Digital Trends

Lenovo ThinkPad X200 August 11th, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Operating System

Although our X200 came healthily equipped with a 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM, we still found Vista choking between window switches, stalling for seconds at a time erratically, and crashing, all while using nothing but the pre-installed software. These hiccups didn’t render the system unusable by any means, but we would highly recommend ordering it with Windows XP or downgrading, which resolved all the same issues on the Lenovo ThinkPad X61.

Software Bundle

Lenovo’s ThinkVantage utilities manage to tie the notebook’s various gizmos and features together fairly neatly, but power users still may want to slim down the suite that runs on startup, since our machine had over 10 ThinkPad-related programs chugging away in the background by default. We were also disappointed with how thin some of the offerings were, like Lenovo Camera Center, which is basically no more than a window prompting users to download Skype. As a benefit to this approach, bloatware and trialware are both kept to a minimum.

Image Courtesy of Lenovo

Boot Time

Given how long many notebooks need to crank Vista awake, start-up and shutdown times for the X200 were a pleasant surprise. It will boot up and open a browser window in under 55 seconds, and shut down in 15 seconds flat. For a travel machine that will be turned on and off frequently to save power between uses, this turns out to be a major benefit.

Ports and Connectors

Almost every inch of the X200’s tiny circumference has been dotted with inputs, outputs and doors, but given the small size of that space, its offerings aren’t really anything above normal. You’ll find three USB ports, headphone, microphone, Ethernet and modem jacks, a VGA connector, and card reader. That’s all the essentials for life on the road, but we would have liked to see more video outputs, like S-video, to make the X200 more compatible with different displays for presentations.

Performance

When Vista wasn’t throwing us a curveball, we found the Lenovo to be a snappy performer with more than enough power to handle the serious multitasking that business users will likely put it through. Staples like Word and Firefox loaded handily and responded quickly even after multiple programs were already running. Without a discrete graphics card, the X200 certainly doesn’t go far with games, but that doesn’t make it a complete dud, either. Older games, along the line of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, will run acceptably after tweaking the settings, which is probably enough to provide a short diversion for the suit-and-tie crowd that Lenovo targets.

Conclusion

The X200 improves upon the X61 in several significant ways without diminishing its number one selling point: weight. Most notably, the transition to a widescreen manages to nudge the notebook just out of the size category that might be called “annoyingly small” and into a more comfortable range. The $1,199 USD price tag places it a cool grand below the X300, and with more grunt under the hood, too. Due to its lack of an optical drive, we probably wouldn’t recommend buying the X200 as a sole do-it-all machine, but for lightweight travelers, this systems hard to beat.

Pros:
 
• Lightweight
• Powerful Intel Centrino 2 Processor
• Outstanding build quality
• Respectably priced for its features

Cons:
 
• No optical drive
• No touchpad