb 500gb

 

I'm having a minor issue with the wireless. It takes a while to connect to the network coming out of standby. Anyone else?

 

Thanks for the responses on the gaming! That REALLY puts my mind at ease because until now I hadn't seen many first-hand accounts of gaming on the HD3000 or X220.

The heat issue is to be expected. I have a cooling pad that works great on my current POS laptop. That thing gets so hot from gaming, it'll shut itself down. With the pad on though, the heat is noticeably less. I usually play on a desk with the cooling pad and a real mouse... just because I don't expect much from the graphics, doesn't mean I'd gimp myself by playing in bed with a trackpad! So yeah... no worries there.

Again, thanks for the feedback! Now I just have to decide if it's worth the money to get a $200 mSATA drive to run along side the normal hard drive. I'm worried if I get one, I'll want one for my home computer(s) too and my wallet can't take that kind of thing! lol

 

Hey guys, I've got a question for the owners of X220's in here.

I'm trying to find out:
a) What speed your expresscard slot runs at, and if it supports express card 2.0
b) if your usb3 port in the i7 models actually does super speed (4.8gbit).

The variable for both of the above is if the laptop has one or two lanes assigned to it for bandwidth.

If you have AIDA64 Available here:
Downloads | AIDA64

Could you do some investigating for me?

Once you have AIDA64 Installed, Navigate to the PCI Devices tab, and look for something related to your USB3 Devices, as well as

Here's an example screenshot from my desktop:
http://i.imgur.com/c9sKp.png
I highlighted where the bus type speed listing is for each device. It's showing my Ethernet card running at only "x1" or one lane of traffic. Fingers crossed your USB3 is running at "x2"!

Thanks in advance and it'll help out a fair few people wanting to try out higher speed usb3 devices and possible expresscard stuff in the X220 too.

A screenshot will be extra helpful, but anyone trying it and replying will be great too

 

As a tech, I have to say that I am not a fan of Seagate's 2.5" drives.

Anyone still getting constant screen flash/switching to 50Hz refresh rate upon unplugging from a power source? If not, how in the world did you fix it? My settings are all correct!

 

I find the seagate 7200 to be pretty snappy. Making sure I do regular backups though.

Think I'm gonna wait a few months for the 310 msata to be updated to the next version and then get that along with the Z5K500 500GB, which should be readily available in the UK.

Edit: just realised the Lenovo 7200 320GB upgrade is already a Hitachi.

 

By a while do you mean three or four seconds? Or much longer...

 

That is what I am going to do. I get 128 GB mSata and want to combine it with my 128 C300. Will it be possible run these 2 disks in RAID 0?

 

Disappointing to hear. Back in the day, Seagate was THE brand to get. I still refuse to buy Western Digital due to how terrible they used to be.

There's a free upgrade to 320 GB drive right now. Is it worth skipping the upgrade to get a better drive in the 250 or are they both Seagate?