Amazing X32 performance on a business trip

[asiafish]

Since most people post here to find answers to problems or to get advice on purchasing, I thought I'd chime in with a recent experience that really made me appreciate my X32. In fact, I wasn't even planning on keeping this machine, and had only purchased it (after having previously sold it) because of a problem with my small PowerBook and no time to fix it.

So I found myself in San Antonio last week for an immigration law conference. Typical day began at 7:30 AM with an informal breakfast session which I recorded on an Olympus didgital recorder. From 8:30 AM until 5:00 PM it was hot and heavy in seminars where I took copious notes. On two nights there were advanced evening classes from 6:30 PM until 10:30 PM. Not counting lunch and dinner breaks, that came out to 6 hours of solid use on short days and 9 hours of solid use on the long days.

With the high-capacity and extended (underside) batteries mounted to the X32, I worked through the long days and still had 30% battery life remaining. Yes, thats NINE HOURS with 30% remaining on a machine that is rated by IBM/Lenovo in that configuration for 8 hours. I did this through a custom configuration of the power management utility.

The screen was dimmed to one bar (quite legible) and the processor set to "slowest". The hard drive was set to spin down after 2 minutes and the LCD to sleep at the same interval. Standbye was set to 30 minutes and hibernate to 1 hour, neither of which were used. Of course WiFi was turned off. The end result was that the 1.8Ghz processor ran at 200MHz, which for taking notes in Word was not at all sluggish.

What was especially delightful was that rather than the routine I had planned for my PowerBook (4 hours max per battery, 3 batteries) I would have had to lug an external charger and still wake up once in the middle of the night to swap batteries. With the X32, I just plugged it in at my hotel room and woke up to a fully charged system ready for another marathon session.

On the flight home I watched a 2:30 minute DVD using the X3 ultrabase and with the power management reset to "ThinkPad Default". At the end of the movie I still had 36% on the main battery (the extended battery cannot mount with the X3 ultrabase). Thats terrific endurance.

In use for all of that time the X32 was more comfortable than the PowerBook on account of its better palmrest shape, higher-mounted screen and the trackpoint. The half-sized backspace and enter keys cause more errors than the full-sized ones on the PowerBook, but the key action is slightly superior, making the keyboard comparison about equal between the two. Finally, the X32 with the extended battery weighs the same as the PowerBook with only the one battery. Of course, the PowerBook has a built-in DVD burner in a case almost the exact same size (and much smoother) as the X32.

While I really dislike Microsoft Windows on account of all of the antivirus, anti-spyware and anti-adware crap I'm forced to run (none required on the Mac), the power flexibility and excellent hardware design convinced me that the X32 is a keeper. It also runs Vista well, though at this point I see no real need.

[bigtiger]

Excellent. I think I am on my way to sell X41 and buy an X32.

[Quattro]

Cool man. Here is my X20 doing some crazy stuff:

http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-and-Repla ... 6/-S4/S6-)

[ragefury32]

Heh. I tweaked the settings on the X31 using Notebook Hardware Control, undervolted the CPU, revised the CPU ramp-up schedule, shut down the sound/Wireless and dimmed the screen down, and got nearly 11 hours on the combined primary/bolt-on battery pool...all this during a transpacific coding flight.

The X3[1|2] series with 2 fresh batteries are pretty much workhorse miracle workers.

Oh yeah. Um. I think someone on thinkpads.com forums had some success installing OSX/x86 on an X3[1|2] series machine. Do a search for it.

[asiafish]

I'll try the Notebook Hardware Control. How do you disable sound, through a hardware profile? What else can be disabled safely. I'd love to see 12 or 13 hours.