Cheap X series for word processing?

[marlinspike]

I saw an X30 in the marketplace for $170. That's not the one for me, as I want a hard drive and OS etc included, but it got me thinking, maybe I should leave my T60 at home and get an old X for class.

So, given that I left my disks for Office 2007 (and an old X probably wouldn't run it all that well), I figure I'd run Open Office on it. So which X should I look at to do that comfortably? How much weight savings would I see from going to an T60 15" to an old X-series? What kind of battery life do they get? How big are their power bricks (are they comparable to the current ones?)?

Thanks in advance

[j-dawg]

My X24 runs Office 2007 without much trouble, though it's a little slow starting up. It ran Office 2003 just fine, so I'm sure OO.o would also work well on it. I'm pleased with the weight, which is supposedly 3.6 pounds, perhaps a little more than half the weight of your T60. I bought a new battery for it because my old one went bad, and get about 2.5-3.5 hours depending on the screen brightness. I can't comment on the power brick compared to the new ones, but it's fairly small and light and it's got a two-prong plug.

Since you're planning on buying this for class, I assume you'll be using the T60 for the Hard Computer Work. I use my X24 for schoolwork as well as the occasional ancient game (it draws the line at Grand Theft Auto 3, which requires 12mb of video RAM to my X24's 8, but plays Counter-Strike and Driver smoothly and cleanly). It's more than capable of all that and still gets compliments from others for its looks and capabilities. I'd rather have an X3x for the extra power, but since you've already got a powerful laptop, an X24 could work well for you. The X23 and X24 aren't far apart besides the processor, as far as I can tell, and when the X24 is in throttled mode it runs at the same speed as the X23's and still performs well, so an X23 might do you nicely too.

[marlinspike]

Hmmm, if an X24/3 would do me, I could get one super cheap, but if the battery life is only 2.5-3.5 hours, I'll have to carry around the power brick, which will eat up any weight savings.

Interesting that it can run Office 2007 fine. I'm guessing even if I get mom to read me the activation code, there's no legal way to copy it off my T-series (it's back home, and now that I'm in grad school who knows when the next time I go back will be).

[rkawakami]

I keep a wireless 800Mhz X22 (2662-9EU) on the kitchen table. It has the maximum of 640MB of memory and runs Windows XP w/Open Office. I mainly use it for browsing (Firefox), light imaging editing (Paint Shop Pro) and web site maintenance (FTP Commander). The battery currently has about 31Wh capacity, from a maximum of 43Wh I believe. It lasts about 2.5 hours away from the table with SpeedStep enabled (533Mhz) and the display brightness down about two notches. It uses the common 16V supplies. I think it shipped with the 54W version but I generally use the 72W supply with all my systems. Don't know the weight off-hand but I'll measure it when I get home.

[marlinspike]

Oh, these have built in wifi? Not crucial, but a big plus. Yeah, if it has wireless could run IE/Firefox, Thunderbird (mozilla's e-mail client), and open office that would be awesome...but with such short battery life, there might be no point. I was hoping it'd get 5hrs.

[rkawakami]

The X22 was the first X2 to have built-in wireless. Otherwise you'd have to use a PCMCIA card. If you turn off the wireless card when you don't need it, that might boost your battery life by 10-15 minutes (?), maybe more. Ever since I replaced the factory ActiionTec combo card with a Broadcom b/g one, the system seems to run a few degrees warmer so it's something that I'm going to be looking at.

My 2.5 hour battery life is with constant web browsing (wireless card enabled and hard drive always spinning). So that's probably going to be much worse than word processing or other office productivity tasks. Install a Compact Flash card and read/write your OO files off of that and you could realize some power savings from the hard drive.

[ajkula66]

You are not going to get 5 hours of battery life out of anything older than X40.

If you found a X31 with a mint battery and played with the settings a bit, you might get close to it, at probably 4 hours realistic time. I assume that due to increased CPU speed, X32 will have a worse battery life.

From X40 on, battery life has been significantly improved, and you can get some seriously good use of these. The weight has gone down as well. Most of these things are around 3lbs or so. Be aware that X41 has significantly lower battery-run time than X40.

All depends on what you want to spend, also...X61s is a very sweet machine and it will run close to forever on battery, but there is a price tag for that sweetness...

Just my $0.02

[marlinspike]

Hmmm, in that case, forget it. I was only considering this because I thought maybe I could get one for under $200. I guess if I consider that I'm lugging around casebooks, the couple of extra lbs I have from my T-series isn't such a big deal.