Thinkpads Forum

It has been a few years since I have been active on this site- my apologies if this is in the wrong place.

My usual approach has been to buy a 5-6 year old thinkpad from eBay, install my own hard drives (ssd now!) and memory and run them for a few years, and then domino down to family.

I loved my T40; then T400.. then switched to an X61, and now I am on an x201. I love the size and utility of my x201, but it is getting a big sluggish for the work I do. The thinkpad line has expanded quite a bit from just being T/X/R - series, and wondering if there is another model that would fit the niche of the x-series better that I could get used since it seems the series did not improve much until x250s came out.

X220-- only a minor upgrade from my x201... no 1080p screen.
x230-- no 1080p screen.
x240-- no buttons for trackpoint..
x250 and newer-more than I would like to spend.

Has lenovo released any other thinkpad models in that time frame that are a similar size\weight as the X series that are available used now? Were there any widespread issues with any of the newer X-series issues or complaints?

Thanks,
Ryan

^
The X250's touchpad (which has Trackpoint buttons) can be retrofitted to the X240.

The X220 and X230 can both get 1080p/FHD screens via nitrocaster's FHD-mod. Long read.

The X230 can also be upgraded with the classic X220 keyboard. Long read.

The X220 is the last with the classic 7-row keyboard, and one of the last with a full-power cpu --- it's faster than many later laptops. The IPS screen is beautiful, but 16x9. You may not notice the lack of pixels unless your vision is better than 20/20. If your budget reaches that far, consider a T450s.

ryan1212 wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 06, 2017 11:50 pm

I love the size and utility of my x201, but it is getting a bit sluggish for the work I do ...
X220-- only a minor upgrade from my x201... no 1080p screen.

1. "A bit sluggish" doesn't help us identify how your current machine is failing. What processes is it running when it feels sluggish?
2. we don't know what machine you have. what is the TYPE number (XXXX-XXX)? It's shown on the undersite of the machine.

Generic cpu benchmarks, for what they're worth, from cpubenchmark.org showing rating range for each machine:
x250 == 3066 to 4302
x230 == 4067 to 4515
x220 == 2423 to 3933
x201 == 2382 to 2751

You'd help your cause if you said what you're looking to spend.

I say a T440s or T450s doesn't weight much more than a X201, but a FHD LCD is more palatable on a 14" screen than a 12".

I use both a X220 and an X230 mostly for Internet use and I love both of them. They do their job perfectly but if you get the 30 series, get either backlight keyboard or xx20 keyboard. the non-backlit xx30 series is like downgrading for no reason. I use the backlit because I had it laying around and it didn't require any modding.

The *30 gen still has the Thinklight at least.

exTPfan wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 07, 2017 4:57 am

The X220 is . . . one of the last with a full-power cpu --- it's faster than many later laptops.

Yes, only with the current Kaby Lake have the 15W CPUs used by newer 12" laptops finally beat the Sandy Bridge 35W in terms of clock speed (by a good margin too). The newer CPUs do supposedly do more work per clock tick though. X230-X240 might still be downgrades from X201 in terms of CPU (but much faster GPU).

An X220 might be a bigger upgrade than it first appears since it gives you an mSATA slot for extra storage and an i7 will include USB 3.0. And as noted there is a mod kit available to add a FHD screen.

Thanks everyone, I will be on the look out for a used x220 on eBay without a hard drive Maybe I will get lucky and find an i7 model. My SSD should be quite a bit faster with SATA 3, and the CPU improvements look to be about 30-40% which is pretty substantial.

ryan1212 wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 20, 2017 10:15 pm

Maybe I will get lucky and find an i7 model.

The i7 version was more noisy and i7 probably doesn't offer much, outside of USB 3, unless you're bumping up to a quad core, which was not offered on the X220.