Tech Valley News

Review by Jef­frey Varszegi for Lenovo ThinkPad X100E 11.6-Inch Net­book (Black)
Rat­ing:
I have used this as my main work machine, doing office / pro­duc­tiv­ity work, for about a month now. It is a great small lap­top, espe­cially for the price.

Build qual­ity is superb. The X100e does not have a roll cage (i.e. inter­nal metal skele­ton) like some higher-priced X and T series Thinkpads, but you’d never know it, prob­a­bly because the small size makes it largely unnec­es­sary. The case is nice and stiff; the hinges are superb; and in gen­eral the build qual­ity seems to be a cut above the T6x series, at least. How­ever, I do miss the slightly rub­bery paint from my other Thinkpads; this black matte paint is smoother. Still nice, but not as nice.

The key­board is the best I’ve used on a lap­top. It is supe­rior to the ones on my T60 and T61, pre­vi­ously my favorites.

The touch­pad is also superb.

I’ve dis­abled the cam­era, partly because I’ll never use it and partly to save on bat­tery life.

The screen is very nice and bright. In fact I have to turn it down from the bright­est set­ting some­times indoors, as it can hurt my eyes due to the extreme bright­ness. The res­o­lu­tion is just fine for doing research, writ­ing, etc. After a quick period of adapt­ing, the screens on my T6x series feel huge and overly tall by com­par­i­son. It is enough res­o­lu­tion to dock side-by-side win­dows and work with dual doc­u­ments, barely.

I haven’t had any prob­lems with heat. I think this may be because I don’t stress the video card much if at all. The bot­tom gets quite mildly warm under pro­longed use.

Per­for­mance is just fine in my book. With 9 win­dows of Google Chrome open, two Word doc­u­ments, one Notepad text file, Win­dows Media Player play­ing an HD movie, two Win­dows Explorer win­dows, Adobe Reader 9 opened to a large PDF file, True­Crypt drive encryp­tion run­ning, AVG, and War­craft III– RAM usage was around 1.2 gigs, and proces­sor use hov­ered around 60–70%.

I am not a big gamer. Play­ing War­craft III against my 4-year-old, though, at full res with all eye candy turned on runs smoothly.

Going fur­ther on the per­for­mance angle, the AMD MV-40 is often roughly com­pared with a Pen­tium M 1.6 GHz or there­abouts. That is prob­a­bly pretty accu­rate, but my machine feels a bit faster than machines of that rough vin­tage, such as the T4x series. This is prob­a­bly due to the SSD, faster RAM, faster bet­ter every­thing else etc. in the X100e. So you would essen­tially get a better-than-X41 per­former in the X100e in my opin­ion, for a bud­get price. Not bad for doing pro­duc­tiv­ity work at all, though it is no speed demon by today’s standards.

I spent roughly $100 to upgrade to an X25-V SSD, which notice­ably improved per­for­mance. After the upgrade, my Win­dows boot time is 25 sec­onds, shut­down time is under 10 sec­onds, sleep/standby mode time is 4 sec­onds, and resume from sleep/standby is 2 sec­onds. The 160 GB drive my machine came with went into an $8 enclo­sure and now serves backup duty.

Bat­tery life eas­ily goes beyond 5 hours for the type of work I do (before the SSD upgrade it was gen­er­ally around 4:30). I have the proces­sor set to max out at 60% in bat­tery mode, and the screen is gen­er­ally set to around 5–6 bright­ness, which is usu­ally enough.

I still don’t have Pho­to­shop loaded on this machine. I think that’s where the processor’s short­com­ings would be most notice­able, proces­sor– and ram-hungry appli­ca­tions like that. But this is not a slow machine IMHO.

I also don’t think most peo­ple would need more than 2 GB of RAM, unless using some­thing like Pho­to­shop where they wanted bet­ter per­for­mance. Sim­ple mul­ti­task­ing that most peo­ple would do prob­a­bly wouldn’t need more than 2 GB. Even with music run­ning in the back­ground, a slew of browser win­dows, etc. I just don’t see how it could stack up to 4 GB. It seems to be an increas­ing prac­tice to load a machine with 4 GB or even 8 GB of RAM, but I won­der how many eager buy­ers real­ize that the RAM they’re buy­ing will never be used.

Of course, I am run­ning Win­dows in a min­i­mal way. I guess some OS fea­tures could con­sume extra RAM, although I wouldn’t know what they are. I tend not to like a lot of junk run­ning in the back­ground, unless it will actu­ally help me run my pro­grams or the machine.

The machine is very attrac­tive and professional-looking. Peo­ple con­stantly ogle it, and I’ve received many ques­tions about it. I per­son­ally pre­fer the size to that of the X200 (the X100e is notice­ably smaller).

The lack of an opti­cal drive is def­i­nitely a neg­a­tive for me. It makes it much mroe of a has­sle to install things. If you don’t already have an exter­nal drive, take this into account.

The lack of the Thin­k­light is also a downer. It is one of my favorite Thinkpad fea­tures, and I won­der why Lenovo couldn’t have charged an extra 25 cents or what­ever it costs for a sin­gle LED light and a bit of wire. I sus­pect it was inten­tion­ally left out to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the X100e more from the X200.

Another really dis­ap­point­ing draw­back, for me, is the tiny half-size media card reader. An SDHC card will only insert halfway, mean­ing I can­not have a built-in, always-ready backup device for my most impor­tant files. I under­stand the machine is tiny, but they still could have squeezed in an extra few mil­lime­ters for a big­ger card reader. The card reader also has no doc­u­men­ta­tion, appar­ently, mean­ing I have no idea if any of the for­mats it sup­ports (which I can­not fig­ure out) would fit com­pletely inside the reader. I plan to fol­low up with tech­ni­cal sup­port on this.

The order­ing process was not so smooth. Lenovo cus­tomer ser­vice sent me an .xls file, telling me to update it and send it back them to start my ser­vice con­tract. Even­tu­ally they caved on this, after I griped. It just didn’t seem fair to make peo­ple install Microsoft Office or sim­i­lar pro­gram to get what they bought, and in any event I didn’t have an office pro­gram installed at the time. The machine itself was back-ordered and took weeks to pro­duce, and the sta­tus was sel­dom updated. The machine and acces­sories came piece­meal: first the extra power sup­ply, fol­lowed weeks later by the machine, fol­lowed later by the neo­prene sleeve.

How­ever, I am really glad to be able to take advan­tage of Lenovo war­ranty ser­vice. I bought next-business-day sup­port for three years. I have never been any­thing but impressed with IBM or Lenovo war­ranty ser­vice, and since this is my work machine I needed it.

All in all, this is my favorite note­book, ever. I would buy a Thinkpad net­book if they made one, but this is not a net­book. Net­books are char­ac­ter­ized by super-cheap price, excel­lent bat­tery life, poor per­for­mance, and usu­ally by poor ergonom­ics and dura­bil­ity. This machine offers per­fect ergonom­ics, great dura­bil­ity, enterprise-class ser­vice options, mid­dling bat­tery life, and mid­dling per­for­mance. I’m not both­ered by the “net­book” name some apply to this machine, but I would not, could not do my every­day work on a net­book. This machine, I can.

The sin­gle biggest draw­back, for me, is the bat­tery life. But if I wanted longer than 5 hours of bat­tery life, and wanted bet­ter per­for­mance and even bet­ter dura­bil­ity, I would have saved up for an X200 series. For what it is, this machine is per­fect for me.

Review by D. Golden for Lenovo ThinkPad X100E 11.6-Inch Net­book (Black)
Rat­ing:
I am no fan of Win­dows com­put­ing, but Apple has cho­sen to ignore the “net­book” seg­ment of the lap­top mar­ket­place, hence I must look else­where. Over a year ago I pur­chased an “Acer Aspire One 8.9″ six cell bat­tery lit­tle work­horse. It ran XP Home, and was for the most part, a plea­sure to own. How­ever, I found that the small screen size was more of an issue than I had antic­i­pated, and I grew to hate using the track pad. All in all, XP wasn’t too bad, but it was a far cry from Mac OS 10.5, and when prob­lems devel­oped, res­o­lu­tions seemed to be painfully time con­sum­ing and com­pli­cated.

Before the iPad was released, I had hoped that Apple would finally pro­duce a small lap­top that would use a real, full fea­tured OS. Obvi­ously, I was dis­ap­pointed by the iPad, but I sus­pect that Apple is feel­ing pretty good about its prod­uct line right now.

Hap­pily, I came across a review of the ThinkPad x100e. Lenovo’s rep­u­ta­tion speaks for itself, and as I read about this unit, I became extremely inter­ested. I ulti­mately bought one, and have been extremely pleased with my purchase.

My first impres­sion was of the over­all high qual­ity feel of the con­struc­tion, par­tic­u­larly the key­board, which might be the best I have ever used on any portable com­puter I have ever owned. I find the amount of pres­sure required for each key­stroke to be exactly what a non typ­ist like me requires, firm but a bit for­giv­ing. My son, who has mas­sive key­board skills, was very impressed, too. The x100e’s weight, with the bat­tery inserted, is very easy pick up and switch from hand to hand even though the machine feels very solid. The 250GB hard drive is a treat. It’s not some­thing that I would have expected from a unit of this size and this price range. In fact, I feel that the x100e offers a great deal in terms of qual­ity and capa­bil­ity for the money. In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, I’m not a gamer, but I can report that I have been able to watch YouTube with­out a glitch, as well as video high­lights from Major League Base­ball. I expe­ri­enced some slow­down and freez­ing while watch­ing a live game, but I was also get­ting a poor qual­ity wifi sig­nal at he time, so I can’t iden­tify the source of the issue. There are also ques­tions about the x100e’s abil­ity to play videos in iTunes. This seems to be a known issue, but I use VLC if I have a prob­lem, and that usu­ally works fine.

The screen qual­ity is very respectable. I didn’t buy the x100e to process images, that’s why I have a Mac­Book Pro, but on a flight back from Hong Kong, I used it to watch a film and was very pleased with the expe­ri­ence. And speak­ing of fly­ing, this unit was a plea­sure to carry while tak­ing long walks through large air­ports. Because of it its pro­file and weight, I was able to use a con­sid­er­ably smaller bag that had the added advan­tage of being able to fit eas­ily under the seat in front of mine. This also meant that get­ting to the bag while in flight was a breeze.

Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sional is by far the best OS that Microsoft has pro­duced. It’s rel­a­tively lean, rea­son­ably coop­er­a­tive and is more Apple like in the way in which it allows the user to make mod­i­fi­ca­tions to appli­ca­tion set­tings. Lenovo’s “ThinkVan­tage Tools” are much more than win­dow dress­ing. They pro­vide the user with eas­ily under­stood, sim­ple to uti­lize appli­ca­tions that build on Win­dows capa­bil­i­ties, and seemed to pop up for me, just as I was get­ting to a point where I thought I might be head­ing into some choppy waters. Whether you need help with pass­words, diag­nos­tics, con­trols, dri­vers, or my favorite, “Airbag Pro­tec­tion”, which antic­i­pates pos­si­ble phys­i­cal shocks to the hard drive and takes action to pre­vent dam­age, Lenovo’s added touches are much more than win­dow dressing.

I knew that I had made a very good pur­chase after a few days of use, when dur­ing one night I had been online for at least two solid hours and hadn’t noticed that I was using a “small” lap­top. My “travel lap­top” has become my pri­mary com­puter for email and any other text inten­sive pur­poses. I also use it about 50% of the time for rou­tine web browsing.

Good stuff.

Review by Phil for Lenovo ThinkPad X100E 11.6-Inch Net­book (Black)
Rat­ing:
I was look­ing at var­i­ous options in the Netbook/sub-compact range and decided the X100e seemed to fit my needs the best. I could not be more happy with this com­puter. Much much faster than any net­books that I’ve seen, but basi­cally the same size. It only weighs a few ounces and has rea­son­ably good bat­tery life, but not quite as good as netbook.

The amaz­ing key­board and bet­ter speed make up for the bat­tery per­for­mance issue and I’m very happy with my deci­sion. Like one of the other review­ers, I switched out the hard drive for an Intel 80gb SSD and up graded to Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate. This gives me extremely quick load times and don’t ever see speed prob­lems with web surf­ing and using office.

I thought this would just be a travel lap­top for me, but I’m pretty much using it for every­thing now. The only time I’ll use my larger lap­top is when I’m using Adobe CS, which is prob­a­bly a lit­tle to much for the X100e’s processor.

I’ve owned sev­eral high per­for­mance Dells and HPs and really like this Thinkpad bet­ter than all of them.

Review by Can­ton­man for ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-EU1X-BK 10.1-Inch Black Net­book — 4 Hour Bat­tery Life
Rat­ing:
Let’s remem­ber that this machine (as are all in the cat­e­gory) is not designed to be a replace­ment for a full-featured note­book com­puter. It is bet­ter to think of it as a large iPod Touch, Zune, or Archos internet-connected device. In that role, this net­book suc­ceeds com­pletely.

Many peo­ple deride the touch­pad but I have to say that it’s one of the things I like best. So many peo­ple don’t bother to delve deeper into Con­trol Panel set­tings or research the func­tion­al­ity instruc­tions of elec­tron­ics and thus do not enjoy their full ben­e­fits. Enter­ing and adjust­ing the track­pad set­tings yields a mul­ti­tude of spe­cial func­tions such as 2-finger scrolling (both ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal), image size enlarge­ment and reduc­tion and other ter­rific nav­i­ga­tion short­cuts. It almost makes the track­pad work like a touch-screen iPod.

As far as I’m con­cerned, the only alter­ation to the basic hard­ware con­fig­u­ra­tion needed is to upgrade to the max­i­mum 2GB mem­ory allowed ($35-$40). Doing so def­i­nitely improves func­tion­al­ity.

Some also bemoan the lack of Blue­tooth but that is eas­ily cor­rected with a USB don­gle for about $5 these days.

Exter­nal USB, exter­nal mon­i­tor, head­phone and other jacks are won­der­ful and can be increased with the use of a USB hub. The cam­era has not, and prob­a­bly will not be used by me so I can­not com­ment.

The key­board has a nice respon­sive feel and while small, is per­fectly usable. Bat­tery life is accept­able based on the designed func­tion of this NET­book. It is more than ade­quate when used to check e-mail, web-surf or shop and do light work or play. Any­thing longer than the 3-hour limit can eas­ily be accom­plished by plug­ging it in. How­ever, choos­ing the same model with a larger 6-cell bat­tery would not be out of line, if desired.

Wire­less set-up was easy and flaw­less and, with the included Win­dows XP Home, soft­ware instal­la­tion and other fami­lar func­tions are suc­cess­ful.

Build qual­ity seems very good and I expect this machine to last quite a while with care­ful use. It’s small size and porta­bil­ity doesn’t negate the need for care.

I’ve read some men­tions of this unit get­ting hot dur­ing use. I have not expe­ri­enced this as my unit has only remained rea­son­ab­ley warm.

If one buys this net­book as a sup­ple­ment to a desk­top or note­book com­puter he or she will not be dis­ap­pointed. Try­ing to make this a replace­ment for a pro­fes­sional, work-level com­puter will only lead to frus­tra­tion.

I highly rec­om­mend this net­book as a fun, casual-use adjunct to your elec­tron­ics arsenal.

Review by Christy J. Langston for ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-EU1X-BK 10.1-Inch Black Net­book — 4 Hour Bat­tery Life
Rat­ing:
I pur­chased this net­book approx­i­mately 3 weeks ago. I absolutely love it. The key­board is big enough for your hands and the screen is bright and allows you to see all the work you are doing. I must admit, I usu­ally use it to browse the web, check email, write in word and so on. So it is just per­fect for what I do. I also like to work with the pho­tographs I take but as of yet I haven’t put a pro­gram on here to do that. I pur­chased the extra RAM and may I say that is a MUST buy. Just let me say buyer beware if you are buy­ing it for another netbook.…be sure to check the type of RAM your net­book uses.

We have a desk­top and a lap­top but I wanted some­thing I could take with me on trips, in the car, just about any­where. This net­book fits neatly into my purse and will be wel­come to such bor­ing long trips out of town. If you are think­ing about a net­book research but this one is a great one.…and you can expand the RAM to put more stuff on it. I even have a MMORPG on here and it runs fine. Hop­ing to put another one on it soon.

I would highly sug­gest this netbook..