A laptop that makes me grin – Lenovo Thinkpad X300

About a month ago (shortly after joining a new team), I upgraded laptops at work. For the first time in my Microsoft career, I selected a non-Toshiba laptop, choosing the ridiculously small delight of the Lenovo ThinkPad X300. Yes, that would be the 3.5 pound, 0.73 inch thick, 13.3 inch widescreen, boot-to-desktop-in-25 seconds (5 seconds from sleep), star of the following video (with credit to Miladin for first discovering it).

I do like the mini-ad campaign Lenovo ran (only) online that ended with: “Everything else is hot air.” I appreciate a good solid poke.

This is the first laptop in a long time that has made me grin idiotically when I first used it. It weighs nothing (the monstrosities in common use by my peers make my wrists hurt just to look at them), looks great, and runs like the wind. I’ll pen a few thoughts on Vista itself in a future post.

One caveat: Lenovo needs to learn how to leave things out. The keyboard is a serious victim of an unwillingness to compromise. It includes every single key that you’d find on a full-size keyboard, including, the completely useless ScrLk and Pause keys (I challenge anyone under 30 to tell me what those keys ever did). They also include both a trackpoint and a touchpad. Now, since I love trackpoints (they take time to get used to, but they are far faster and more precise than touch pads), I appreciate having it, but I’d be willing to deal with the touchpad if they left it out (and in particular, if they used some of the saved space to make it bigger).

All in all, it’s an amazing laptop – if you can afford it (or you can convince someone to buy it for you), I highly recommend it.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 06, 2008
  The Scroll Lock key locks you into scrolling instead of moving your text cursor.  It is still used in some programs such as Excel.  I have also seen it used as a key along with arrow keys to swap which computer is shown on some KVM switches. The Pause key paused the computer back in DOS days.  It is still useful to stop the computer when it is showing BIOS information on the screen that only displays for a second, in order to write down BIOS versions, etc. Today I mostly use pause in combination with the Window Key.  The Window Key + Pause brings up system information.  I am not sure how many versions of windows this goes back to, but it atleast works in XP and Vista. Only 28 years old.

• Anonymous
  August 06, 2008
  :) Nicely done, young one.

• Anonymous
  August 06, 2008
  The comment has been removed

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  October 17, 2008
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