x120e Owner's Thread

can't compare it with those but i think that, apart from the shoddy viewing angle, the screen is perfectily servicable. And really, on a laptop this size i think the viewing angle is not all that important.

I think that would depend on how much RAM you install and the size of the documents. So far i have not run into trouble iwht LibreOffice but i mainly work with pure text so that's not all that taxing. Opera is certainly not having trouble running multiple browser tabs at the same time, even if some have Flash content.

 

Thanks. Yeah I usually view the laptop straight on anyway. Since it is so small I don't think multiple people would be viewing it at different angles either

 

Not an owner yet but, I do own the X100e Elite and I can run Maya, Photoshop CS5 and Pale Moon (firefox) all at the same time with no heat issues and minimal lag. I have the L625 version that supports a slightly higher clock rate, double the cache and, more p-states than the L335 version so it runs cooler and a bit faster.

As a comparison the E-350 is slightly weaker than the L625 but, can still out-perform the L335 in some things and, under-perform slightly in others. However, the graphics performance of the x120e pretty much destroys that of the x100e by a very large magnitude.

So in theory, the x120e should have no problems running multiple instances of excel and powerpoint assuming you have enough system ram and a 64bit os

 

Thanks. Would 4 gb of ram be sufficient or would I need 6 or more?

 

4GB ought to be enough for anybody.

 

Even 2gb is more than enough. The bottleneck is cpu so adding more ram won't give you any snappyness boost.

 

4 Gb should be plenty. The people putting 8 Gb of RAM in these laptops are doing the equivalent of putting a set of ceramic brakes on an otherwise completely stock Toyota Yaris, lol.

 

I would just like to add that I was trying to purchase 2 X 4 gig of RAM for this machine and I came across a company called Comeuro.net Location selector. They have stolen my money and won't send me anything nor are they replying to my emails. I'm pretty upset.

 

Thanks for the info! I'll keep in mind that 4 gb will be the max I need.

 

My Lenovo Thinkpad X120e came on Thursday of last week. I noticed right away that it made a creaking / sticky noise every time I opened/closed the laptop. I figured since it was brand new that the noise would go away as the hinges are "broken in" so to speak.

Well now it is Sunday and having used the X120e extensively including opening/closing the laptop, the noise is still there. It's not so much of a creaking noise but a loud sticky noise as if you are pulling scotch tape off a surface. Normally this wouldn't bother me except that it's brand new and shouldn't be making any noises of this sort until well into several months (or years) of ownership.

I just wanted to see if there are any owners with a similar problem and what are my options as far as replacement, repair, or refund?

 

2GB is usually enough, but sometimes I get close to that amount. An extra 2GB stick costs $20? Just bump it to 4GB and don't worry. You'll never need 8GB.

 

How do we pop off the fn and ctrl keys safely? Want to swap them, making sure I don't break anything before doing it.

 

Gently get your finger under an edge - the top or bottom edge might be best - and lift. It should just pop off. To put it back on, place the key in the correct position and push down until you hear a click.

 

When I swapped it, I popped it off from the top. I had to use a credit card to push the little plastic thing inside back into the key when I was putting it back. When I just pushed it in, it was wobbly and didn't feel as secure as the other keys.

 

its extremely easy to bend the thin metal bit or break the tiny plastic bit in the key mechanism. wouldn't really recommend popping it off. if you touch type the bios setting should be good enough

 

Pop from the top, not the bottom. The key snaps on the top but has a kind of hook on the bottom. If you pull from the bottom you are likely to break it. I had no trouble unsnapping by pulling on the top edge. I showed a few people how it was done so mine has been unsnapped more than once.

 

Yup, popped mine from the top, it snaps back in perfectly with them swapped. Thanks!

 

Anyway to program the track point buttons? Would love to make those Back/Forward and Refresh for the middle.

 

Just saw the osx lion video from Apple .

I love the way you can swipe between previous and forward web pages on the web browser. Anyway I can do this on the thinkpad x120e?

 

you can set tap zones for forwards and backwards in the corners of your mouse trackpad sections.

 

Are you a wizard? Tell me how.

 

Technically yes, but swiping isn't good on Win notebooks. Nothing is as good as Apple's trackpad. The swiping is also available in Snow Leopard, so it's not a new feature from Lion.

That's Apple's only big advantage, though. Everything else is a personal preference or much better on Windows. I wish PC makers would put glass trackpads on these machines already.

 

I know!!!!
apple copies from pc makers all the time, I wish pc makers would copy apple properly and implement a lot of their tech and designs into their machines.

I think after having the x120e for 2-3 years I'll jump ship to Apple unless Lenovo has something really amazing around that time

 

For what it's worth; The HP Envy line resembles the Macbook Pro and some people even say it's "The PC equivalent of Apple."

 

It's more about the drivers than the touchpad material (I, for one, despise the stiction of glass on my fingers); supposedly, the touchpad looks marvellously in Linux, but is horrid with Synaptics drivers. Considering Synaptics also makes Apple touchpads (iirc), I'd think there's some conspiracy going on here.

 

Well I finally pulled the trigger on this one, should be here in a week. I decided no one offered a laptop that could do everything I wanted for under $800. So I decided to go with this and I picked up the office depot hp p6710f deal, (1 tb hd, athlon II 640 etc etc for $379) a quad core desktop for doing my video stuff. I'd rather have a laptop and desktop over a single $1000 laptop.

 

I've purchased mine a week ago (059624U) from DirectCanada.Com when it was on sale ($499 CAD) and love it! I've thrown a couple things in since purchasing:

-120GB OCZ Solid 3 SSD (PN: SLD3-25SAT3-120G)
-8GB DDR3 1066MHz SODIMM (PN: CM3X8GSDKIT1066 G)

This changed the WEI on the Hard Drive reading from 5.6 to 7.7, and the RAM from 5.6 to 6.0. My future plans for this netbook is to install a touch screen and a mobile card. Anyone know what touch screen kit would be compatible? Preferebly capacitive, but resistive would be ok.

Thank you!

 

What brand of RAM did you get and what are the CL timings? I've been raped by a company called Comeuro.net. I've paid them last month and they wont send my RAM. I should have googled them before I sent them a bank transfer as they requested me to do. I'm pretty angry that I cannot enjoy my laptop to its full potential even though I've paid for 8 gigs of RAM. I'm stuck with a paltry 2 gigs.

 

I bought these from NCIX when they had their sale. It was $68. The latencies it shows on Corsair's website were 7-7-7-20: Corsair Memory ? 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 SODIMM Memory Kit (CM3X8GSDKIT1066)

WEI shows 8GB of RAM installed (7.6GB readable). That sucks, sorry to hear about the bad sale. If you are looking for the same RAM that I've installed, check NCIX here:

NCIX.com - Buy Corsair CM3X8GSDKIT1066 8GB 2X4GB PC3-8500 DDR3-1066 SODIMM Memory Kit - Corsair - CM3X8GSDKIT1066 - in Canada

It's back at full price, but still a really good deal!

 

Does anyone know if there is any suitable, compatible replacement for the internal speakers? I tried looking on eBay and google but had no luck. Was just hoping to try and replace them for some higher quality speakers if possible.

 

Speakers are often customized for particular laptops to fit in the casings, and in any case, there's not all that much room in the X120e for significantly better speakers--from what I've seen, they seem a fair bit smaller than the ones used in my T500. I'd say your best bet is to instead spend the time and money and get a better pair of headphones.

 

Hello Zacate,

Many thanks for your recommendation. I've gone ahead and bought from here:

Corsair memory - 8 GB ( 2 x 4 GB ) - SO DIMM 204-pin - DDR3

I'm going to the police with respect to comeuro.net. I've googled them up and loads of people have been scammed up. The pathetic thing is they are actually in the UK, based in Wales. If they were a little closer I'd go round and see them.

 

This is what I'm doing:

AUNE HIFIDIY.NET Mini USB DAC Headphone Amp MK2 SE Ver | eBay UK

And:

6moons.com audio reviews: M2Tech hiFace

And:

Grado SR 325i - Headphones - Wired

of course all this stuff is much more cheaper on your side of the pond and you don't really need to be an audiophile and use an M2Tech from USB to SPDIF. The headphone amp is decent and thats all you need along with a nice pair of headphones and trust me, kaboom. You'll be blown away with the quality!

 

The best option is to go with these:

Amazon.com: NuForce Icon uDAC-2 (Black) Headphone Amp and USB DAC (24bit/96kHz): Electronics

and a set of good headphones. I have one and it's great.

 

No problem. They work great for me so far, I noticed my computer is a bit more responsive, not to mention it handles tasks a lot better. That could also be because of the SSD that I have installed though.

Really cool idea for the heaphone adapter. I will probably look into doing something like that too!

 

An odd problem is happening infrequently on my wife's X120e. Just at random, it'll shut down. An actual shut down too, as in it puts up the "Windows is Shutting Down" screen.

No other error messages. No overheating. Battery levels have been as high as 90% when it's happened. Just one second typing or watching a video, and the next, it's shutting down.

Has happened a few times on battery power. Once plugged in.

She doesn't have much running. It's basically stock, with all the Lenovo updates installed, and Microsoft Office.

Very confusing. Doesn't happen enough to make her want to be rid of the thing, but enough to make us go Hmmmmm.

Anyone else experience similar?

 

That's very interesting. What about when it's plugged in? Does it still occur? How frequently does it happen? Did you make any hardware changes too?

The reason why I ask is because since I've installed my SSD I've had problems with the bootup and shut down. For example, as of 3 hours ago I have been unable to power up my laptop. I I would press the power button, the fan would kick in for a second then the power would go off. It doesn't even have time to make it to the post screen. So I tried putting the old HDD in and it booted up just fine. How does that make sense? I can't even get into the BIOs with the SSD.

I thought the SSD might have become a useless paperweight, so I decided to try it on my desktop computer, and it WORKED! So the SSD didn't die, it boots up all the way to Windows on my Desktop computer, but the laptop just will not start up. It doesn't even load up to the point of displaying the Thinkpad screen.

Any ideas?

 

How much do you guys think I can sell an x120e with 4gb ram and 320 hd for? Think I want an x220

 

i use this:

XMI X-mini II Mini Speaker: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics

its the size of a golf ball, and i dont know how i ever could stand listening to my laptop speakers in the past. it also holds a charge for 12 hours of music so you can use it with your phone as well, and this thing is loud and has a shocking amount of bass for its size.

 

me too ocacasionally. infact todsay it did it. i was like is there a combination press i did that made it happen. only thing is it didnt do it when i had important stuff going on.

 

My x120e tends to shutdown sometimes. I"ve noticed that it occurs when I'm using tpfancontrol on the smart setting.

I put the program on bios mode and no restart or switching off has occurred since. I have upgradaed the ram by the way so that could be a reason for the random restarts.

 

TPFanControl's smart mode does not support the X100e and presumably the X120e. It expects fan settings to go from 0 to 7, whereas it actually goes from 0 to 3 then back to 0 (4) and up to 3 (7) again. You should set a custom fan profile or use BIOS settings.

 

Can you suggest a good profile to use? I am just using it on smart and it seems to work okay, but the computer has gone into hibernation on two occasions while unplugged because "the battery reached a critical state" even though it was mostly charged, so I'm guessing this might be why.

 

I leave it to BIOS on my X100e. I left it on Smart at first and it shutdown a few times before I figured it out.

The go-into-hibernate thing is a weird issue that seems to fix itself with time (likely unrelated to TPFC); happened at first with my T400, but it has stopped happening entirely.

 

Hey folks,

Newegg currently has a Kingston V+100 96GB SSD for $99.99 after rebate. How much of a performance boost would I see if I replaced my stock 320GB 7200RPM drive with this? Is it worth 100 bucks? I feel like the CPU is the real bottleneck in the x120e, so I'm not sure how much better an SSD would be. Thanks for your help.

 

My old x100e had a Kingston V Series and it really brought that notebook to life. Boot times were cut in half and applications booted noticeably quicker. Assuming you don't need the space, go for it.

Just as a side note; I can't believe how much SSD prices have dropped. I paid over $3=1 Gb for my SSD a year ago.

 

The x120e is my portable lappy, while I use my Macbook Pro as my main computer. So space isn't a priority. My current HDD in the x120e has about 34GB used, so after transferring the data over to the SSD I would have around 55GB left. I assume SSDs don't perform less if they are close to full as HDDs do, correct?

I'll admit I've never used an SSD before, so any suggestions on how to optimize it for Windows 7 use? I don't know if I should be enabled TRIM for example. Thanks for your help!

 

Help!

I'm getting a BSOD on my Thankpad X120e. Error message is "page fault in nonpaged area". I try re-booting into last known good configuration - doesn't work. I tried booting into safe mode - doesn't work. I tried doing a recovery install using the Lenovo tool - doesn't work.

From googling, I understand this is most likely a memory or driver issue.

The only change I made to my computer last night was installing Daemon Tools Lite. Could this be causing the BSOD?

Any suggestions? I have no problem losing my data - I just want to be able to use my lovely x120e again...

Your help is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Ryan

 

In my experience this usually indicates system instability, though it may also be a driver issue. Have you installed new memory lately?

If you're unable to boot into safemode, try running Memtest86+. You should be able to run it from a USB drive. Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool That will help eliminate memory as an issue and it doesn't require an OS.

If the memory is ok you might need to reinstall Windows, though you shouldn't have to...

 

Thank you for the quick response! I will run memtest when I get home and let you know of the results.

No hardware changes lately. I did up the RAM to 4GB when I first bought the unit a few months back. Nothing changed since then.