X200 Discussion & Issues/Critique

I purchased the warranty for X200.. It's still in process, so how many days does it take for Lenovo to complete the order?

 

My order was place 10/22. 10/25, my MC got charged the amount for the 2 yr warranty. I called in and they said that the laptop is held up in custom. I am assuming it's going to them first...then to me?

 

I was talking about the extended warranty. I purchased the X200 in September. I purchased them separately.

 

I would like to ask this again:

Where can I download the Lenovo vista theme? I did a fresh install and would like the theme back.

 

has anyone successfully done a windows system restore on their x200 using vista?

I am on the factory vista installation (the way it came out of the box) and I am unable to use any system restore point, ones I created or points the system routinely does. I know a fresh install would help but I can't do that at the moment (I will later on).

 

I am not sure if there is a theme...but there are icons http://jedicore.com/x200/icons/

 

I think I know why the review of the X200s here isn't available yet - they already have the new version with LED-backlit screen and webcam. At least my crystal ball tells me that.

 

Hmm, not according to the Lenovo web site....

And there are reviews to be had out there -- I wrote a short one here.

 

to whom it may concern,

after 30 restarts I found how how to fix system restore. If your system restore does not work from vista and gives "unspecified error", run from safe mode but select the "recovery" option instead of "safe mode". All your restore points should work then.


now someone please help me with my wifi

 

Hey guys,

I didn't order the BT module with my x200, but my friend turned me on to:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad...31534QQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp1713.m153.l1262

It will take a while to get here from China, but I will be sure to post pictures and such for anyone else interested in adding bluetooth to their x200 after the fact .

 

So after a few days of use with my X200 with T9400 2.53 GHz CPU, I'm not too pleased about the battery life. This cpu is rated at 35W TDW instead of 25W TDP for the T8600. I had no choice in the CPU configuration as it was a replacement for my X61 by Lenovo.

Anyways, today was the first time I had any real extensive use of the battery (9 cell). It was charged to 100% and all that I have been doing is Word, wifi on, brightness at 50%, and listening to music. Power setting to Power Source Optimized

So far, I'm at 50% after 2 hours of use only, with 2:30 hrs remaining according to the battery meter. That only gives me about 4.5 hrs of battery life! Which is about half of what is report with the T8600 CPU!

I can probably stretch it to 5 hrs if I have screen at minimum, no wifi, and no music. This is worse than my x61, where I can active 5-6 hrs with this kind of use.

This sucks

On another note, I don't know why my HDD keeps flashing. According to Peformance monitor, it is spinning up and down constantly, from 0 KB/sec all the way up to >8000 KB/sec. It just keeps fluctuating. Is this normal? Virus scan is not active.

 

Vista caches a lot initially for the first week or so of usage to try and get your pattern down. Playing music WILL tax the CPU more than office productivity. You just need to adjust your settings. Everyone else can get REALISTIC 7-9 with internet and office use but we aren't playing music or videos.

 

Playing music taxes the CPU? Really?

My 5 year old Compaq V2000 (Pentium M) can play music without a hiccup and still get me 2.5 hrs of battery life.

 

I don't think T9400 (35W) versus P8600 (25W) would make that much of a difference in battery life. I had a P8400 2.2ghz X200 a while ago with a four-cell battery. I could barely get 1 hour and 57 minutes of battery life on optimized, 75% brightness, and wifi on. You do the math for the nine-cell battery. So your 4.5 hours is more typical than not I believe.

I felt my X200 was hugely disappointing considering all the hype about the increased battery life. I think some of the people getting 10 hours of battery life with the nine-cell are full of crap, undervolting, screen brightness set at one bar, or perhaps not running Windows Vista.

 

The only way music playing taxes batteries is with visualizations. That would be cpu and vid chips, and a bright screen.

 

We have told you the settings we use. We set the brightness to about half, and throttle the CPU. You don't need to assume we're lying. Look at the review from this site. But thanks assuming. And there are quite a number of brightness settings between 75% and 1 bar...have you ever tried experimenting with it? Or just go ahead and assume we're all lying.

 

Visualizations does not use the GPU necessarily at all... and you think playing music does 0% CPU usage...? Really...? Every little bit matters.

 

Download CPU-Z and see what your processor throttles down to. With a 2.4GHz P8600 processor it would drop down to 800 MHz per core when idle. From some of the review units with a T series processor (W500/W700) I have only seen a drop to 1.6GHz per core. This would cause a substantial difference in battery life.

Vista does have a bad way of thrashing the hard drive. In my experience, this will tone down after a few weeks (and especially after the laptop has been running a few hours consecutively), but the hard drive still has issues spinning down. I would also recommend you adjust the hard drive spin down timer to 15 minutes or more because constantly spinning the drive up and down is bad on the battery and the drive.

I didn't test the battery life on my x200 (P8600, 9 Cell, 160GB 5400 RPM, Vista Business 64) too heavily on music, but I did test it on video and web browsing heavily. With medium brightness (6/15), wi-fi on, and a processor at the slow setting I got very respectable battery life. I would get about 8.5 hours with a web browser, 7.5 with standard definition video, and 6.5 with high definition video. Your numbers may be slightly lower due to the T series processor, but they should still be reasonably close and better than you are getting.

 

I think the idle at 800mhz versus 1.2/1.6ghz is key. My P8400 would only idle at 1.2ghz at battery mode, even when undervolting.

 

is there any way to throttle down the idle CPU speed? I'll have to check what the idel CPU speed is on my laptop

 

You could probably undervolt the CPU with a program like RMClock but I'm not sure if it would substantially improve battery life. The first thing I would recommend is that you double check your settings in BIOS and Power Manager to make sure that SpeedStep is properly enabled.

The processor should automatically undervolt. This process can be either dynamic (adaptive) or fixed (slow). The first option gives you good battery life with little/no change in performance compared to maximum speed. The second option gives you the best battery life, but some tasks may take longer to complete (this can be particularly useful if using an application that has a tendency to request way more CPU than it needs [older games, Firefox on a bad page]).

 

HI, so I would like to do a fresh install of windows xp. I have an external DVD±RW/CD-RW Drive, is it possible to install windows using my installation disk and my external drive??

Edit: Also if I am able to do so. Its there an easy way to reinstall all the drivers, without having to install them one by one?

one Last question. Would the 12.1'' zeroshock case fit the x200 with the 9 cell battery?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=295550

 

@tallshorty: i'll just chime in with what others have said. I think you should be getting more battery life even with playing music. Give vista a week or two to get settled (and remember it is learning how to be more effective, not just trying to **** you off) and use the battery manager software to tweak your settings (set your wifi card at "max power savings" etc). I was able to regularly pull between 8 and 10 hours with my X61s and X60s notebooks so I think similar numbers are completely realistic with the more efficient X200.

 

Thanks for all the feedback everyone.

I just download CPU-Z and it looks like at Max battery saving mode, my idle CPU speed is 1.6 GHz! No wonder I'm experiencing unusually short battery life.

Anyone know how I can throttle that down more?

 

RMclock will allow you to do that, there is a thread in this forum for it. but you can also wait for notebook hardware control to release a new version, which will also allow for it.

Can someone help me, I'm having some issues with my x200. The wifi problem still isn't fixed but I've given up on it.

-My network adapter "6To4 adapter" shows up with a yellow exclamation mark beside it in device manager. Does anyone know how to fix this? All vista updates have been applied, wifi driver is latest.

-Where is the hard drive spin down option in "power options"? I google and that is where it is supposed to be, but I can't find it...

-does anyone know where I can find the automatic accoustic management tweak for my seagate momentus 7200rpm ST9100821AS? It came factory installed and is very loud.

 

That is almost certainly your problem. The problem with using an application like RMClock is that it might not be dynamic or automatic. This would cause you to either manually adjust the processor regularly or substantially handicap your performance when plugged in by leaving it under volted. Ideally your system should be able to dynamically adjust over a wide range of voltages (I think the P8600 supports 4 or 5 steps) depending on how much power it needs.

I would try and contact either Lenovo or Intel and see if that is the appropriate stepping (report the exact voltage and MHz rating) for that particular processor. There may be an alternative BIOS or power management driver you can find that will take care of this for you. I would think that the T9400 should be able to downclock to 1.2GHz or lower (the P8600 went down to 800 MHz) and this will substantially improve battery life for basic tasks (web browsing, document editing, video playback, etc.).

 

My best guess is that 6to4 adapter is related to Firewire as that is the only device I know that has both a 6 pin and a 4 pin cable. This is odd because the x200 doesn't have a Firewire port, and Vista removed the option for networking over Firewire. Did you use some kind of Firewire adapter with your laptop at some point? If you uninstall that device does it come back?

If you have the Thinkvantage power manager installed (you should, it is much better than the stock Windows one) you can adjust hard drive spin down options in there. You need to switch to advanced mode and manually adjust each of your profiles for both plugged and unplugged to set this. One word of warning on the spin down. I found that in Vista the hard drive never actually spun down. It would drop power usage a bit, but it would not physically stop. I was able to get it to spin down in XP, but not in Vista (I suspect Superfetch and/or indexing may be to blame for this).

I'm not sure about the AAM driver for that particular drive. You can try and get one from Seagate, or there is the reasonably universal tool from Hitachi (I used this on my desktop) that can enable AAM on almost any drive. I believe there is both a diskette image and a bootable CD ISO. I'm pretty sure that you can't do this from Windows, and will instead need to do it from a pre-desktop environment. You should be aware that AAM may reduce drive performance (particularly random seeks), but if the noise is bothering you I would say that it's worth it.

 

IPv6 to IPv4 tunneling adapter.

 

I tried clean install on my dad's HP after swapping old HD with new HD. Now that I'm clear on clean install, I kind of want to do it on my X200, but I have a question. If I want to keep my recovery partition and do a clean install, what do I do?

 

How do you set you wifi card to "max power savings" ??

 

I think it would just be a easier if you mirrored the whole disc...bit for bit...since you had issues with the original backup disk.

 

Look in the lenovo power management utility and set it to advanced layout. Look for it in one of the settings.

 

Both RMClock and NHC do not have Vista 64 bit support .

I wonder if there is any easy way to lower the idle CPU speed. My T9400 seems to only fluctuate between 1.6 GHz and 2.53 Ghz.

 

I am actually going to call Lenovo up about this issue in a second. My new x200 tablet (SL 9400 @1.86 GHz) is only dropping down to 1.6 GHz in Vista. This drops my battery life down to about 6 hours (it should be more like 9). I know for a fact that the SL9400 should drop down to 800MHz (it works fine in the Ubuntu and Windows XP installs I did).

I think there may be some kind of setting that is wrong in some of the Vista configurations that Lenovo is putting out. I will find a way to get mine fixed (the problem is software not hardware, so I should be able to do it without sending it in [I really don't want to go through that again]). Whatever fixes mine, may also help yours. I think even the T9400 should be able to get down to 1.2GHz or maybe even 800 MHz (is there anyone with a T400 or other Thinkpad with a T9400 that can verify the steppings?). I'll get to the bottom of this problem and report back.

 

I am also getting about 5-6 hrs of battery life right now. I'll be eagerly waiting for your results. I hope this can be solved. Good luck!

 

Is the solution as easy as a battery manager setting?

I know that there is an option that asks you for a minimum and maximum processor speed in the battery manager utility. Unfortunately I don't have a thinkpad ATM so I can't be more specific.

 

I have the same problem with my x200s on a fresh Vista x64 install. I'm only getting about 7 hours of battery on a 9 cell (which is good, but not the 10+ hours I should be getting) If you find a solution, please share.

 

hey, has anyone set lenovo power manager to charge to 95% but have it go up to 100% anyway? It was working fine for me for a few weeks, but I left the computer off for 2 days and now turning it on the battery is charged fully. The thresholds are still at 60-95%.

 

Sadly it is not that simple. When I set mine to "slow" with the battery manager it still lists at 1.6GHz and wattage usage is around 11w with minimum display and no radios (turning up the display and enabling wi-fi pushes it closer to 15w). The x200 should be capable of 8-9 watts with minimum brightness and no radios, and the x200s/x200t should run at 6-7 watts with the same settings due to the Low voltage processor and LED screen (the batteries in the x200/x200s are identical, so energy efficiency is the difference in battery life).

I am still trying to run down a solution to this problem, but I haven't found one yet. To further test it I used the provided XP Tablet recovery DVD on a spare SATA hard drive last night to test out the battery performance. Unfortunately, I have the same problems here as I had with Vista. I could never get power usage below 11 watts no matter what I turned off, and as a result I can't get my battery life above 6 hours (the 8 cell in the x200t is a 66 WHr battery and it is quoted at 10.3 hours).

I am showing the following steppings for my processor ( SL9400 @1.86GHz):
Minimum Multiplier 6x (should probably be 3)
1.038 Volts, 1596 MHz
Maximum Multiplier 7x
1.20 volts, 1862 MHz

I should, but am not getting a slow option with a multiplier of 3 and a voltage around 0.75 volts in "super low frequency mode" and ≈800MHz.

The P8600 and T9400 should also be capable of similar multiplier adjustments, although the overall wattage will be slightly higher in each model.

 

I might be beating this to death, but what about if you go into Vista's control panel -> power options. The Lenovo battery manager is just a shell for this (as you are probably aware) but the Vista utility allows you to define the minimum processor state in a percentage format, not "slow", "fastest" etc. For example, my desktop is currently set to a minimum state of 5%.

I think we can deduce that the problem has to be with the battery manager utility since I think this is the only Lenovo customisation that touches any power options in the OS. There are power options in the BIOS too (have you looked there?). You could always just try uninstalling the battery manager and see what happens...

 

My vista control panel settings are set to 5% lowest too. I don't think it's a power manager problem either.

There is a bios update for the x200s that doesn't show in the driver matrix that I'm going to try later tonight (I can't run it within windows b/c I'm on x64, and I don't have my ultrabase with me to burn a cd). I'm not allowed to post a link (stupid forum rules), but Google x200s bios and it's the second result.

 

I just got off the phone with one of the guys at Lenovo. His suggestion was that I perform a full cycle on my battery 3 times. This is something I usually try and avoid to maximize battery longevity but I will give it a go. I am still on the first cycle, so it's possible (albeit unlikely) that I need to break the battery in before my wattage goes to an appropriate level.

 

Bios update did not solve. And, I don't see how doing battery cycles will make the cpu go into deeper sleep states. If it work, then great, but I'm skeptical.

 

I'd just like to chime in as well, as I have noticed that my processor, accroding to CPU-Z, does not clock below 1.6 ghz.

I've played around with a good bunch of the settings, in vista, but to no avail.

 

Recd my X200 today In the process of setting it up right now with win xp pro with sp3.

I downloaded the drivers but I still seem to be missing some. I have 3 unknowns:

PCI Simple Communications controller
Unknown Device
Unknown Device

I downloaded:

audio
bios
bt
intel chipset
fingerprint
modem
wired nic
power manager
trackpoint
turbo mem
video
wifi

what am i missing

 

regarding the 1.6 in the Bios. i'm not sure why its SUPPOSED to go under 1.6ghz. thats the limit from speestep and the 6x multiplier.. thats how it is on my desktop also

why are people expecting it to clock under 1.6ghz out of the box? if u want that i THINK you're supposed to down-clock it yourself.

 

So how do you downclock it?

 

As I can't post URLs, google sl9400 sleep states, and go to the first result from cpu world.

At 1.6ghz the VCore is about 1 volt. As this page shows, it can go much lower without special downclocking. That's why we care.

 

This is confusing.

I installed RMclock on my vista 64 via the workaround and when I am on battery, RMClock reports 0.84 Ghz @ 0.95V but CPUZ reports 1.6 Ghz ???