I was using an X41 until last year and now have an X300, so here are my opinions, anyway.
tokyo_x40 wrote:
- * Build quality. 3.5 years daily use in Tokyo, & still reliable. Love the keyboard.
* Battery life w/OEM 8-cell. I use it sparingly; but my original 8-cell still gives me 5+ hours. Brightness 3
* Portability. Love not needing a "PC bag", rather a protective sleeve in a normal bag works well.
* Memory expansion. 1.5gb was a lot 4 years ago!
* LINUX option. Nice to know it's there, though I'm fine with Windows for now.
Build quality of the X300 is about the best I've ever seen -- better than the X41 I'd say. The chassis feels rock solid despite it being so slim. If you're going to worry you could worry about the display lid and the DVD burner because they're so thin they seem like they could be a bit fragile, but it's not a matter of poor build quality.
The keyboard is very good, but actually here I'd say I preferred the feel of the X41 keyboard.
Battery life on the X300 is fine, but not great -- maybe 3 hours on the 6-cell battery with screen at max brightness. I think the X41 was a bit better there too.
Portability is great: I use a Waterfield sleeve and a small bag. Very easy to carry around anywhere and in pretty much any bag you want.
I guess 2GB is all I'm likely to need, but it's easy to add another DIMM (though who knows if windows will manage to recognize it all...)
Linux I don't use on this, having downgraded myself over the years from Linux to XP and XP to Vista, no doubt to the horror of most right-thinking OS experts.
What I dislike about my X40 and want to change:
- #1) Clunky external wide-screen support. I really hate having to reboot to switch to the Intel IEGD driver by hand whenever I use my 16:9 screen at home (and then rolling back to the IBM driver afterwards to get the LCD to work).
Very Distant #2) Battery life with the 4-cell. Perhaps I had a bad after-market one, but I could only get about 2 hours on it. Brightness 3
Don't use an external display myself, so can't help you there, but I also had a small battery for the X41 which I wound up never using because it didn't give me enough battery life. If you're plan to spend any significant time unplugged with the X300, though, I think the 6-cell for sure.
Of course, there are other dislikes, such as not having enough CPU to decode 720p *.mkv files, or the mighty slow 40gb hard drive, but I see those as Moore's law kind of inevitable improvements that just happen after 3.5 years.
The slow hard drive was one of the things I really didn't like about the X41. It's like night and day with the SSD on the X300 (as it should be given the price...). Overall, the X300 feels very fast and responsive compared with the X41.
The other things I didn't like about the X41 were the low screen resolution and lack of a DVD drive, both of which the X300 fixes. I much prefer the X300's included DVD drive and no docking station to the other way round (I simply plug in a mouse, power cord and ethernet) but I'm sure other people have opposite priorities.
Important questions keeping me from buying the X300 today:
[1. Lenovo components, build quality, ruggedness. Is the build any different from the X40? Any reports/studies beyond rumors here?
I'd have no worries at all with the X300 on that score - the opposite in fact.
2. AC w/o battery. Will the machine boot with AC only?
Well, I tried mine, and it booted fine on AC qithout the battery, so no problem there either.
3. Noticably deeper/wider? Same review has a pic of X61 on top of X300.. Safe to assume that X40 and X61 are the same size?
Not sure on X40 vs X61, but the X300 should be wider (13.3" screen and larger keyboard) and thinner (I think) than either of those.
4. Touchpad disable. I'm a X40 TrackPoint addict. Are the two hardwired together, or are we expecting an eventual BIOS/Windows update to disable one over the other?
I like both (another plus for the X300 for me), but my understanding is that you can disable the touchpad without any problem.
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