Love X20!

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They are so cold! The palm bay is on top of the battery, no circuit underneath. The only laptop is like this is the very old and legendary Libretto. The key area and the bottom are also cold, very comfortable for fingers and laptop. My wife loves this.

They are so quiet, deadly quiet! The CPU fan is not audible at all. One of my X20 ticked, but no more once I soldered a 470uF cap between the red and green wires. I found the 20GB Hitachi TravelStar is the most quiet, simply incredible, not audible at all. Next to it is the 40GB, audible but not annoying enough. The worst is the Toshiba, very loud and screams.

They run very smoothly! Other laptops such as Sony have much faster CPUs but they are still sluggish, because there are so many craps running on top of the BIOS.

The trackpoint is so fan to use! It is even better than a desktop keyboard/mouse as my hand never fly off the keyboard. Of course the special Lenovo mouse driver must be installed via Windows Update, sensitivity set to the highest and middle button scrolling enabled.

So light and thin! The newer UMPCs are 1 lb lighter and 2" smaller, but as long as they are still not pocketable, why bother? The extra 2" estate is so much easier for eyes. Furthermore, those new babies all have the battery at the other side, leaving a hot palm bay.

So cheap, under $100 these days! Still $300 cheaper than the cheapest UMPC.

Why I want anything else? My smartphone is always with me for message alert and handy email and Opera Mini; my OQO 02 is for bed and road only; my desktop is for special PCI cards only; they have their own purposes, but this IBM X20 is what I use 99% of the time.

I found the X21 is significantly hotter than X20, 40C vs. 34C. The coldest is the X20 with Celeron, but unfortunately they come with SVGA (800x600) only and the XGA (1024x768) models all come with hotter PIII. By setting CPU clock to 500MHz with NHC, X20/PIII becomes as cold as the X20/Celeron, but X21 is still too hot to my like. And the mouse stick on my X21 stinks. So, X20 is my favorite ever!

X20 + Hitachi 20GB, is the coldest and quietest computer I know of. If you know anything even better on these two aspects, please let us know.