Lenovo x121e netbook

nero120 said:
Remember it's a fraction of the cost! My T410i which I bought last November cost me over £1200 and is built like a tank, but I wouldn't expect the same build quality in a £350 netbook. Overall, I'm more than happy with the X121e after a week of solid use.
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I fully agree with you - cant compare a £350 netbook with a £1000 laptop. I have used and checked out other netbooks in the X121e price range and do feel it is of a higher build quality. I am just not sure the X121e is worthy of the Thinkpad label - perhaps Ideapad or one of the other cheaper Lenovo brands may have been more appropriate.
The poster with the cracked screen must have been extremely unlucky.
I think I may have been spoiled in the past as once upon a time you could pick nearly new mid range Thinkpads etc from Ebay for under £500 with 24months+ warranty remaining - these kinds of deals have pretty much vanished from Ebay now.
 
Pondering an order of an i3 model, following the death of my Thinkpad X61s (I loved that thinkpad :( )

Can anybody tell me if the wires (Ariel, SIM Card slot) are left in place for 3g.
Looks like an abundance of cards on ebay at half the price.
 
When I opened mine up to upgrade the RAM I could see a two loose antenna type cables in a empty area next to the Wifi card.

EDIT: There are plenty of 3G/WWAN card on their suitable for other Thinkpads - I assume these would work with a X121e?
Thanks!
 
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harry66 said:
When I opened mine up to upgrade the RAM I could see a two loose antenna type cables in a empty area next to the Wifi card.

EDIT: There are plenty of 3G/WWAN card on their suitable for other Thinkpads - I assume these would work with a X121e?
Thanks!
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Is there a sim card slot? Would be under / near the battery
Compatibility - depends on the model I would guess - guess you're taking the risk.
I can see my existing wireless card isn't compatible as its full height vs half height. Shame as it works nicely under linux and the options presented with it don't see to be great.


Anybody got the various network card models who can say which chipsets they come with?
 
10% offer

Hello, new to the forum - been following this thread for a while and have bought the x121e (AMD E-350 version). Just a heads up, there's an offer at the moment on the Lenovo site 10% off with code SEPT10%OFF - I'm annoyed I bought my laptop in the last couple of days of august and didn't know abou the offer :/
 
I have been wondering which model to get and after checking NotebookCheck I found that there seems to be a remarkable difference in battery runtime with tasks such as surfing with WiFi.

The AMD E-350 model beat the Intel i3 model hands down when it came to battery life gaining 2 hours extra, but at the sacrifice of CPU performance.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-ThinkPad-X121e-NWS5QGE-Subnotebook.61149.0.html (AMD)
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-X121e-204562U-Laptop-Review.58880.0.html (Intel)

A German YouTube user also has several videos of his AMD E-350 model x121e running various games if anyone else is interested.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmq2JiMmYf0 (x121e E-350 playing Half Life 2).

I cannot purchase the notebook yet so I'm just stewing and reading reviews until I can :)
 
I also saw that they are offering a 10% discount and headed here to find out more.

Good links there Riv4l.

Deciding between the AMD Fusion or Intel i3 is proving to be not so clear cut unless all you want is increased CPU power.

The AMD Fusion runs cooler and as Riv4L states, gains 2 hours extra runtime over the Intel i3 model when actively using Wifi.

AMD - 7h 12min
Intel - 5h 9min

A 2 hour gain is pretty damn impressive, but at the cost of reduced CPU power of the AMD.

GPU performance has me scratching me head. As some benchmarks are obviously benefiting from the increased processing power of the Intel i3 model. Can anyone give a definitive awswer as to what model will cope with (light) gaming better?

Then there is the price with the 10% discount.

AMD E-350 - 6 cell comes in at £279.20 + delivery
Intel i3 - 6 cell comes in at £343 + delivery
 
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OK I got handed a brand new e-350 laptop from a family member to look at and I stupidly said that I would also clean up the installed bloatware :rolleyes:

Anyway I thought it would be an i3 or something but almost choked when I saw it was an e-350. Don't get me wrong an e-350 is excellent on power consumption (probably ranks right up the top) and will make an excellent HTPC with XBMC due to the onboard acceleration BUT as a laptop - not so good. CPU ranks in the netbook atom range - Even my HTPC is faster.

Looking at the i3 prices should I just recommend returning it ? :confused:
 
As others have said, the base spec if around £300 while most ThinkPads of past have cost a lot more, so one can't really expect the build quality to be up there with £1,000+ x60s etc. of the past.
 
PoisonJam said:
As others have said, the base spec if around £300 while most ThinkPads of past have cost a lot more, so one can't really expect the build quality to be up there with £1,000+ x60s etc. of the past.
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I realise that, but these things are meant to be 800 notes rrp normally ;)
 
Further money off on the x121e and other "x" range notebooks using code "SEPTX10%" until Sept 21st, I should be buying one next monday ;)
 
Hello. I'm new to these forums, but I've been lurking for some time, especially as I've a new laptop purchase to decide about and this thread caught my eye as I've been considering the x121e with the Core i3 processor.

Would any of the people who own this laptop be willing to run passmark on it and post the overall score on here? Or even better, do any of you run image editing software such as Capture One or Lightroom on your x121e?

The reason I ask is that I'm after a lightweight, portable replacement for a battered old 'Philips' (inverted commas as it's a DSGi special) 12NB5800 laptop with a Core2Duo T7250 processor at 2Ghz. I use this for editing images on the move and I've always been happy with the performance, but wouldn't want to use anything slower.

I'm a little confused by conflicting info on the ULV Core i3's performance. The Windows Experience rating doodar comes out at 4.9 for the i3 (whereas its 5.1 for the t7250) but the passmark rating for the i3 is better than the t7250 (i3 = 1718, T7250 = 1103).

As I'll be crunching Raw image files on it, the processor's performance is paramount. I shall not be playing games or even watching videos on the thing... I even turn transparency off on windows Aero. The promise of extended battery life and a lighter laptop than I'm used to, is very tempting.

If it looks up to the job, I'll probably be ordering the basic spec with a 6-cell battery, then I'll upgrade the RAM to 8GB and maybe stick an SSD like this in it which looks as though it's 7mm in height.

As an alternative, I've also looked into the E320 with the i3. I know this will be faster than either laptop, but it will also be chunkier, heavier and probably worse on battery life as it's a full power mobile chip, so I'd like info on the x121e first and foremost to see if its suitable.

Sorry to babble. Any opinions/info will be greatly appreciated.
 
That SSD is 9mm with the full shell on. You can remove some plastic spacers and make it 7mm, but likelihood is this won't go down well if you need to claim warranty later.

The problem with the i3 is while its a power efficient and well designed processor, its 1.3 Ghz. The T7250 isn't a bad chip, 2ghz, 2mb cache.
While the i3 has a better design, slightly more cache and hyperthreading, I'd expect performance to be broadly comparable - some tasks might be a bit quicker, some a bit slower - but broadly it certainly won't be night and day. The i3 will absolutely murder in terms of power efficiency and video.

I have pondered how easily the x121e can have the processor upgraded, the i5 equiv of the chip is more or less the same, but will turbo up several hundred mhz.

You might want to consider a laptop with a higher end processor if you can afford.

Ps mine is currently in germany, should get it by Monday with any luck :D
 
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The problem with the i3 is while its a power efficient and well designed processor, its 1.3 Ghz. The T7250 isn't a bad chip, 2ghz, 2mb cache.
While the i3 has a better design, slightly more cache and hyperthreading, I'd expect performance to be broadly comparable - some tasks might be a bit quicker, some a bit slower - but broadly it certainly won't be night and day. The i3 will absolutely murder in terms of power efficiency and video.
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Thanks for the response. I suppose this is the problem with synthetic benchmarks. Nobody I've seen uses processor-intensive photo editing software for benchmarking either. Occasionally the odd review site will run a Photoshop action on it, but that's more dependant on disk I/O than the processor.

If I can get roughly the same performance as I'm used to, with better battery life (at the moment the Philips laptop will give me approx 30mins editing away from the power socket, so I have two spare batteries and I've learnt to do it quick) the it's win-win for me :)
 
Hi All,

#1:
Can I just confirm here that you people are buying the basic X121e from Lenovo and you are going for the Intel version because it's better than the AMD one right?

#2
In addition to this, are you all upgrading the RAM and drive to SSD off your own backs too?

#3
If yes where are the RAM and SSD's being bought from and how much money do you save by buying them elsewhere and installing yourself?

#4
Doesn't doing this void the warranty?

Sorry for many questions but just want to know as I'm starting College and University and currently all I have is a crappy toshiba laptop that can't even run Office without me having to wait 5 minutes to change font to bold and a further 5 mins to go underline!

Thanks so much!
 
I've had my Intel x121e for a week now and I'm very impressed with it. I'm coming from a 5 year old MacBook - really wanted a MacBook air but couldn't justify the price.

I was concerned that this would feel cheap and bulky but it really doesn't. The matte finish on the lid looks smart and the keyboard is, in my opinion, better than my old MacBook.

It's obviously much faster and handles everything I need (internet, music, word, photos, cs:source) very well. The trackpad isn't a patch on the macs but I'm slowly adjusting to it.

It was incredibly simple to add another 4GB RAM and I plan to add an SSD next month. Coming from a mac, it's a bit weird having to use anti-virus, anti-malware, disk cleaners and disk defragmentation but I suppose that's just part of using Windows.
 
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