Thinkpad x20x (s/t/i) Owners Thread

Hey guys, is the X201's keyboard compatible with the one from T61 ? It looks like, but I'm not sure 100%. I have a spare keyboard so I was wondering if I could use it later.

Thanks.

 

I get a horrible piezoelectric noise when I plug in usb items. Maybe that is the source of your "cpu whine" problem - try it out, unplug all your usb items. When I do that the whine stops. (I have my profile set to balanced so the cpu is not at 100%.. but it still makes that noise with usb peripherals)

Also... my goodness this x201 fan is loud. 3200rpm non stop, the second you start typing and it hits 54celcius the fan goes on again.

 

I've had a 201s for a few months. I have shrunk 7 and put fedora 13 in the rest of the hd. Right from the beginning I've had problems with the machine switching itself off in windows 7.

It does not happen often (every 10-20hrs or so). It's only happened with the AC adapter plugged in. Lenovo gave me another adapter but I still have the problem. Now they're asking me to leave the machine on in the BIOS and see whether it works there. They say if it does not happen there then they asked me to reinstall the OS. I cannot make much sense of this frankly, as operations under win7 are nothing like operations under an idle bios!

Is anyone having the same problem? I'd have thought that we'd make sure the battery is fine and the machine is not overheating.
Any advice?

I've looked in the bios and noted that the Power Management setting (Thermal control) under AC is set for optimal performance (as it should be). I am giving a go at setting it like in battery mode. This will compromise performance though, as it will throttle the cpu.

I've had many thinkpads - this is by far the worst I've ever had. Seems to me it was released way prematurely. We had problems with key strokes, wifi problems, gfx problems, countless bios updates etc.

 

i am experiencing a weird problem and am wondering if you guys are experiencing it too or hope you can try it out.

basically i unplug the laptop and turn it on from complete shut down. when it is all loaded and at the desktop, i plug in the ac adapter again and the screen doesn't raise to my ac brightness. i open up power manager and find out that the ac brightness changed itself to the same brightness as the battery brightness. this only happens from a cold boot and restarts. but if i power on the laptop with it plugged in and unplug the power, the screen brightness will lower to the intended battery brighntess.

i am using power manager 3.29 and windows 7 home premium. anybody else experience this?

 

quick update for anyone interested. I tried bios 1.14 because if you google it, someone mentioned it has quiet fan noise. absolutely no difference (3200rpm). version 1.16, 1.17 are also loud. so tpfancontrol it is

 

does the x201 have a proprietary HDD or not? I want to install a free-fall sensor 7200rpm disk. it's 2.5" right?

 

It uses a standard 2.5" SATA drive. The X201 already has an accelerometer to detect free fall. I don't know that I'd pay extra for a drive with it.

 

hello guys, I am considering buying a used x201 that has 3 year warranty and a 4-cell battery.

can someone tell me how many hours is it possible to squeeze out of the 4-cell?
also how much are batteries? how cheap can i get a 6 or 9 cell?
what's the cheapest you guys got a x201 from lenovo with coupons?

 

thanks Zaz

 

I bought the four-cell for my X200. I was hoping to get 2.5-3 hours out of it, which is about what I need. Ill post the results when I get it. I'll save the nine for when I need the extra battery time.

 

I originally tried a 4-Cell with my 200T... I could get about 5 hrs idling at the lowest brightness, and just under 4 web browsing at the lowest brightness (roughly ~5.5W and ~7.5W respectively). I'd expect the 201 to draw more power at idle/light load than the 200/T, though. Maybe 2.5 to 3 as ZaZ said.

 

i thought the 200t would draw more power with it's tablet touch screen.

 

Anyone know of a way to get a deal for those in Canada?

 

how much are batteries? how cheap can i get a 6 or 9 cell?
what's the cheapest you guys got a x201 from lenovo or the outlet?

 

Picked mine up in February for $600 and change when Lenovo had the 20% Outlet Coupon. The prices right now aren't that great, but they ying and yang, then another buck and a quarter for the AFFS. A few, three weeks back they had some $600 X200, but they went fast. The more patient you can be, the better deal you'll get. The same applies for eBay if you want to go that route.

I picked up a four cell battery on eBay for $40. The picture looked legit, but we'll see when I get it. It comes from Hong Kong and takes two to three weeks. Hopefully, it'll be here this week. I'd say $60-70 for the six-cell and $80-100 for the nine-cell.

 

how is the heat and fan noise on the x201?

 

for me, using the x201, i do not feel any heat at all at the palmrest. the only area where heat can be felt is where the vents are on the left. also i couldn't even tell that the fan was running unless i put the laptop next to my ear. even then the only way i could tell was the stream of air that was coming out, i still couldn't hear any noise.

 

^may I ask what version bios you are using? Unless you are in a really loud room I don't know how you can not hear the fan running! I have tried versions 1.14, 1.16, and 1.17 already.

 

i dont know. my room is definitely not loud. i can't hear anything but it is blowing hot air out. i am running the latest one which i think is 1.17

 

the latest one is indeed 1.17. Wouldn't matter because I've used everything from 1.14 TO 1.17 and the fan is always spinning at 3300rpm (doesn't matter what power setting you use - as soon as it hits 53 celsius it spins up). Mine is loud

I idle at 46-50celsius on AC

 

In case anyone is interested, I can confirm that the Power Management setting makes no difference. Just had another switch off with the AC connected and laptop idle. I very much doubt it's heat related.

 

has anybody had this problem?

 

As a proud and happy owner of a new X201i I would love to ask another forum members abou what bag are you using to carry your laptop? I´m looking for something really small to carry just the laptop, AC adapter, NTB mouse and a wallet and cell phone.

 

Victorinox Swiss Army Eiffel Laptop Brief is pretty good, but slightly expensive for what it is.

 

I got this. It works well if you've got the nine-cell.

 

Zaz you are using a Macbook Pro bag for Thinkpad, this is heresy. But in the spirit of this heretical trend setting, i use this Dell 12.1 inch leather portfolio case for my X200.

 

well, if you want to use a leather bag, than this looks like a better option IMHO:

Laptop Tasche für Lenovo ThinkPad X200 X200s X201 X201s bei eBay.de: Notebooktaschen (endet 20.09.10 00:05:48 MESZ)

 

nice out of shanghai... i got the Dell leather satchel bag for free from a Friend, and it matches the Leather Debden Diary that i use... and the quality of the construction on this Thinkpad leather X200 laptop satchel looks low rent, most likely a cheap imitation of the real stuff.

I got 15 laptop bags already, so i will pass.

 

There's no Mac logos on it anywhere. Because it's for the 13" MBP, it works well with the X20x machines with the nine-cell battery, which sticks out the back.

 

In the spirit of heresy I will confess here I am a regular user of the Brenthaven backpack that came with my first and only macbook! Best part of that purchase in fact and it's still going strong after several years and now regularly used with my x201.

Glad to see no one else seems to be having the switch offs I am having. They happen very rarely and I am mostly on Linux so I do not mind too much. Still

 

this is the confession thread for all those sinners (i.e. people whom diverged to the other brands, etc).

i admittedly bought my first Macbook Pro to show off to other class mates in uni... whom were using their ASUS, Acer and HP consumer laptops.
---------------
But keeping within the topic of discussion. I am amazed how Lenovo kept the weight of the X20x pretty much the same as the X6x laptop, when the actual dimension of the laptop got bigger.

 

Thanks for your imput. I finally decided to buy Dicota Motionslight 12´, it should arrive today. I did see it only on pictures so let´s hope it will be nice.

 

Well, I'm settling in with my new x201i, and for the most part I'm very impressed with it. I do have a few issues with it, although all but one are small:

• The battery does jiggle a bit too liberally in the back. I understand this is a common issue so it doesn't bother me that much.
• Really a non-issue, but I'm curious to know if this is common: The top cover doesn't quite meet the front lip evenly. Rather it's a bit wavy, with parts of it sticking a bit above the lip. You can kind of see it in the picture here as long as you don't enlarge it to actual size: http://i.imgur.com/dpfjU.jpg
• The only thing I'm truly disappointed with is the screen. Perhaps I'm spoiled by my much cheaper Samsung netbook, but things on the x201i screen seem far more murky and drab by comparison. I realize this is not unusual for a business netbook, but I can't help wishing such a relatively expensive laptop came with a nicer screen. I don't mean to harp on this, it seems almost every other newcomer to the thread brings this up.
  
  Anyway the screen is really not that bad, but I do find myself gravitating toward a brightness level of 13/15 to keep comfortable, which gives me about 4.5-5.0 hours of battery life. For comparison purposes, what brightness level do the other folks here like to keep your ThinkPad at? How is your battery faring at said brightness level?
  
  For the record, I also found that raising the Saturation level to 20 in Intel graphics properties really brings out the colors on my display. Any similar configuration tips someone could recommend?

What I absolutely love about the ThinkPad x201i:

• TrackPoint is somewhere close to the top of this list. It's just really fun to use, like a little videogame The touchpad is better for heavy mousing, but for quick mouse gestures between bursts of typing there's no beating the convenience of TrackPointing, as when I'm doing coding work for example. My only gripe is that it does occasionally mess with me trying to hit one of the three letter keys around it, but that doesn't happen very often, and might happen less with time.
• Great keyboard of course. I can really let myself fly on this one. Who needs chiclets.
• Laptop feels really solid. I don't feel like I have to watch how much pressure I lay on it at any point.
• Very important for me: Does not seem to get hot even after hours of use! And stays very quiet. It did get a little warm after about three hours of coding, but nothing that constituted a serious problem. I'm also wondering if putting an SSD in there will drop the warmth level further.

 

Hi everyone, newbie X201 owner on board!

 

Just ordered an X201s, looking forward to having a thinkpad again.

I started with a 600E that I got off fleabay and resurrected for about $50 many years back (2003-ish). I upgraded to an X21 a few years later and found it to be a wonderful little machine. I've rebuilt and worked on several other thinkpads since then, a few other 600-series (600E's and 600X's mostly), an R40 and a couple of early T-series.

I ended up selling the X21 to get an Asus 1000h. While the eee is a decent little machine, the low-res screen and touchpad drive me nuts. Can't wait to have a proper keyboard with a trackpoint again. To it's credit though, the eee screen has excellent color reproduction - an important point as a photographer.

 

I have the same issue with all of my X201T's. So I would say it's common. It makes it look even cheaper/nastier than it looks already.

Question for the larger group:

I had a weird situation with the X201T I use most. I had it plugged in at home on a desk. When I came back home from a laptopless outing, it was whirring away and really hot - the desk was actually quite alarmingly hot, suggesting it had been in this state for a while. AC, Battery and Wifi lights on. Powering it on brought it up to the 'resuming Windows' screen and it booted up as normal.

Any ideas?

I never shut down any of my notebooks - they're slept/hibernated and only restarted when they BSOD (something I haven't seen in the last two-plus years on a non-Apple notebook since the Sony TT, and then only once) or I do an update. In all my notebooks - including the X201T's - I set a 1-hour hibernate time under battery, and 6 hours in AC.

It would appear to me it crashed while hibernating - although I haven't seen this kind of behaviour in a notebook since, oh I dunno, a PCG-TR2MP running XP, and a troublesome-in-other-ways UX390N running Vista. Could there be something else?

 

yeah i know what you are talking about. you can feel it being uneven as you run your finger along it. but i don't think it's a problem though

 

Just posted about this on OT, but does anyone know if the warranty and the protection program carried over to the units sold in the outlet store? I bought my X201 for $890 just a few days ago from the outlet and the warranty look up shows me this, and I've never paid for an extra warranty whatsoever:

 

what you're seeing is the original warranty for that system before refurbishing.   in a week or two your warranty will be reset to 1YR depot service.   outlet systems aren't eligible for warranty upgrades.

 

Hey guys, a potential owner of an X201 has couple of questions for heavy users of their x20x toys.

Basically I'm looking for a powerful and portable solution for heavy usage. X201 with i7 620m, 8GB and eventually an SSD will make a really good upgrade for my current system, but I have some doubts on several things:

- 24/7 usage - how futuristic is this statement? Of course I won't be using it 24/7, but I'm sure it will be close to 16/7, so would be nice to know that my machine can handle this kind of demand.

- heat and noise - this may be related to 1st question at some level, however this is pretty important as well. So, under decent/mild usage, how hot it gets? And how noisy is the fan? Does it run all the time or only kicks of when it gets warmer? Being a much smaller machine, I understand that there are trade-offs however I'm hoping that Lenovo engineers have found a decent solution to heat & noise problem.

- since it has only 1 VGA port, can it handle 2 monitors? w/o having docking station. I would assume that yes, however I'm not sure 100% about Intel HD capabilities(still researching this one)

- Full HD video - in future I'll get a camcorder with Full HD support, would be nice to know if it will handle that as well, both playing through VGA (is this even real?) it and minor editing...

Any thoughts or inputs on this are welcome, thank you in advance.

 

That puts my mind at ease, thanks for responding.

That is very alarming. I saw someone mentioning battery drainage during hibernation earlier in this thread which had me puzzled. Probably has nothing to do with this though... I like to ensure that all the lights are off when I put a laptop in hibernation before I put it away, but honestly I've never actually needed to do that.

Might anyone care to comment on what brightness level they like to keep their x201x at? I'm more interested in your ideal comfort level, not so much when you're trying to save battery life.

Thanks, Nir

 

In doors, I feel like my eyes are going to burst when I put it on 15. I usually use it at around 12.

EDIT: I just figured that I use it on 8-9 at night.

 

How are the boot times for the non-SDD users that performed a fresh install without the thinkpad software? I have a feeling that all their modifications on top of the software have slowed things down. It seems that by disabling AMT I saved 10 seconds on my start up time.

 

I'm a 7/15 when on battery.

 

I tend to keep mine pretty low, but I am kinda light sensitive. I'll typically run around 3-5 on battery, and maybe a 1 in low light if I really need it.

 

I don't know how you guys do it. I need 12/15 just to feel comfortable. At 1/15 you can barely tell the screen is on. Maybe I really do have a defective screen...

 

It may be your eyesight, too. I have very light-sensitive eyes, and am easily blinded by glare. I'll leave the screen at 0 or 1 only in low light(ie: browsing in my room at night, usually with the ThinkLight on).

 

It could be, though I've always been happy with low brightness levels on most every laptop I've used in the last few years. I even keep my Samsung dekstop monitor at 30/100. I can certainly see someone being more sensitive to brightness however. I'd love to be able to crank the brightness down on the ThinkPad and get better battery life, but at least I'm happy at 12-13 so I'm not stuck with something I can't use comfortably

 

Can anyone please share their experience with heat & noise with x201? A review on laptopmag mentioned some heat after 15min of hulu.

"After we put the X201 under a little stress by streaming a 15-minute Hulu video at full screen, the system got warm, with the touchpad reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the keyboard clocking in at 99 degrees, and the bottom hitting an uncomfortable 106 degrees. "

Thanks.

 

I always run in low power mode. With the SSD, it's like the machine is off noise wise. In low power I've no trouble running Hulu. My machine can get pretty noise running at max power. Perhaps that's how they did it at Laptopmag.