Digital Trends

Lenovo ThinkPad X300 April 22nd, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

Like the MacBook Air, as soon as we lifted the X300 out of the box we were amazed by not only how thin and light it was, but by how rugged it felt. You can pick it up by the display or by the corner of the chassis and it doesn’t flex one bit. We pressed down hard on the top of the LCD cover and it was rock-solid and didn’t budget. It’s a smidgen thicker than the Air, but that’s mostly due to its boxy roll-cage design. Suddenly, our very own 6lb. notebook – an XPS M140 – felt like an obsolete tank in comparison.

The X300 is just under three quarters of an inch thick at its thinnest point.

First Boot

Since the X300 uses a solid-state hard drive, we expected its boot time to be better than average - especially since we’d heard stories of how fast it boots. It ended up booting to the desktop in a scant 40 seconds, which is good, but it then took an additional 15 seconds to load all the startup items, giving it a 55 second boot time, which is average for a Vista machine. This performance backs up our previous experience with the Asus Eee PC – as a user it’s literally impossible to “feel” any speed advantage with solid-state drives. 

Once we got to the desktop it seemed pretty sparse in terms of pre-installed programs, as the only links on the desktop where to ones we see on almost every pre-built PC we get in for review: Norton Internet Security, Microsoft Office trial and Adobe Reader. It’s certainly nothing like the Toshiba Qosmio we recently reviewed. However, when we looked at the available hard disk space our jaw dropped – with its 64GB hard drive, only 36GB remained unused. This translates to a 24GB installation of Vista plus the usual ThinkVantage applications, which is unbelievably large. We used a utility to examine drive usage and nothing out of the ordinary came up aside from a 4GB directory named “backup,” but we looked and System Restore had been disabled. We’re honestly not sure why Lenovo configures its systems this way or what takes up so much space, but 36GB for storage is not a lot of space obviously.

General Performance

With its 2GB of RAM and Core 2 Duo processor, the X300 is certainly zippy enough for day-to-day tasks. It comes pre-loaded with Vista’s Service Pack 1, which has been known to improve general performance as well as file transfer times. It’s Windows Experience Index score is a decent 3.5.

Obviously, given its specs it’s not a machine one would purchase for gaming or video editing, and though some people are griping about its processor running at only 1.2GHz, we found it to be totally sufficient for general laptop duties.