aristophrenia

How I made the switch from the Dell XPS m1210 to the Lenovo Thinkpad X200s

This above all: to thine own self be true.

The xps m1210 has been my companion for the last four years. It is most certainly the best laptop I have ever laid my hands on. Sturdy,  small, great Linux compatibility and a battery-time that no laptop I’ve ever seen could match. The size of course isn’t that big a deal from today’s point of view. Even I find it rather fat at times compared to all the netbooks around but it has to be understood here that I bought it more than four years ago. Back then, having a laptop as small as that, you were the king of the hill, the sexiest nerd on campus, the center of attraction in any lecture. It was awesome! Added to that the ~9h of real-world battery-life, nothing could make this baby go down. And it provided a  great typing-experience too. There were times during my studies where I’d have to do programming for 4-8 hours a day five days a week. The m1210 mastered it all without any reason to complain. I’ve spent about 1400€ for it and never looked back.

But time leaves it’s trace on a device like that. I’ve carried it around with me ever since I bought it, spilled more than one cup of coffee over it and dropped it a few times too. It started to become more and more unreliable, freezing randomly at times, the harddrive getting louder and starting to click more often than I like it and the battery life was down to  about four hours. So I faced the question whether to buy a new harddrive and battery (a battery that most likely spent all of the last three years in storage somewhere) or venture out and look for a completely new laptop. Since I like shiny new things in my posession I decided to take the high road.
The first logical choice when you like a product of a certain company this much is to look at the same company for a new one. But Dell decided to focus more on the colorful apple-side of consumer electronics and instead of the old quality devices today they only produce laptops that suck donkeyballs don’t live up to their own standards of old. Even their corporate product line is dominated by cheap plastic and more “design” than functionality. I did look at the Latitude E4200 with some interest for a while. Until I had the fortune to meet somebody owning one. Two minutes with the device were enough to move my focus completely away from Dell to the only two other brands I’d consider: HP and Lenovo.

To make a long story short, I decided to buy the X200s. It seemed to be the most logical choice, having the non-glare display I wanted, a big battery (or so I thought) and an available docking station among a few other features. And it does have the hardware wireless switch I love at the m1210. I also decided to buy it on ebay instead of Lenovo itself to save some money there. It worked out great, I got it for 700€ with two and a half years of warranty left. The only downside is the CCFL display. But I’m not willing to pay an extra 300€ for what amounts to roughly one hour of extra battery time per charge that an LED display would grant.
A remark I’d like to make here is that I’ve been following the laptop market quite closely during the last few years and apparently no manufacturer is interested in producing a decent laptop at all points. The perfect laptop isn’t out there so I got prepared for compromise.

When the X200s arrived, at first I was most disappointed. The 4-cell battery they deliver with it is so small that it lasts all of two hours when turning the brightness to 50%. So the first thing I did was venture out and buy the biggest battery this thing can chew on. A 9-cell unit that sticks out the back of the laptop like I was used to from the m1210.

Keyboard/Trackpoint

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Until the new battery arrived I had some time to get used to the new keyboard and the fact that the X200s doesn’t have a touchpad next to the famous IBM trackpoint. Before touchpads were invented, every laptop had one of these and everybody was happy. Then they invented touchpads and all of a sudden most of them were gone. I never knew how much I missed the old times until I got the X200s. On my laptop I’m using Xmonad, a tiling window manager that can be controlled entirely without the mouse. For surfing there’s of course vimperator so the need for a mouse is down to a minimum. Still you can’t go completely without a mouse today and I found that now I have a trackpoint again I’m even using the mouse more often than before simply because I don’t have to move my hands away from the home row anymore to do so.

Also you can’t deny the ergonomy of any Thinkpay keyboard. I’ve worked with a few of them before and they always provide a one-of-a-kind typing experience. The X200s, compared to it’s 12″ 4:3 predecessor the X61s uses the new 16:10 formfactor to reshape some keys. The X61 suffered from shrunk keys especially in the area of the right ctrl key. The X200 however has a normal sized keyboard with all keys the size you’d expect.
Every laptop manufacturer encorporates their own keyboard layout. On that note, I’ve gotten quite used to the layout of the m1210. In particular there’s the position of the pg_up and pg_dn keys. I use these keys a lot in everyday shell work to search back and forth in shell history. The m1210 has these keys positioned next to the arrow keys and thereby at the tip of the pinkie. The X200s has these keys on the upper-right corner of the keyboard so I needed another solution. Luckily (as can be seen on the picture) there are two keys next to the arrow keys that I neither have any application found to respond to nor could I determine their use from the icons on them. So using xmodmap, mapping these keys to pg_up and pg_dn was a matter of seconds. And since I’m talking about this. Capslock, the universally hated, completely useless key can be made escape in the same time.
The thing I was most worried about is the position of the fn key. On the m1210 it was on the right side of the ctrl key, the latter, hence, being the leftmost key on the keyboard. The X200′s leftmost key however, is exactly said fn key with all the other keys lined up in the usual order to it’s right. This turned out to be the smallest problems of all in the end though. After just one day of typing I had it right. Leaving only the joy of typing and trackpointing. I don’t look back to the m1210 on that aspect.

Display

Are you good men and true?

A thing you can’t fail to notice is the X200′s display brightness. I’m told that the LED display it also comes with is slightly better there but the CCFL one I have really lacks both contrast and brightness. I’m not expert enough to attribute either to the fact that the m1210′s display is a glare one and the X200′s is not. But the difference is quite noticable and it takes some time to get used to. In the long run I must say though that the the fact that the X200s display is a non-glare one makes up for most of it’s disadvantages. The viewing angle for example isn’t too good either. But you don’t realize that while using it. It’s these rare situations where other people need to look at it too where this becomes annoying.

Battery

Tempt not a desperate man.

A few days later, the new battery arrived. Lenovo’s ThinkVantage Toolbox for Windows confirms that it is indeed a Lenovo battery and hasn’t had it’s first cycle completed yet. So it’s new. Giving it time to charge and discharge (one complete cycle) the acpi reports an estimation of about six hours. I didn’t do a real-life test yet  but I’ve noticed a strange thing with these numbers. Yesterday I’ve used the device on battery and the estimation remained around 5:30 for over an hour. I know these numbers can’t be trusted but I’m not interested in the longest possible battery life you can achieve with the most inhumane display and hardware settings, I’m interested in real-life battery time. If I can use it normally and it lasts  a good five hours I guess I should be happy. Although I have to say that I look back at the m1210 with a sad eye there for the fact that just the new battery would have brought me back up to more than seven hours on the highest display brightness level.

Weight and dimension

Small things make base men proud.

Pictures say more than words. Both devices are equipped with the largest possible battery.

The m1210 weights a good 35% more than the X200s. It is made of a way thicker plastic and has aluminium support casing here and there. You can try to press it wherever you like, it won’t yield. The X200s, though lighter, also has the cheaper feel. It can be flexed a little fairly easily upon a light press (not in the area of the keyboard though) and I’m really afraid of dropping it (which will eventually happen one day) for I feel it might actually break.

Noise

True is it that we have seen better days.

The m1210 is a completely silent laptop. And I mean completely. Of course if you compile a lot (I’ve been running gentoo on it for quite a while) the fan will spin up and emit the usual hissing noise.  But most of the time the thing stands still. And since I’ve replaced the harddrive for a Samsung one two years ago I’ve not only gained half an hour on battery time, the samsung drive is also literally imperceptible. Which is not exactly something you can say about the Hitachi drive Lenovo stocks the X200s with. Since mine is a used device I emailed my dealer of trust for confirmation that this is indeed the drive that this laptop retails with and I’m sad to confirm that it is. I’ve read much about how quiet the X200s supposedly is, people even report it’s the quietest laptop they’ve ever had, tests recommending it for being so quiet, all this doesn’t hold true for me. The drive makes a hissing noise that sounds (and I have indeed thought that for the first day using it) like a fan is running continuously. Now people will say you could always use hdparm set the power-management level to 255, making the drive spin down wherever possbile (in these cases the laptop is indeed imperceptibly quiet) but that makes it all the more annoying when the drive spins up every few minutes to do the write-back. Not to mention the general unresponsiveness of the system when it’s spun down. For many people this won’t be a big problem (and frankly, most laptops I know are still louder) but for me, this drive must go.

Linux support

Can one desire too much of a good thing?

The old question whether linux will run or not and how well certain parts are supported shouldn’t concern anyone anymore in today’s computer world. The Linux Driver Project has done an amazing job helping big companies to develop incredible linux drivers that all distributions can package withouth fear of legal ramifications. As long as you don’t buy Acer, or the local superstore brand buy a quality brand you can’t go wrong. Installing my beloved Arch Linux was a matter of little more than an hour, including dm-crypt and the setup of all devices. As expected from the Cetrino2 platform, wireless reception is incredible (I can acually recieve the wireless network my neighbors four houses down the road have set up now) and the thing suspends and hibernates as if it had never been a problem at all.

One problem, though not entirely linux-related the X200s has is bios passwords. The m1210 for example would, if protected by a boot password ask for said password even when resuming from standby. The X200s does not. And there’s no setting in bios to enable it. The only situation where it asks for a password is when booting from full-off. Being a user who suspends his laptop more than 95% of all time, I was relying on the device itself to protect against unwanted use. With the X200s I’m now forced to take this protection to the OS-level. And I don’t really see why Lenovo chose to do this. I would at least like to have a choice here.

Price tag

Not stepping o’er the bounds of modesty.

The Lenovo prices are just way too high. The configuration I bought retails for the modest amount of just over 1500€. Therefore buying a used device struck me as a very good deal at first. But taking into account that I had to spend another 100€ for the big battery (which retails at 180€ in Lenovo’s very own webstore by the way) and will have to spend at least another 50 for a new harddrive, things start to look more real. It’s still way less than the original Lenovo price but the higher the price tag goes, the more I would expect from the device. And at a certain point, the display and the overall battery life bias that impression.

On a sidenote

Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t.

Something that shouldn’t go unmentioned is the fact that the X200s comes with an optional dockingstation, the UltraBase. I haven’t yet figured out the specific property that makes it ultra but it retails for a modest 220€ and it’s features include: A second VGA port… (*tadaa*)
Maybe it’s just me but I would think a laptop having only a VGA port would be better extended with a DVI or HDMI port. The ultrabase does have a display port though. You know, one of those small things that really come in handy for designers of very thin laptops? Well, it’s right there, built into the most bulky dockingstation on the marktet. The pressing assumtion here is that lenovo wants to drain their customers of the very last Euro because an adapter to one of the above standards is not included (it is conveniently offered in Lenovos webshop though).
I would definitely like to connect two external monitors to the laptop. One I can get with a decent picture now while, no matter how I turn it, the second suffers from an analog signal and all the usual flaws that come with it.