X300 first impressions

Got my Lenovo Thinkpad X300 last week and I’ve been using it for development for only a few days. Here are my first impressions:

Pros

  • Very lightweight
  • Fast – the SSD drive seems to make some things pretty fast and the system is fast enough for the work I do
  • Nice screen
  • THE BEST KEYBOARD ON A LAPTOP (as all Thinkpads have)
  • The Trackpoint (never leave home row again)

Cons

  • The fan is the WORST PIECE OF CRAP EVER!!!!!

After much research and pain it appears that Thinkpads in general have a horrible issue with fan noise. Apparently, the Thinkpad BOIS pretty much refuses to turn the fan off and the fan goes directly from 1000 RPMs when cool to 6000 RPMs when hot. There is no intermediate fan speed. Well, needless to say that 6000 RPMs is extremely annoying.

I would definitely not recommend this machine to anyone looking for a solid work laptop because the fan noise is considerable enough that after an hour or two of working with that drone you are certain to have a monster headache and feel like throwing up. I’ll probably sell it and get an Apple instead. At least then I know I’ll have very little problems with the hardware.

6 thoughts on “X300 first impressions”

  1. That sucks, I’m waiting for my new Lenovo to ship and I was hoping your review would end up positive. What OS are you running on it, BTW? I’m planning on using a free hippie OS, one of the reasons I’m buying Lenovo.
    thnx

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  2. To date I’ve tried these:

    – Vista
    – Ubuntu Hardy (8.04)
    – OpenSolaris

    I’m downloading OpenSUSE to give it a shot. We’ll see how it goes. Probably going to sell it regardless though.

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  3. You can try tpfancontrol and make it silent. I have done this and works well. Makes the left hand side of palmrest a bit hotter, though, but nothing compared to my previous Vaio which was really hot.

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  6. “Who was the first developer CPU? What is year and company name?
    Who was the first inverted keyboard?”

    I have no idea what this means, but it sounds pretty suite! Inverted keyboards and developer CPUs… hmmm…..

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