Humanoid's review of the x120e

[Humanoid]

Hello. I got myself a thinkpad x120e about 3 months ago, so here's my review of it.

I customized the thinkpad on the lenovo site so that it has an E-350 CPU, and a 3-cell battery. I saw the 6-cell battery is available separately, but the 3-cell battery is not, so I decided to get one while I could.

As soon as the laptop arrived in the mail, before I turned it on, I took the hard disk out and replaced it with my own hard disk that has Debian GNU/Linux on it with my own boot loader. This way I have an untouched copy of the original windows that came with the computer without ever booting it, in case I ever need it. But I doubt I'd ever need it, I've never booted windows on this computer, and I probably never will.

The keyboard is probably one of the best keyboards I've ever seen on a laptop. Surely, it does not compare to the IBM and Unicomp model M keyboards I use on my desktops, but it's far better than other laptop keyboards I've tried. I do most of my work on the keyboard, so a good keyboard is very important to me. The keys are rubber dome, but have a decent tactile feedback with a click feel at the beginning of the key press, and don't feel mushy at all like a lot of other rubber dome keyboards do. There is some padding between each chiclet style key, however, it should definitely be made bigger. That is, the actual tops of keys need to be made smaller, like the tops of the model M keys, and the padding between the keys needs to be made bigger. There is a slight curve on the tops of these keys, but it's very subtle and a little hard to notice. The curves need to be deeper too.

This is the first time in my life that I've used a trackpoint. I've tested it out at shops before, but never had one of my own. When I first got the laptop, I was mostly using the touchpad. I only played with the trackpoint occasionally cause I found it fun. The trackpoint took a bit of time at getting good at it, but after I did get used to it, I was very impressed with it. In fact, within like 10 days of getting the laptop, I was solely using the trackpoint, and then completely disabled the touchpad. I've never re-enabled the touchpad since then. I now consider the touchpad completely pointless when a good trackpoint like this one is available. I eventually got myself a usb mouse, which is still better than the trackpoint when sitting at a desk at home with space for a mouse, but when I go out, I don't mind leaving the mouse behind and only using the trackpoint. Even with the mouse here, I still prefer using the trackpoint if I'm on the keyboard and only need to click one or two things before going back to the keyboard. The touchpad, on the other hand, is so completely useless, I wish they'd remove it completely from the laptop and place the keyboard at the bottom edge of the laptop, like desktop keyboards are, which would be so much more comfortable for typing on it. I don't like having that padded space under the keyboard like almost all laptops have, which interferes with a comfortable hand position.

The overall size of the laptop feels perfect to me. It's not too big, and not too small. It's very easy to carry with one hand, both when the laptop is opened or closed. There is no bump coming out the back of the laptop because I am using the 3-cell battery. So far, I've only ran out of battery life once. I think I was using it for about 2.5 hours at the time the battery ran out. Even if I do decide to get an extra 6-cell battery, I think having the battery stick out the back is a very good idea. I prefer having the laptop smaller and having the screen closer to my eyes. I've seen the x121e and pictures of the x130e and I really hate the new chassis they put on those models. The chassis on the x120e (and x100e) is MUCH better. It takes up less space, and the screen can open a full 180 degrees which is really awesome when the laptop is actually on your lap.

I've heard people complain about the E-350 cpu being too slow for them. So far, I don't have any speed issues with this cpu at all. It's slower than my modern desktops, but it's definitely fast enough for me. The only time I really notice a speed difference is when I'm compiling my code, which takes significantly longer to do. Encryption and decryption of data takes longer too, but it's acceptable for realtime use. Watching videos, even hd videos, always ran at full speed for me so far.

For others who use linux, they would be happy to know that all the hardware works perfectly in linux for me. I had to upgrade my linux kernel to support the radeon gpu with kms and 3d acceleration, and the wifi card as well. I've also tried running a live usb of ubuntu 11.04, and it also worked with everything straight out of the box. The lenovo website describes the wifi card as "ThinkPad 1x1 b/g/n", and here is the output of lspci -nn for the card I got:

Network controller [0280]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter [10ec:8176] (rev 01)

I am very happy with the decision to buy this laptop. If I ever lose my laptop, I am sure to buy the exact same laptop again. I really think the thinkpad x120e is the best available laptop for me right now.

So far, I've mostly talked about the good stuff... now on to the bad stuff. There are 2 issues I have with this laptop, 1- the screen, 2- the bios.

The screen... well, how do I say this. This has got to be the worst screen I have ever seen, because the colors are all wrong! Even if I tilt the screen to the optimal position, there is only a very narrow horizontal band that contains the correct colors. Tilting up or down, only moves this horitzontal band of correct colors up and down, and it will never fill the screen. It is very sensitive to the location of your eyes, especially the vertical height of your eyes. The easiest way to see this is to draw 3 rectangles on the screen, one white, one gray, and one black. If you tilt the screen downwards, in the direction of closing the laptop, the white becomes gray, and the gray becomes white! Seriously, they switch. And if you tilt the screen upwards, in the direction of opening the laptop, the black becomes gray, and the gray becomes black! Another switch. So you have a narrow horizontal band take takes about 1/4 of the screen with the correct colors, and you have wrong colors above, and different wrong colors below this horizontal band. You can see a more complete effect by drawing a full gradient from white to black on the screen. I've seen wrong colors on other LCD screens, but only when I tilt it by a very very large angle. This screen has this effect even when you are at the optimal viewing position. There is no way to avoid seeing wrong colors. These wrong colors are very annoying. I am considering replacing the screen! When doing work editing text files, the problem isn't a big deal. It's mostly when looking at photos or videos that it really gets annoying.

The second major problem I have with this laptop is the buggy bios. It doesn't work the way it's supposed to. I use my own boot loader for my OS, and at first the bios wouldn't boot it at all. It kept saying "Operating System not found". It took me a lot of hard detective work at figuring out why it wasn't booting my boot loader. I did tests on usb sticks, and after a lot of work, I found one of the problems. The bios looks at the mbr partition table, and if it doesn't see a partition that is flagged as bootable with the 80h code, it refuses to load and run the mbr completely, saying "Operating System not found". I don't use the 80h flags on my partitions, so they're all 00h. So the way I got my boot loader to run off a usb stick was to flag one of the 4 mbr partitions as 80h, and then it just worked fine. It doesn't matter which one I flag as 80h, as long as one of them is flagged as 80h. This is wrong behavior on the part of bios, and is certainly a bug. The bios should run the mbr code regardless of whether or not there are any mbr partitions on the drive, or if any of them are flagged as 80h. And that's only part of the problem. I managed to get my boot loader running from a usb stick, however, now I have to keep inserting a usb stick everytime I turn on the computer, which is very annoying. I still haven't been able to convince the bios to load my boot loader off the hard disk that is inside the laptop. It just keeps saying "Operating System not found". My hard disk uses a GUID partition table (gpt), not the old mbr partition table, and I believe this might be the reason the laptop's bios is refusing to boot from it. My boot loader code is still in the protective mbr, and that's what the bios should load and run, just like every other computer does. I've tried disabling UEFI booting in the bios, and have it set to boot "Legacy" only, but it still won't load and run the mbr from my hard disk. I've also tried setting the bit 2 bootable flag on a gpt partition, I've tried creating a "bios boot partition", and tried creating an "EFI system partition", and still no success. If anybody knows how to work around this serious problem with the x120e's bios, please let me know. I think I'm going to have to get rid of the gpt partition table, and use dmsetup to access my partitions.

Besides those two problems, I love this laptop. It's fast enough for all my work. The only time I notice that it's slower than my desktop is when I'm compiling my code which takes much longer to do. The laptop stays cool, and the fan is usually very quiet. The fan only gets louder if I'm doing some cpu intensive stuff for some time. I've been using this laptop as my main computer for the last 3 months, and I think it's awesome.

[jdk]

Good review. I have a x120e coming in the mail soon and plan to run SL6 on it. From what I understand, I will have to run fglrx on the 2.6.32 kernel to get anything above VESA, and support for the wireless has been backported from 2.6.38.

It also looks like I'll just create four primary partitions with the bootloader in MBR. /boot, /, /home, and swap.

[bealdrid]

Good review. I have a x120e coming in the mail soon and plan to run SL6 on it. From what I understand, I will have to run fglrx on the 2.6.32 kernel to get anything above VESA, and support for the wireless has been backported from 2.6.38.

It also looks like I'll just create four primary partitions with the bootloader in MBR. /boot, /, /home, and swap.

Please let me know if you are able to get Scientific Linux 6 on this thing! I had tried before with no luck with USB / external DVD. Either the installer would hang before it started asking questions or I would have EFI issues.. I can't remember it has been several months. But good luck and let us know

[jdk]

Scientific Linux 6.1 works perfectly, to include suspend/resume. I will probably add to the ThinkWiki at some point, but look into ElRepo for the backported fglrx and wireless drivers. I know I set UEFI to legacy only and the installer would only boot from one out of the three flashdrives that I tried. KMS does not work, you will see text only while booting/shutting down. I have the E240 CPU.