X61s question

Hi guys,
What do you think about this specs:

X61s
Intel Core 2 Duo L7300 1.4GHz
INTEL X3100 UPTO 256MB
1024MB DDRII
120GB SATA 5400 RPM
WINDOWS XP PRO
4 Cell Lithium-Ion

Will it be enough for a engenering student who need web surfing and programing?

What is the weight of this unit with 4 cell? and how long os the battery life?

Thanks in advance.

 

The specs look good. I would upgrade to an 8 cell battery for longer battery life. The laptop weighs about 3.3lbs with an 8 cell battery.

 

I would upgrade to 2 gigs of ram for sure. err wait, I didn't notice you said xp pro. personally i would go with vista. I love it, and I really don't what the big deal is about it, but thats just my opinion

I'm a grad student and carry my x61s with me all day and I just have the 4 cell battery. I probably use it 10 hours a day or so before I go home, so an 8 cell wouldn't be enough. For me at least, there are always battery outlets everywhere in classrooms and the library, so the smaller charge has never really been an issue since I can easily plug it in.

 

I second the 8 cell battery, It more than doubles the time, and battery life is one of the main selling points of ultraportable laptops

 

The ram is sufficient, but 2 gigs wont hurt (just upgrade ureself as its cheaper).

And i recommend upgrading the battery. I mean the point of the x series is portability, and u want as much battery as possible.

Plus it should be powerful enough for engineering. Im an engineering student, and really programming doesnt really need much of an computer.

 

does any one know what is the weight diffrence between the 8cell and the 4 cell? and how much work time will thr 4 cell provide?

 

I don't think Lenovo has the 8 cell battery available for purchase anymore. They removed it from the X61 line (temporary), just like they did with the T61s (9 cell).

 

upgrade to a bigger battery and you will be fine

 

Thanks for all the good advice but someone can please answer the question?

 

2.7lbs. w/ 4 cell.
3.3 lbs. w/ 9 cell.
You get about 9hrs with battery stretch/9cell
You get about 2:30 -3hrs with the 4-cell
battery stretch disables everything (wifi, sound, ultrabase, dvd drive, bluetooth, and dims the screen to 0)
I would suggest you get:
a) 2 batteries
b) 1 battery and one AC Adapter so you can charge/use the laptop near an outlet.

ENGINEERING:
The laptop should be powerful enough. It runs a dual-core.
Make sure you upgrade the ram though.
Engineering software requires a lot of folding and rendering.
I would suggest you worry more about upgrading the RAM.
You can get the a 4 gig SD card and use it as ready boost (what I do) and it will significantly improve performance.

 

How do you define "significantly improving performance"? I'd be great if you could provide some objective comparisons with and without your SD card/ReadyBoost, i.e. using:

- Event viewer to test boot times
- PCMark05
- HD Tune/Tach

I haven't noticed any tangible differences on my X61, but then again I have 3GB RAM. While you "only" have 2GB RAM you should still have more than sufficient for ReadyBoost not to make a significant impact.

 

Well I noticed while loading adobe.
It would usually take me about 16-20 secs to load it.
and now it takes me 10 secs while using readyboost.
I didn't go around benchmarking everything software, but I did do this and i noticed a significant improvement on software load times that I use daily.

 

Are you sure this was not because the application was pre-loaded into RAM via Superfetch?

 

Pretty sure. Since i used the laptop for a month before using the SD card. I also did defrag the laptop so it prioritizes the software I most use. So the combination of both might have helped in that dept.
The only that stops the loading of Adobe PS completely is the fact that I get a warning telling me that the screen is not calibrated.
I figured the RB and the defrag both played a part in shortening the load time of the software.
Try running RB for a while and you should see a difference in your software load times (as far as frequently used software)

 

Thanks for the info.

The thing is though, that it only takes about 4 seconds on my X61 to load Photoshop CS3, so I doubt it will cut much more off the load time, but I'll see if running Readyboost for a longer time will make any difference.

 

I went ahead and disabled the screen calibration warning and it loads a lot faster. About 4 secs (the same as yours).
Use it for about a week and you should notice a difference in 2-3 days.
According to the guy who owns ReadyBoost:


Q: How much of a speed increase are we talking about?
A: Well, that depends. On average, a RANDOM 4K read from flash is about 10x faster than from HDD. Now, how does that translate to end-user perf? Under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, the system is much more responsive; on a 4GB machine with few applications running, the ReadyBoost effect is much less noticeable.

Based on his engineering needs (which requires a lot of resources and rendering power) I would suggest go to 4 gigs if you can, which costs about $165 on eBay or getting a Lenovo (Hynix if I'm correct) stick of 1gig eBay $45 with shipping and getting a 4 gig SD card $45 on Newegg.
So $165 vs. $90.
His rendering will be helped by the SD card according to the premise of ReadyBoost.

From Matt Ayers:

"I'm the Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows Client Performance group and own the ReadyBoost feature. I wanted to give some offical answers based on the excellent questions and discussions that I've seen in this blog, to date. Also, I'll be using this as a starting point for the official ReadyBoost FAQ.

Overall, as many posters have pointed out, the feature is designed to improve small random I/O for people who lack the expansion slots, money, and or technical expertise to add additional RAM. As y’all know, adding RAM is still the best way to relieve memory pressure.

 

Thanks for the info. I read the whole interview with Matt Ayers some months ago. At that time, I actually posted the link to the interview in the NBR Windows forum

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=157051