Is a X220T/SSD an 'instant-on' tablet?

[nathanb131]

Short version:

I'd like a little feedback from any x2xxT/ssd owners on how 'instant on' the thing is compared to a smartphone or ipad/honeycomb tablet. Also any tips to optimize that would be helpful.

I am starting a new job in a couple weeks and am fortunate to be getting this configuration: X220T-160gb ssd-i7-multitouch-8gb ram-verizon LTE card. Pretty much my dream machine.

Long version (thoughts on Lenovo and tablet use in general which gives the background for my question):
For almost 3 years I've been using the x200t-winxp-5400rpm hd. This thing is slooow to start-up and load almost any program. Takes several minutes to boot (like 5 minutes, I'm serious, it's agonizing). Getting into and out of hibernation isn't too bad but far from 'instant on'. I blame the software combo of winxp and my current company's software which also seemed to really bog down a Dell I was initially issued, especially on startup. Many attempts at screwing around with the settings and lenovo's own 'optimization' software have left this thing painfully glitchy and slow with an IT department who doesn't want to refresh it to factory settings. So I'm just limping along with it for its last days in hopes that I can buy it cheap when I leave and put a clean copy of win7 on it....

Other than the glitchy and unique software situation, I love this little guy! Within weeks of being new, she slipped out of her carrying sleeve (never EVER leave that unzipped, you THINK it's stuck in there but it's NOT!!) and hit 3 metal steps and landed on a concrete floor in our factory. The front left corner received minor visible damage and that usb port has been unreliable since but other than that it has been going strong for years since.

So physically it's help up really well and I still choose to type on the keyboard even when docked with a full-size keyboard. When you absent-mindedly reach for the little thinkpad keyboard/nub over a desktop keyboard and mouse, that says a LOT about this keyboard! I thought really hard about requesting the HP 2760p instead but all the pros and cons aside, it's the keyboard that keeps me coming back to Lenovo. I never hear anyone talk positively about the nub either and reviewers consistently denounce it as an archaic hold-over that is obsolete in these modern times. When I first was transferring files between a great Dell Latitude with a nub to the x200t the difference was black and white. So my guess is that many people are turned off from nubs due to bad experiences with non-thinpad ones and don't give them a second chance. Unless I'm doing heavy drafting or gaming I always prefer the nub, especially compared to trackpads. I hope that Lenovo continues to honor their core users who really value it!

The x200 screen is dim and hazy but fine for me. I'm really looking forward to that IPS display and slight increase in size (12.1 to 12.5). Battery life was awesome but I've pretty much gone through my 4 cell and 8 cell that I got with it. At first I would get 10 hours of life from the 8-cell! I know I'll be giving up some initial battery life but I'll most likely never need more than 3 so having two 6-cells to swap out will be just fine. I'm curious to find out how much the bulging, off-centered, battery on the 220 will bother me or if I'll pretend it's actually an ergonomic advantage. Reviewers seem to be split on that.

So on to my useage scenario: I've always had a dream of a truly instant-on digital assistant for digital note-taking and have been closely following the evolution of the tablet pc because of this. I though the x200 would be it but it's just been too laggy. Taking notes in pre-determined settings like meetings works great, but just grabbing it to walk around the factory with was too often glitchy and laggy to be considered an advantage over a pad of paper and a scanner.

One would think a solution to this is to have an ipad/android tablet which is much thinner and lighter and truly 'instant on' and not glitchy due to it's way simpler OS. Well if there was one with a digitizer AND a GOOD One-Note tablet app that synced instantly to my 'real' computer then I'd be all over it. I was fairly excited about the HTC flyer and it's software for note-taking, but was turned off after reading how limited it was.

There are dozens of programs to take notes and record info. However, in my humble opinion, OneNote is in a category by itself for this. I've been looking desperately for a different option because I want it to sync across all my devices but I just keep coming back. Yes evernote is everywhere and supported by everything and they keep coming out with great new features every few months. But it's just not as elegant to use as OneNote. This makes me sad because I feel that it's Microsoft's best software and they don't seem to care about pushing it out there. So because OneNote kind of sucks anywhere outside of an actual PC, it means I either have to learn to like Evernote so it's always with me, or have a full tablet pc which is mostly instant-on for most situations.

Is anyone of the same mind about this and have they found a solution in the x220/ssd or will this just be one more disappointment along the search for a no-compromise digital assistant?

[2disbetter]

I guess "instant on" could use a little more defining, but from my perspective it certainly could.

With the 6 cell battery it ships with you'll get about 5 hours of battery life, if you left it on doing usual computing things. Through in sleep in periods of inactivity, and you should have a full days worth of use out of it.

From sleep and depending on how you have windows login configured, and the current orientation of the device (clam shell closed, or in tablet mode) you can be back into windows desktop in roughly 2 seconds. Maybe faster if you didn't have a login credential to go through from resume on sleep.

Like this I started off in the morning used it for about two and a half hours, slept it for about 3 hours, worked another hour in it, slept it for 2 hours, worked in it for 30 minutes, slept for another 2 hours, and finally worked on it for another hour before going home for the day. By the time I went home, I had 19% battery life left. Usage included MS VS 2010, VNC use, browsing, word, and outlook.

You mileage of course could vary, but if you were to combine the x220t with the slice battery you could easily go 2 days without a charge.

All in all, I think you'll be very happy with your new thinkpad.

2d

[nathanb131]

Thanks for the reply. I think 3 seconds from telling it to wake up to actually be interacting with it is my over-under for defining 'instant on'. That means I could actually use it for quick checking and entering of data. If it was ready to go from sleep in 2 seconds on a reliable basis then that will be awesome!

[Cads]

I have a similar configuration to yours that takes less than 5 seconds from finger print swipe to usability. A cold boot takes no more than 25 seconds or so. I haven't taken any special steps to optimize this since it's already so quick.

[nathanb131]

Thanks for the info. So you haven't made any changes to the pre-loaded 'thinkvantage' suite of utilities and they don't seem to be bogging it down?

This is a battle with my x200t which isn't very powerful due to the slow hd and ulv processor.

Since it's running 'winxp for tablets' that means there are several tablet-specific windows utilities running at all times. It might be my imagination but those seem to bog down the system a bit. Also, those add-on utilities are just one more thing that likes to crash. My hope is that since Win7 has a lot of that tablet pc functionality built-in instead of added-on that it will run smoother.

In addition to that, the 'thinkvantage' applications seemed to not do me much good. For example, their wifi utility seemed cool but I didn't understand how it gave me any advantage over winxp's built-in one. So I disabled that among several others in order to free up precious system resources and reduce glitchiness and lag. This may have helped but I think it may have caused as much trouble as it solved.

Because of this experience I am skeptical of Lenovo's specialized utilities. Even though they now advertize as being Win7 optimized, in your experience are they actually useful or are they just a poor substitute for a 'clean' windows install?

I hate bloat and I am used to re-building my systems once a year or so because it seems no amount of active management will keep a windows system's registry from becoming increasingly muddled over time. I always have this nagging feeling that simply uninstalling a program doesn't get my system back to how it was before the install.

I was a sysadmin in college in the late 90's, so it has been a while since I've been near the nuts and bolts of what makes computers run well or not. So I still hold on to those standard solutions of restart, wipe clean, build fresh, remove bloat, etc rather than actually identifying and solving the individual culprits on the fly. So I watch the system tray like a hawk and end any programs just hanging out and I frequently check what is wanting to auto-start with the 'msconfig' command and even try to stop any services that we aren't supposed to mess with.

Now I'm wondering if this does more harm than good since cpu power and ram are less of a precious resource these days.. I learned that the hard way with Android and had to finally accept that the OS was better at deciding what needed to be 'killed' than me.

I'm curious about other's thoughts on Lenovo's add-ons in general and how closely they watch what is running in the background. My instinct when I first turn on the new machine is to immediately uninstall or kill anything on the fringe of every being useful to me. Is that no longer necessary?

[2disbetter]

I understand your line of thinking with regard to pre-installed 'utilities'. I was of the same mindset. However I have noticed with the x220t and thinkvantage, that it is a very useful set of software that can be disabled without uninstalling, and then used only when necessary. The system update is nice, as well as the productivity based stuff. (Fingerprint software, autolock based on webcam and the presence of your head, etc.) I leave most of it installed as it tied directly to hardware buttons or fn + key combos that allow you to turn off or on radios, input options, brightness and volume control.

If something annoys you I've noticed that it can be disabled.

To that end I believe I only uninstalled a few useless things, like promotional material, and user guides.

So to answer your question, I think most of the stuff that comes with them is useful.

2d

[Cads]

Well it's true that the main reason I don't mess with thinkvantage is that my performance is fine and fiddling with it to preserve a fraction of my system resources is an exercise in obsessive compulsiveness. The wifi utility actually fails me occasionally when I'm connecting to some oddball secured networks that use TKIP or something, since I can't figure out how to configure it correctly and just use the windows wireless service. In cases like these the lenovo utility will gracefully step out of the way and let the windows service function so not a big deal. That said there are some useful applications like the hard disk manager which has a nice disk usage visualization, plus the battery and hardware status utilities and update manager, which are concrete things that I can point to as an advantage if I were concerned about it.

[Hattori Hanzo]

Well, I can't tell you too much specifically about the x220t, but I very well understand your situation.

The x220t should easily be the always on device you want. If not from hibernation then certainly from sleep. I'm still using the T421x currently in my signature for almost the same thing you want, although not exclusively. It's about a second from button press to waking up and another 2 seconds to swipe the finger over the fingerprint reader. The fading animation of the logging screen is another second and then it is usable. Clicking on the OneNote icon starts it in about a second. That's about 5 seconds and it seems like nothing because you're not waiting.
Given that the x220t has way faster everything and you're getting it with an SSD it should easily be capable of doing the same.

If you thought about getting an iPad or something like that especially for note taking and as a second device, why not a Slate 2 or a Q550?
They're, well, Atom based, but for OneNote they should be fine. Boot them in the morning, start up OneNote, then put 'em to sleep and you should be close enough to what you want to not consider paper and scanner anymore.


Concerning the various utilities all kinds of vendors put on their machine for "added value", I always get rid of them. The main reason is that none of them really does something completely new, but every OEM makes their stuff tick differently. So if you are forced to configure a wireless network that needs rather specific settings and not just "name, wpa key" you have to get adjusted to the completely different ways of setting things up with Lenovo, Asus and HP. It's not a problem, but a nuisance.
Another thing that I have often seen, not just with Lenovo, over the years is that those utilities seem to be a source of added bugs and problems. If something doesn't work that some utility does that could also be achieved by using Windows, just using Windows itself was in almost all cases the solution. I remember one case, though not the OEM tools involved, where I could reproduce problems with 802.1X authentication by installing some WiFi manager and uninstalling it left the functionality broken. It either needed a system restore or a complete reinstallation of the entire OS.

When it comes to the bloat factor I don't think that's too much of an issue. It partly was in the past, because memory and processing time were more valuable, but the hardware developed way faster than the bloat of those OEM utilities. On an i7 you could have a task running that would consume the power of an entire Atom CPU and its memory interface and you'd likely not even notice it really

[cegras]

I have one with almost the same configuration as you, except I have 4 gbs of ram.

Here's what I do: open the lid, the computer wakes up, brings up the login screen in 2-3 seconds. From swiping finger on the reader to the desktop, another 2-3 seconds.

It's not android / ios fast, but for W7 it's probably as fast as it's going to get until W8.

The i7 is ridiculously fast. Faster than my 3.4 ghz E7200 by a fair margin. I have not bothered uninstalling any utilities, except I use windows for the wireless instead of thinkvantage connections. The lenovo update utility is really great and trouble free. Lenovo has their own software for fingerprint management, and the thinkvantage tools (while a bit of an advertising jumble) are good for a quick serial number reference and hardware specs.

[nathanb131]

Thanks for all the user experience replies on here! 2 more weeks and I will be able to see first-hand. Based on what I've read, I will let most the Lenovo utilities do their thing unless I actually run into lag problems.

Hattori:
You asked why I don't just get a windows slate to take notes with. I really love the thinkpad keyboards and am more than willing to deal with lugging it around as a fat slate in order to be able to use that keyboard. Though detachable would be fine and I am excited to see full-powered slates start to hit the prime-time. I think a big slate that looked like the Android thinkpad with a detachable real thinkpad keyboard running windows 8 would be an awesome device. I'm a big fan of the thinkpad design, everyone else seems to be going to metallic designs with rounded edges and that is just fine because they look and feel great. To me, the thinkpad is like the SR-71 spy plane. After all these years it still looks pretty awesome, even compared to the newest jets. As much as I don't care what people think of me, I DO care that they not mistake what I'm inking on to be an Ipad!