lenovo thinkpad x220t questions

thinking about buying x220t but have some questions.

why specifically buy this mobile pc tablet? particularly over hp elitebook 2760p?

also is it possible to have an ssd solid state drive as the main drive and a second hdd hard disk drive somewhere?
heard hdd is the bottleneck in performance and ssd is faster but less reliable and can suddenly break down and lose everything.
so wanna use a ssd to boot and run everything and save everything like personal files that cant be recovered on a hdd.

and if you have windows xp professional and installed it over windows 7 and installed all the drivers would it work fine?
is it difficult? how long would that take?

please help, anyone.

 

I'd get the X220t over the elitebook because of the more rugged build quality (yes, this is a bit subjective), lower weight (3.6 lbs vs 3.9) and higher capacity battery (66 Whr vs 44). And of course, the thinkpad keyboard.

You can use a 2.5" HDD in the main bay and put a mSATA SSD in the spare mini-PCIE slot (note, you will have to give up using WWAN, as the WWAN card goes in the second miniPCIE slot). You can then clone or install windows onto the mSATA drive and use it as your primary boot drive.

WinXP has less advanced pen input capabilities, so would not recommend downgrading from win7 unless you absolutely need XP for compatibility reasons (even then, running XP on a VM would probably be a better option).

 

Do keep in mind the X220t has a 7mm hard drive bay. The biggest 7mm drive right now is the 500GB Hitachi Z5K500, which I have. It's not the fastest drive, but fine for storage. If you're willing to modify the bay, you can use larger drives, but that will have consequences for your warranty.

If you want a tablet with a modular bay for an extra drive, the Fujitsus T901 or T731 are worth a look.

I'd agree using XP for a tablet seems counter-intuitive for a tablet as Windows 7 has much better tablet abilities, but Lenovo does supply the drivers if you're inclined.

 

did anyone hear the rumor that if you buy a pc with window7 after june 2 then you need only to pay $15 to upgrade to window 8?

 

PS The upcoming X230T is also worth considering. Compared to the X220T, it has some advantages:

* Ivy Bridge CPU with HD4000 IGP - the IGP is about 60% faster than the HD3000 in the X220T. It may also have more advanced GPGPU capabilities if and when intel ever gets around to writing a proper OpenCL driver with GPGPU support (their current OpenCL drivers only use the CPU for computations).
* Rapidboot speeds up boot times significantly (first seen on T420s)
* USB 3.0
* Rapidcharge lets you charge to 80% in 30 minutes
* Backlit keyboard option

Unknowns are the quality/feel of the chiclet keyboard, but I am carefully optimistic that lenovo won't screw it up. This coming from 8 years of thinkpad usage pre- and post-lenovo.

 

I don't know if Ivy Bridge has that drastic power savings from Sandy Bridge with the introduction of tri gate transistors, but the HD 4000 is vastly improved over HD 3000 (5650 Mobility scores vs 8600M GT/Mobility HD2600 scores). My main gripe about X220 tablet is the crummy touchpad, though thank goodness for the trackpoint. The 6 cell though bulky, likely is to remain the same as the X220 tablet, unless you can find that rare and overpriced 3 cell.

 

You might want to consider the screen's aspect ratio. There are those that believes the HP's screen aspect ratio is better for inking.

As for the drive replacement, I swapped out the HDD that it came with, to a Crucial 128GB drive. I had an Intel 80GB before that. I definitely recommend doing this. I can't see myself going back to a HDD as a boot drive any more. The difference is night and day.

I'm not sure why you would want to use Windows XP, maybe it's legacy software that you're using. But maybe you can boot with Windows 7, then run a XP virtual machine. If you really do need the large amount of disk space, then get a mSATA drive. Then install your main OS, Windows 7 on it. Install your XP and other stuff onto the HDD. Just my $0.02...

The HP looks really bulky compared to the X220T for some reason. Although I haven't seen the HP model myself before.....just from pictures.

 

I am also considering the x220t. What are the chances that the x220t drops below its current price of $1,104.15 (direct w/ coupon code)?

Do you guys have any speculations on the pricing of the x230t?

 

I mean are you talking about a base X220t? Probably not anytime soon. You can get some sweet configurations if you want to spend a bit more. My X220t came with i5-2520M, 4 GB, 6205 WLAN, Bluetooth 3.0, Fingerprint reader, multi-touch, 160 GB Intel SSD, 3 year warranty and 7 Professional for 1250 + shipping from Provantage. Try to camp that or Cost Central.

 

All x220t have an IPS panel.

 

All panels on the x220t tablets are IPS. They never offered TN panels for them

 

I cannot restate this, ALL X220 tablets are IPS. There is no such thing as non-IPS X220 tablet, only normal X220 and normal X230. The X230 tablet will be IPS only too. What Lenovo reps are telling you is dead wrong.

 

I found that thread at the thinkpads.com forum here, and the advice was that all tablet X220 models come with IPS screens. There is nothing contrary to this that I have seen for several generations of Thinkpad Tablet PCs, except perhaps the other high quality screens on the X200 tablet.

The configurations you posted in your pic at thinkpads.com all have IPS screens. I know because that is exactly what I used to configure my X220 tablet, and it is indeed IPS. This was without the website every having to explicitly say so.