X41 considered slow by our users..What is your experience?

[Steve2112]

We recently did a laptop refresh for the end users we support. We gave them the choice of the T43 or X41.

We have had lots of complaints of the X41 being very slow, and slowing down over time. So slow, that the screen saver often comes up before you get to the domain login screen.

I am in the process of benchmarking the the two machines for some hard numbers. I realize the X41 is 1.5GHz and has a 4200 or 4800 rpm hard drive.

I would appreciate any info about this - I have done searches on Google for X41 and slow, and most of the results come back for the tablet version.

It has got to the point that a couple of our users have requested to switch from the X41 to the T43.

Thanks for any info!

[BillMorrow]

there was some comment, some time ago, about SOME of those 1.8 inch HDD's not using the inbuilt cache..!

i have both X41 and X41 tablet..
they ARE slow..
due to the HDD mostly i think..
what i did on the tablet, when i was using it running street atlas USA and mapping properties i was looking at, was to defrag the HDD and put the map data on a 1gig SD card..
the thing ran quite well doing that..

it was too bad IBM chose to use that 1.8inch HDD>.
the X60S and the whole X60 line i imagine, is arms and legs ABOVE the X40 series in speed..

if it were me (and it was and i did) i would change to an X60 for portability and just plain ability..
and then go to a T series for less portable serious work (or play)..

[asiafish]

I think that the X41 is only slow in disk use, something many here have said as well, and performs quite well in other areas. I've previously used a T42p and X32, both at 1.8GHz and with 7200 RPM hard drives, and moving to the X41 is a bit of an adjustment.

Windows boots considerably slower (1:30 or so for the X41 compared to about 0:50 for the other two) and of course large file transfers are equally slow. That said, processor speed isn't noticably different despite my X41 being 200MHz slower at 1.6GHz.

One thing I definitely noticed was the need to optimize the X41. With the regular machines, defragmenting the HD gave a slight speed boost, but with the X41 the difference is dramatic, probably due to the much smaller cache more than the actual speed of the drive.

Also, I upgraded my X41 from the 40GB drive to the 60GB drive and noticed a nice speed increase there as well, probably due to the higher aerial density of the platters (the reason why the 80GB 4200 RPM drive in my X22 is MUCH faster than the 20GB 5400 RPM drive it replaced).

With frequent defragmentation the disk performance of my X41 is about the same as most conusmer grade laptops with their 4200RPM 2.5" drives. That isn't saying much, but it isn't the mollasses-like experience that I was expecting either.

[Steve2112]

Some have also said a total wipe of the system and installing XP from the OEM disk, and getting rid of lots of the IBM related stuff. Unfortuantely a build like that is not possible in the organization I work for - very all encompassing change management, which is great for system stability - except in the rare case like this where the drive is 4200 RPMs, scores low on HDTune benchmarks, and is rumored to have 0 cache, but that has been debated and attributed to an error in which the drive cannot communicate the buffer size to HDTune software - is that correct, or is there really 0KB cache size on these drives compared to the 8MB cache on the T43 laptops? How good is that for a run-on sentence!

Thanks,

Steve

[christopher_wolf]

There are things you can do to speed them up, such as disabling the paging file and keeping a tight defrag(offline/online)/reg scan/cleanup for them.

The 1.8" HDD isn't the best at sheer, massive I/O ops; then again, if you want something like that, that is what the T Series and X6X Series are for. For the X41 tablets we use for the lectures and lab work, they get heavily optimized depending on what the user wants to do with them. In some cases, the workspace is confined to a very high capacity flash devices (as Bill stated).

As far as I know, the comment that the 1.8" HDDs do not use that level of caching is pretty much a joke. There are very few, if any, modern HDDs made for interruptible throughput *without* a cache. Given that I have seen and been around the manufacture of various HDDs, that is a pretty far fetched thing to have happen. There is no HDD I know of that has *zero* cache, it is not all that sane from an engineering standpoint no matter how it is looked at.

Given that the X41 uses the same type of SATA-PATA bridge that is used in the T43 and the R52 with a SATA controller, it is perfectly possible that the tool either can't understand the data that it is getting back if it is doing actual measurements or isn't getting back anything over the bridge from the microcontroller on the HDD itself due to the utility program not understanding how to deal with the bridge. I have seen, albeit rarely, certain HDD tools have difficulty on systems with SATA-PATA bridges, especially if they either try to measure specs on their own or pull data off the drive a la SMART.

[bigtiger]

I currently use X41 (1.5G) as my main computer. I used to own a T43 and a T41. The T43 works much fast than the T41 that I used to own. But I fail to notice significance performance difference between my T43 and X41 that can justify the portability feature of my X41. That is one reason I finally sold my T43.

Yes, you need to kill many redundant processes to speed up the computer. I did a fresh install and noticed a significant performance improvement.

By the way, I do a lot of Photoshop, Adobe Premier and moderate computing work on MatLab. I run a local PHP and Lighttp server too on this machine.

[mhca]

I am once in a while sad about the performance of my X41 mainly battery and system performance.

I also decided to do a fresh install of Windows XP but I can't for sure say I have experienced a performance boost.
But I have lately started to use Hibernation instead of shutting it down fully. The short boot-time due to hibernation helps me from being annoyed by the slow HDD performance.

Since the X41 isn't my primary computer I don't really care that much about the HDD performance as long as the overall performance after booting up is fine. And I think it is.

If I weren't transporting my laptop that much I would probably rather have a T4x mainly for a more fullsized keyboard and a larger screen.


The optimal IBM X41 would have:
8 cell battery performance (without the increased battery size)
highperformance flash harddisk and 2 GB memory.
High-resolution display
That would surely satisfy me

[Gustavo]

When I was in the process of buying my X series Thinkpad I spent alot of time overweighing which one would fit me best the X4x or the X3x types of Thinkpads but in the end I picked the X3x type, there were tvo main reason. First was the harddrive I could upgrade it to an high performance 7200RPM drive which I have and second was that it uses regular DRR sodimm modules which makes upgrading ram much cheaper than on the X4x types also the X3x types dont have one off the ram modules soldered to the system board but they are easilly accessiable under the machine.
These reasons outweighted the small increase in weight off the machine and size, it is still ultraportable. And one final reason is the basic X3x types come with 6 cell batteries versus the 4 cell on the X4x.

Personally I have no experience with the performance of the X4x types but given that X3x can have faster CPU speeds and faster HDs and more Ram say too me that they are faster machines.
My X31 is much more snappier then my T43 even though the T43 has an faster CPU and more Ram then the X31, but maybe this is because the T43 is my main home computer and is full of all kinds of programs and other stuff.
But true power lies with the X6x series, but they are expensive! and I cant afford it uff huhh huh...............
Its an hard life being an Uni student with family in another country

[losmeme]

Thanks for that, Gustavo. I also have an X31 (1.4GHz) and a T43 (1.8GHz, From work). My X31 blows the T43 out of the water, and I have been at a loss to understand why. (Basically the same speed HDD, same amounts of RAM in both)

I hadn't done much investigation, as the X32 is the one I end up using the most, but it is refreshing to hear the same experience from someone else.

[tomh009]

My X31 is much more snappier then my T43 even though the T43 has an faster CPU and more Ram then the X31, but maybe this is because the T43 is my main home computer and is full of all kinds of programs and other stuff.

7K60 hard disk on the X31, 5K80 on the T43 -- that will make a big difference on heavy I/O: startup, starting big apps, reading/writing large files (like photos) etc. Switching to a 7K60 on my X31 made a huge difference with Photoshop originally (now have 7K100).

[asiafish]

X41 isn't THAT slow, only a little slow, and only when compared to machines with drives of above average speed. Most laptops are sold with 4200RPM drives, and those drives won't be much faster than the 4200RPM drive in the X4x.

[mono666]

X41 isn't THAT slow, only a little slow, and only when compared to machines with drives of above average speed. Most laptops are sold with 4200RPM drives, and those drives won't be much faster than the 4200RPM drive in the X4x.

emm I agree. I have a X41 Tablet 1.5ghz with 1.5gb Ram. Booting up is noticeably slow compared to my dothan @ 2.6ghz, 1gb ram and 10k rpm raptor drive. but once windows loaded up i don't feel it being slow at all while browsing, and listening to mp3s. i guess the ram really helps.