Digital Trends

Lenovo ThinkPad X61s August 8th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

The Big Screen

The X61s ships with a 12.1” display, and unlike most notebooks these days with a fancy widescreen aspect ratio, this one is kicking it old school with a 4:3 ratio and a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768. The screen looks decent, but we’ve gotten so used to widescreen, glossy displays that the X61s’s seems a little small and, well, kind of bland. There is no integrated webcam, but Bluetooth support is an option that is available.

Onboard Video

The X61s sports the ubiquitous Intel onboard graphics, care of the 965 Express chipset. While desktop replacement notebooks need high-powered graphics cards for gaming, thin-and-lights such as the X61s need just a basic onboard solution, and we had no issues with Intel’s onboard chip. We were able to play casual games like Chuzzle, but didn’t even bother with hardcore 3D games, as we know from past experience that Intel onboard is not capable of running anything but the most lightweight 3D applications.

Battery Life

With any thin-and-light notebook, battery life is paramount, and the X61s offers multiple battery configurations to satisfy even the most hardcore road warrior. According to Lenovo, its 4-cell prismatic battery is good for 3.1 hours, the 4-cell cylindrical unit offers 4 hours, and an 8-cell double-wide model offers 8 hours of battery life. If you buy the extra battery that locks onto the X61s’s tummy, you can supposedly get around 12 hours of battery life.

Spec sheet aside, we tested the X61s in the “real world” and found that when performing rudimentary office tasks such as e-mail, web surfing, and listening to music, its 8-cell battery was able to squeeze out 3 hours and 50 minutes of battery life at half brightness, which is decent, but not even close to the battery’s reported 8-hour life. Perhaps if we just turned it on, but didn’t use it for anything, we could achieve the reported battery life.

What is most likely is that Lenovo is taking something called Battery Stretch into account, which can be enabled when the battery gets low. It puts the notebook into ultra-low power usage mode, dimming the display, shutting off the wireless radio, and so forth. We enabled it when our battery got down to 10 percent, and it claimed we’d be able to work for another 49 minutes on just that amount of juice, which is impressive. However, not being able to access the internet, hear audio, or use an optical drive makes this mode impractical for work scenarios. It would be useful in an emergency, though.

Battery Stretch Screesnshot

OS Situation

These days, when buying a new notebook, you can usually get any OS you want, as long as it’s Vista. Though Vista is offered with the X61s — in all flavors — you can also opt for Windows XP Professional, which is fantastic and something we wish all integrators would offer. After all, not everyone wants to deal with Vista’s hassles. 

Touchpad, Or Lack Thereof

Due to its diminutive size, the X61s lacks a touchpad. Instead, it offers the iconic red “nubbin” (a.k.a. TrackPoint) that you use to move the mouse cursor. For some people, this might be a deal breaker, as a touchpad is generally considered to be the best interface for user control of the cursor, aside from a mouse. However, the nubbin is fairly accurate, and though it took some getting used to, by the end of our evaluation period, we were comfortable with it. It’s perfectly spaced in relation to the left and right click keys and makes using the apparatus much easier.

Lenovo Thinkpad X61s keyboard

Biometric Security

Corporate security is a big deal, and the ThinkPad includes a biometric fingerprint scanner that you can use to log into the computer, if you choose. When the Vista welcome screen appears, it gives you the option of using a traditional password or swiping your pre-selected finger across the scanner. Once you swipe your finger, it compares it to the original scan and then tells you if it’s successful or “too short,” for instance, meaning your swipe was too short. All in all, it works exactly as one would expect, and we never had any difficulty registering fingerprints or logging into Vista.

X61s fingerprint scanner

Storage

The X61s includes a 120GB 5400rpm Serial ATA hard drive, which is quite spacious and reasonably zippy. Though everyone loves to complain about 5400rpm drives being slow, we’ve never had an issue with them. And on this system, with its 2GB of RAM and dual-core CPU, the OS and applications are very responsive and open almost instantaneously.

Since notebooks are always moving around — and that’s bad for hard drives, with their read/write heads floating nanometers above the platters — Lenovo has instituted a safeguard system that we’ve praised before. Basically, the notebook has a gyroscopic sensor inside of it that senses movement of the system. It attempts to predict sudden movements, and will spin the drive down in order to prevent a head crash. You can actually see it in action, in real time, thanks to the built-in software utility that shows a 3D rendering of the notebook, mimicking its motion as you tilt it and move it. And if you tilt it too fast, you can hear the hard drive click on and off.

ThinkVantage Protection System Screenshot