x120e Owner's Thread

Just a comment on construction. I have worked on many machines over the years, including a bunch of notebooks. The internal construction on the x120e is the best I've ever seen. Everything is solid, and all the parts are easy to get to. Nicely done. Putting in the new SDD was easy as pie.

 

after going through 111 pages, i have a quick question.

for the extended battery ( 6 cell) , i plan to purchase it separately ( no config options available)

is the battery the same as the t61 (6 cell) battery, or are the connectors / is the battery different?

thanks!

 

Pretty sure it's not the same, since there is a 9-cell battery available for the T61, and I've never heard of a 9-cell for the X120e. Ergo, it's likely that the 6-cell batteries for the two are not interchangeable (indeed, given the T61's greater size, it wouldn't make sense to use the same configuration).

 

No, they're not the same. The X100e and X120e share the same 3- and 6-cell batteries, though.

 

T61 & x120e don't share the same battery. One thing i must say is that the 6-cell on x120e gives approx. 7-8 hrs of backup on balanced power plan. Amazing stuff.

 

Just a friendly reminder.

I don't remember the exact numbers, but the x120e 3 cell has a significantly larger capacity compared to the x100e 3 cell. They'll both work in either machine, but I would make an effort to get the x120e 3 cell.

 

Interesting and ugly problem today--I couldn't connect via wireless or wired connection to a network. I tried shutdowns, removing battery, the whole works. The only thing that got me back online was connecting to the charger(!). Things seemed to work OK after that.

Has anyone else seen this kind of problem?

 

@wintermute7 : I haven't faced such issues yet. This could be due to a faulty Driver/software installation. Have you changed anything within your hardware ?

 

@Shan2129: Nope. I did a clean install of Win7/32 on the machine for various reasons and--well, yes, I did change the HD to an SSD along the way, but that shouldn't affect this. And the problem seems to have cleared up. OTOH, I've had the machine hybernate itself a couple of times (including before the SSD) when the battery is well-charged, claiming that it's low on juice. The problem goes away when the machine wakes up from hibernation, but it could be a software problem with power software; that might explain both phenomena.

I should say that with an SSD, this thing ROCKS.

 

@Wintermute7: I had the hibernation problem before, but the behavior disappeared at some point... I think it may have been fixed in a more recent BIOS update.

 

I had permanent network connection problems. Went away when I removed the Lenovo 'thinkvantage access connections' software (or something like that) and rather let windows handle the network.

 

All:

Thanks for the useful information. I've been trying to build this as a fairly "light" system, but I have installed some drivers & c. I'll try to do a BIOS update this weekend and see if that helps, then go on to explore this and that. Again, thanks!

 

New and interesting problem, which may not be related to the X120e (or may be). I have been using a Windows phone (WP7.5) for a little over a year. I recently decided to make my X120e the Zune host for it.

I've never had trouble syncing it with other machines but the sync with this computer is. so. slow. it. is. un. believable. 16GB in the phone, 13GB of music, and after 7 hours, it wasn't even 50% complete. Anyone else run into trouble with Zune?

 

Does it sync over USB? Are you using the USB 2.0 port (yellow)?

 

This is via USB sync; it tries to sync, but it moves SO SLOWLY. And I've tried both the yellow USB port and another.

 

anyone having problems with thinkvantage toolbox crashing?

 

Which SSD did you get? Is there that big of a difference in speed? I read that the lenovo only supports SATAII too, but I don't think it will make much of a difference.

Also, has anyone had problems with the battery bar being inaccurate? My lenovo says the batter is low so I charge it, but then within a few minutes, it shows it is at 100% charged. Then when I unplug it, it shows that it is 7% within a few minutes.

Thanks

 

That sounds more like a battery issue to me. You might try getting it replaced if it's still under warranty, or using the Power Manager utility to do a battery reset.

 

I downloaded battery bar to see if it was reporting the same battery and it was. Currently, it says it will take 36 minutes to recharge the battery then it jumped to fully charged. Yeah, currenty i'm doing the battery gauge reset. It says the full runtime on the battery bar app is 36 minutes. I got the laptop in January and I haven't used it enough for it to have degraded that much.

Update: after doing the battery reset, it says that my battery condition is poor and it can only store 54% of it's original full charge capacity. So I guess somehow the battery went bad? That's disappointing.

Do I just have to call them up and ask them to send me a battery or do I have to go to one of their authorized warranty service providers? I've never dealt with lenovo customer support before.

Thanks for the info.

 

If you're within your 1 year of warranty, you can call Lenovo support. They will ask to remotely connect to your laptop, and then they will check the battery health information in Power Manager. If it's really at 54% health (let them know you did a reset) within a year, they'll mail you a replacement.

 

Thanks for the info! Yeah I called them and they remotely connected for like 30 seconds. I had the battery power manager pulled up with the battery showing poor condition with 54% health. They are mailing me a replacement. It seemed like pretty good customer support. I just had to wait a long time before someone picked up the phone.

 

Glad it worked out well for you!

 

hey everyone ! X120e is a very well built, good performing device. As mentioned before in this thread, processor is a bottleneck. I am happy with this, but sometimes while typing documents the cursor freezes for a moment or two & then types all that the keys that I press in that period at once. It doesn't misses out on the key strokes, but a little hang is kinda annoying. Does anyone else has faced this issue ?

 

I put in a Crucial M4 128GB drive because I'd heard good things and the price was reasonable. It works fine; I did a fresh install of Win7/32 Ultimate, connected via ethernet cable to the web, and downloaded all the drivers from Lenovo. If I were doing it again, I'd put all of the drivers in a USB key BEFORE installing Windows. Then there'd be none of this "OMG! No WiFi" stuff

 

They did. Several of my laptops had this problem too. They disappeared last week when we updated the image of the burned BIOS and OS.

BIOS update it is

 

I have seen this sometimes. I tend to think this is more an application issue.
it can happen almost anywhere except notepad... txt. chrome, firefox, ms word, excel.... it can just show up and vanish with no notice. if you leave performance monitor open/running, you'll be hard-pressed to see any cpu bottlenecking other than the obvious [big fat high def videos, file conversions, etc].

speaking of Browswers: the new 64-bit beta-release Firefox "Nightly" is very good - the best Firefox ever and first one to rival chrome IMHO. it is my daily driver now even though its still very much W-I-P

 

Hey guys i've had this X120e for a month and i'm experimenting some temperature issues. My laptop is always around 65-67 C with minimal usage. When i start doing some tasks it goes up to 70 and therefore fans are always running.

I'm using TPFanControl with this levels (i customized them because i would like my laptop to be quiet)



Level=60 0 // Level=140 0
Level=67 0 // Level=150 1
Level=70 1
Level=75 3 // Level=165 3
Level=80 7 // Level=175 7
Level=90 64 // Level=195 64


Im also ignoring no5 and 7xd sensors (the last one because is always on 72C)

What can i do?
Are my temp sensors measures wrong ?

I really dont know what to do, i read all of you have your x120e on 50's when doing basic tasks

Should i change the thermal paste (avoiding the warranty)? or Undervolt it?

Please help me

Thanks in advance

 

f8290 - this isn't normal. what does it feel like to you near the vent, upper left corner? and feeling the bottom - that should be the only warm spot anywhere. Even when mine has really been taxed, like with a very long Flashplayer session on Hi Def it does not get "hot", only warm ... I would guess in tactile human terms its 100 deg F. Right now, the fan is inaudible [don't know if itson] and the vent area is at most 80 F.

how much ram? stock HD or ??? What is running in the background? it all matters a lot. too little ram + a bunch of clutter in the background means a thrashing disk drive: if its a 5400 rpm small-buffer drive, its worse thrashing.

 

Which temperature sensor are you using?

 

First of all, thank you both for the responses

Look i was thinking about that, is really strange, i feel it very cold (i wake up from sleep, is cold here and the sensor shows 65C), i mean it doesnt feel LIKE 67C i'm warmer than that (im 36?) i think that it could be some trouble with the sensors, i dont know..

I've 6gb of ram (crucial 4gb extra) and the HD is the stock one. Im not running any specific app in the background, just "normal" windows' tasks

I'm using all sensors, just 'bypassing" these:

IgnoreSensors=no5,x7d

Are you doing the same?

could it be a driver-related issue? I mean could the OS be taking wrong readings from the sensors?


UPDATE: Ive undervolted it and the temps (according to the sensors) dropped down just a few degrees 1-3C

UPDATE 2: Do you think i should buy one of these? http://www.ebay.com/itm/04W1380-LENOVO-X120E-HEATSINK-FAN-/160786567437 or maybe replace the thermal paste?

 

how much RAM do most of you guys have with this machine? Right now I have 2 gb but i'm thinking about adding another 2 gb or 4 gb stick. Will it work sufficiently on 4 GB or will 6 GB give any noticeable differences? The price difference is only about $7.

Thanks.

 

go to 8gb. its too cheap right now. saves your hard drive, runs cooler, etc.

 

I need to rewind my remarks. your notes provoked me to go grab a few utilities and get readings on my own. the util I like best for now is HWINFO64 [beta... not hwinfo32].
I did use several others.

I now see that mine, at idle, is in the same range as you mention. to the human touch, it is not hot at all, just warm near the vent [upper left], and even under a heavy load it never feels hot, but the temp is 65C +/- and does not fluctuate very much. from reading around, this is the normal range [and I'm looking at all the sensors and their ranges, not just the cpu and/or gpu].

so, unless you think you're hitting throttling, I wouldn't be concerned about it.

but to your other point, a really class A thermal-paste job can make a couple of degrees diff, but if you have not done so already, I would first take the steps of maxxing out RAM, and moving to a good SSD [I like crucial], as those steps for the most part take the heat gen by the HDD out of the equation.

thanks for raising the question and tangentially challenging me to do better diligence

edit: just a note, and this will be apparent to any of you using it: HWINFO64 has a bug, copied over from the prior versions, that mis-renders F to C conversions on some of the sensor readings. You can flip it to F, to C, and back, and the mistakes will move around from one reading to other, but its still there. I don't think it means an incorrect reading, just a bug in conversion execution

 

Thanks again for the response.

Look i think that there is something very weird going on here. I came home and the x120e was sleeping, i woke it up and TPFanControl showed 60-64C while the bottom was really really cold i mean like 20C.
I know the sensor is not in the housing but after hours sleeping the difference couldn't be that big.

I cant figure whats going on.. a driver issue? a thermal(paste) issue?..

 

did you read the readme.txt on that experimental program?
if you have an issue, it could well be the installation of tpfancontrol.
pls read it. then see if you can figure out a way to restore your devices to their proper state.
is your fan running when awakening?

uninstall, and maybe find a restore point prior to installing all those device modulators

 

Yes, i did read it, I think it might be either a soft issue or a hardware one..

It's just i dont know what else to test, I'm thinking on changing the thermal paste, I dont see another option. Because booting from a usb (a linux distro) wont be very useful since i should install a lot of drivers..

 

we may be talking past one another: the package may be causing the problem. remove that hairball and try to reset everything to pre-install of that .
I wouldn't install that on a bet. you're a guinea pig [no offense].

after you de-install that, what I would try is to install one of the proven, longterm utilities like hwmonitor or hwinfo, and boot to either a diags boot or Safe boot, and let it run awhile with LOGGING on so you get a trace over a couple of hours or so. my guess is you do not have an issue, other than one introduced by those untested device daemons

 

It depends in large part on the OS you're using. 32-bit Windows won't be able to use more than around 3GB. In that case, at least, you'd see absolutely no performance difference. 64-bit systems can use much more, and I expect you'd see a difference, but I don't know how much.

Since I'm running 32-bit Windows (it's what I happened to have), I have 4GB in the machine.

 

8 gb seems like overkill. Plus it's $48 for 4 gb x 2. I'd rather just buy a 2 GB or 4 GB stick to add on to the current 2 GB stock.

My Lenovo has 64 bit Windows. I thought they all came with 64 bit windows, but I guess not? Yeah I wouldn't add more than 3 GB if I had 32 bit windows. I guess I might just go with the 2 GB stick to total 4 GB. Thanks.

 

I got mine used, and it did come with 64-bit Win7, but the previous user had done some things that, well, let's say, made life difficult--and the restore disks he'd made had an error :-(. Since I was replacing the HD with an SSD anyway, I thought I'd do a fresh install, and I had a licensed set of 32-bit Win7 Ultimate, so that's what I used.

Interestingly, though it seems they all shipped with a 64-bit OS, the utilities & such that Lenovo has for this machine are all 32-bit versions, which was great for me.

 

Well i finally ran an USB live Ubuntu on it, and i checked the sensors: while idling it was at 60-61 C whit a couple of Firefox tabs + 1 youtube tab it was at 70C, and when opening another Youtube tab it reached 75c

All the time the fan was running at 450-500 RPM

So now i dont think it is a software issue, do you think i should definitely replace the thermal paste?

PS; while it was at 70/75C it didnt feel THAT cold on the bottom.. its confusing..

 

this is not about x120e per se, but may offer some encouragement about lapping/paste. i'll search a bit more. did you google extensively? dm1z also uses this platform and there are more gamers there than here.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=102345

 

also here - if you read through the reviews, some pretty dramatic temp drops after doing paste right
Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-E350N-USB3 AMD E-350 APU (1.6GHz, Dual-Core) AMD Hudson-M1 FCH Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo

 

I've found this thread

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thi...ermal-compound-replacement-great-justice.html

i read the threads you posted and i think it would be my last shot.. do you agree?

 

go for it. take some pictures as it will benefit many.
i checked with one of our resident gurus who suggested IC Diamond as the best paste - not necessarily the most exotic but given the envelope we're working with it is as good as you're going to reasonably get.
newegg does not have it.
amazon does:
Amazon.com: Innovation Cooling Diamond "7 Carat" Thermal Compound - 1.5 Grams: Computers & Accessories

you might find better or better deal.

 

I have a tube of IC thermal paste, and although it does work better than stock, it doesn't improve thermal performance as much as other pastes, such as TX-2 or MX-3. Also one thing to note is that the diamond paste scratched the polished chip of one of my desktop GPU's, and also scratched some of the laser etching off the aluminum CPU surface. Probably not a huge deal, but just something I wanted to point out.

 

Is there anyway to make use of the WWAN slot for something else?

I'd much rather put a Crystal HD Decoder card in there than a WWAN card.

I know it wasn't designed for such a thing and there is the whitelisting issue...i'm just curious to know what it would take to make that slot useful.

thanks!

For those having battery issues:

My battery life sucked...2 hours at best. I was very disapointed.

Called Lenovo support....replaced within 48 hours.

Now I get 5+ hours!!

I would guess I had a bad original battery or something.

 

That was with a 6-cell battery??

 

Yes...6-cell battery with 2 hours life!

It must have been defective or something.

Lenovo support had me run some battery apps and it just made it worse.

The new 6-cell replacement is awesome.

 

I've been lucky...I got mine with a 6-cell, the machine was a year old and though I run it on the battery most of the time, I haven't run out yet. I'm probably getting 5-6 hours per charge. Too bad you had to put up with the problem, but at least you got decent service!