Thinkpads Forum

Just ordered X301 directly from Lenovo and now having a buyers remorse.
Is it too slow - X301? Can somebody comment?

PCMark05 shows:
7,050 for 2.8GHz T500
6,589 for 2.8GHz T400
And only 4,457 for 1,4GHz X301

Apps I'll be running on it:
- Microsoft Office
- Photoshop (not very often)
- DVD burdning software
- IM clients
- DVD Player

Thanks
TP

I use the same set of applications as you are, and my X301 is fast. I would say it is as fast as my dual XEON DELL workstation (2.6GHz, 8GB memory, RAID 0) for most tasks except heavy computation tasks. The main reasons I bought my X301 is the nice design, good build quality, and low profile of X301.

The key is to optimize the X301. A fresh install of XP (or vista if you must), virtual disk to hold swap file (to extend the life SSD), etc. I am looking forward to having Windows 7 on it once it becomes official. I installed it on my X60T and there are still some driver issues.

I also had a brief buyer's remorse after I ordered my X301. After all, I could have bought almost three X200s with that money. All doubts vaporized after it arrives. It did took me almost two days to optimize everything though.

Not slow at all. Don't under estimate the contribution of the SSD to overall system performance. For the applications you list above, I'd say my X301 is noticeably faster than my previous T61p which had a 7200RPM drive and a 2.5ghz processor.

Speaking solely for myself, I'm actually very pleased with the speed of my X301. I have a lot of different ThinkPads to compare it to with much faster Processors and far more resources, however at the end of the day unless one is doing super resource intensive work the X301 performs quite nicely.

It's the same for the display bashing, I have a T43, T60 and T60p all with the superb IPS Flexview Displays as comparison examples, and while the X301 certainly does not compared to those, it's still quite good. To those naysayers that say well the comparison machines are also ThinkPads, I have last years matte MacBook Pro and the newest MBP that was just released. Are they brighter? Absolutely by a wide margin. Does that make them that much better? Perhaps for those with compromised vision, however I find I must turn down the brightness. Personally I find they each have their advantages, and my preference remains the IPS Flexview models. There are times when I wonder if those that are complaining actually own and use one, of if they are believing the "experts" that write the reviews.

my x300 which is slower than x301 by negligible margin, it outperforms my T60 in daily tasks, except for IE7 in specific situations. the screen is also quite nice.