Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,

Recently i was able to buy a second hand Lenovo Thinkpad X230i (CPU: Intel I3 2370M, 4 Gb RAM, 320Gb HDD) for a nice price. This fine piece of machinery is meant to join me on my travels to the Middle East where I often work in remote areas, sometimes under harsh conditions (occasional sandstorm in the Egyptian desserts and plus 40 degrees Celsius temperature). For me reliability and endurance are paramount.

I just reinstalled Windows 7 pro on the laptop and I'm looking into the options for tweaking so that it will best fit my demands. I have a few questions regarding upgrading and the laptop in general.

- Is there a Lenovo Thinkvantage package available so I can download all drivers and add-on in one go? momentarily I do run power manager and the connections manager, I have seen there are much more downloads available at the Lenovo website but it is not very clear to me which are specifically for my system.

- Using 'Hotkeys', My previous on the road netbook (Samsung NC10) had some handy hotkeys which made changing a few settings very easy. I'm looking to find similar on the Lenovo but I have not been able to figure out if it is available. I'm looking for: a quick way of lowering the CPU speed (and switching off the fan, on my Samsung this also worked when charger was attached) and other parameters to enable maximum battery life and a fast key for tuning off the screen back-light (so letting to laptop run with the screen off without turning it to sleep).

I have seen the laptop has a free slot underneath the keyboard to fit a mSata SDD or a PCIe minicard. Both options seem to be interesting but I can't have both of them at the same time. Now I understood the mSata connector only supports sata2 so putting a SSD in there and transferring the OS will not give you much of a speed boost compared to replacing the 320Gb HDD by a SDD. Am I right here?
The other option to fit into that little spot would be a PCIe minicard supporting WAN and or GPS. The GPS function is really appealing to me. In my profession I use it a lot and this potentially could turn my laptop into a base station without the need of attaching a external antenna. Has anyone got any experience with this and is it any good? I have seen the sierra Wireless 7750 module, it seems nice, and it also has the WAN function. But do its features also work outside of the US? In Egypt I constantly work with an attached USB dongle to connect to the internet by mobile phone network. This system uses a Sim card in a Huawei dongle and is preprogrammed (sorry I don't have it at hand now so can't give you any specs). The Sierra module looks like it support the available bands but will it work?
Searching the web I have found a number of manufacturers supplying GPS/GLONASS/GALILEO minicards but they seem to be meant mostly for industrial embedded applications.

Can you help and point me out in some directions here?

Thanks in advance
Laurens

System update.

Right click on Power Manager on the taskbar and you can switch from the pre-configured power plans, which range from low to full power. You can also make your own. I don't believe there's a way to change the fan speed. ThinkPadFanControl is an option.

Laurens wrote:I understood the mSata connector only supports sata2 so putting a SSD in there and transferring the OS will not give you much of a speed boost compared to replacing the 320Gb HDD by a SDD. Am I right here?

It depends, but for most uses whether it's SATA I, II or III is mostly not relevant. The benefit of a SSD is the latency, how fast data can be found and read, not throughput - how much data can pass through the controller in a given moment in time. Typical usage like Office, Media and/or Internet doesn't place a high load on the controller so the performance will be very similar, regardless of the controller speed.

If you want to do the mSATA SSD + HDD while doing WWAN, an external card is an option, but I don't know much about them, so someone else will have to help. Good luck and welcome to TPF.

At the risk of sounding redundant, I'd second everything ZaZ said. System Update is an excellent utility you'll find on Lenovo's driver page, and you shouldn't get too wrapped up worrying about SATA II vs III. Except for some highly specialized scenarios, the vast majority of people will hardly notice a difference between the two.

Now, for your own fairly unique sounding usage I'd recommend just replacing the HDD with a full size SSD and then using the internal slot for WWAN. Unless you really need the extra storage space of two drives, doing away with the HDD entirely will give you the security of knowing all your data is safely stashed away on far more physically durable flash memory. You'd also be able to take advantage of SATA III, for whatever that's worth.

I'm afraid someone else with more knowledge will have to comment on which WWAN card you need, but (from my limited knowledge) I think you'll be able to find what you're looking for.