x300/x200 choice

[malachont]

Greetings TP'ers

I am considering the X300 (available for about $1000- my budget) or a new X200, I like the 13" screen but I have never personally seen it - I worry that the characters are just too small and when enlarged play with the formatting of things too much - I can say that I have a Lenovo 3000 V100 with a 12" 1280x800 with XP and I got it sorted out to my satisfaction without reducing the resolution, but I don't know if it will work out with the higher-res x300.

I want the lightest machine possible, don't need much of battery life or an optical drive. But it has to also be a light desktop replacement in terms of keyboard and display comfort.

Also- if the X300 is refurbished or used - the SSD drive has a limited life, right? (more so than a regular hard drive?) is it at all possible to replace its SSD with a regular laptop 2.5" hard drive, just in case the SSD goes bad and I want a cheap replacement?

lastly-does anyone know how much does an XP restore DVD costs for the x300 (the ones available seem to be mostly with Vista).

Thanks

[ssd_thinkpad]

SSD drives do not have limited life time. Old x301 64gb ssd are slc, todays x301 64 gb are inferior mlc ssd. 128 and 80 gb ssds are always mlc ssds where the 80 gb is from intel and has extremely fast reading and moderate writing speed. x301 hdd is 1,8 inch and you can put any 1,8 inch sata hdd you want inside it. Its display resolution was too high and the characters too small so I increased Windows Vista DPI settings to make the fonts larger. The display viewing angles were bad. Display was only good when very bright. Display comfort ist debatable for this device You can buy a x301 and then just put the dvd drive out. It will be lighter then, maybe around 1,3 kg. You'll have to add the weight of the ac adapter then. You can also use the 6 cell battery and the 3 cell bay battery which gives you around 7 hours for 1,6 kg.

[malachont]

The x301 is too expensive for me... I'll have to go with a refurbished or Lenovo "new" (restocked I guess) x300 or a really new x200. Does that mean I'll get the older less reliable SSD?

Also can one disable the touchpad on the x30x? I hate touchpads and I read that one's hands can brush against it while typing, moving the cursor...

Thanks again

[ssd_thinkpad]

You can disable the touchpad. The older x300 ssd is the superior slc although as much reliable as the inferior mlc ssd. The x301 display and battery life are said to be an improvement over the x300.