Short review: This thing rocks!

About every three years it seems like we need to update a notebook PC. Fortunately we aren't both on the same three year cycle so we're able to temporarily "cascade" mine (a new corporate IT term I learned) to the Mrs. (who was still running Windows 2000 on hers) and get me a new one.

This time I thought I'd go for an "ultra-portable." After a lot of research, I settled on the Lenovo Thinkpad X61s [1].

(I was seriously lusting after one of the X300s with the solid state hard drive, but decided it's too new and not worth a $700-$800 premium.)

The X61s I got has a low-power (indicated by the 's' designation for some reason) Intel L7500 Core Duo 1.60GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, a 7200RPM 100GB hard drive, and Vista Ultimate. It has built-in gigabit ethernet, wi-fi, Bluetooth, and Verizon wireless broadband adapters and a dial-up modem. It came with the X61 "Ultrabase" docking station which has a DVD reader/writer, additional USB ports, and serial, parallel and monitor ports.

It also came with the larger eight-cell battery which is supposed to last up to nine hours. I can't vouch for that yet, but I'm skeptical. The X61 (no 's') models come with faster, higher powered CPUs, but get significantly less battery life. I opted for longer battery life.

This model comes with a three-year factory warranty, which I didn't think was standard. But this particular unit is one of Lenovo's specially priced "Top Seller" configurations, which may be why the longer warranty is included, not sure.

X61 models appear to be backordered at Lenovo, and after reading several horror stories about their shipping delays I decided to look around for one in stock. I got mine at PC Connection [2] for $1899 [3] with free shipping (however they do charge sales tax in Tennessee). We've purchased from them before and never had a problem. I also purchased a Bluetooth wireless mouse [4] ($54).

This X61s also has a fingerprint reader. It came already setup and it was easy to "enroll" my fingerprint so I can now log on with one quick swipe. (My older Thinkpad had one, too, but I never got it working correctly.) The only disturbing thing is that my firewall alerted on the fingerprint driver trying to access the internet. I don't know why, but I went ahead and allowed it. I guess it's sending fingerprints directly to the NSA and the FBI or something.

The Bluetooth mouse works great, too, and was easy to setup using Windows Bluetooth dialogs (select the "no passkey" option). I didn't install the software that came with the mouse.

Everything started up and worked fine right out of the box. It went through the usual Windows first time use gyrations for a few minutes, and was ready to go.

So far I love it. I was a little concerned about the low power CPU but it's pretty snappy. (Although new PCs usually are, because they aren't all kludged up yet.) I ran a comparison with my desktop PC (3 GHz Pentium D with 3.5GB RAM) that consisted of rendering a 1:22 YouTube quality video using the same source video and same editing software. It took 1:52 on the desktop, and 1:30 on the Thinkpad, about a 20% improvement. Works for me. Photoshop loads a lot faster, too, and Lightroom seems to spit out JPEGs about twice as fast.

I haven't tried the wi-fi yet, but I don't anticipate any problems. We have a Verizon wireless broadband account, so I tried that. We have a modem card (one of those PC card things) that we used on the old notebook. I had to call Verizon and have them deactivate that and associate the built-in broadband modem with our account. That took about five minutes on the phone, and after that it connected right up.

As for ultra-portability, the X61s is amazing. Untethered from the docking station, it weighs just over three pounds with the extra-large battery. Even with the docking station, it's still as portable as any other notebook, but unless you need the ports or the DVD writer there's no need to haul it around. And untethered, it's literally about the size of a notebook. (See photos below.)

I was a little concerned about the small keyboard and the 12.1" 1024X768 screen, but I was pleasantly surprised. The X61s keyboard is almost as comfortable to use as the legendary "full size" Thinkpad keyboards. Very few compromises had to be made to fit all the keys where you'd expect them to be in such a small space. I also like the Thinkpad Touchpoint mouse pointer (the little red nub thing in the middle of the keyboard) and the fact that the X61s doesn't have a touch pad (I hate those things).

The monitor screen is bright and sharp, and very usable even with the smaller size and lower resolution, which is a small price to pay for ultra-portability. My only complaint is that you have to be looking at exactly the right angle for proper color and contrast.

My only other complaint so far is that the front edge where you rest your wrists when typing gets a little warm. OK, the only only other complaint is that about 10GB of the 100GB hard drive is reserved for the hidden factory image install partition. That's fairly common these days, though, and it actually came in handy already. OK, and one more thing. They don't send out recovery CDs. You can make your own, or order them from the factory for $15 or $20. (Curiously, they do send out XP upgrade, er, downgrade CDs.)

As far as Vista, I had only used it before in the process of testing our software, and didn't really use it per se. After actually "using" using it for a week or so, I kinda like it. It's not a whole lot different from XP, but has snazzier graphics and some nice multi-media features (although the photo software still doesn't recognize camera raw files and the video software still doesn't recognize MP4/AVC/H.264 videos.) Lots of folks gripe about UAC (User Account Control) but I find it to be a reassuring extra layer of security. It also has a proper backup utility that will save an exact image of your entire hard drive. (Supposedly, I haven't tried it yet.)

So far I am thrilled with this notebook and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a Windows ultra-portable. The price is right, too, considering all the features included in this powerful little package.

Scroll down for some photos, or continue reading if you're interested in the gory details of some Microsoft installation drama, offered in case it might be helpful to someone else...

The first thing I did after Windows Vista finished configuring itself was to uninstall Norton Internet Security and install Windows Live Onecare firewall/virus protection. I've been using it for a while and it works great and it's unobtrusive, and for the $49 subscription fee you can install it on three computers.

The next thing I did was uninstall some other junk "shovelware" such as PC Doctor and Diskkeeper and some other stuff. (Google Picasa was also installed, and I played with it for a bit before uninstalling it. This is some great free software, more on that in another post.)

Next I started installing our moneymaker development environment, which includes some "legacy" tools and components, and that's when some of the drama began.

Note to self and other Vista users (or XP users for that matter): if you're going to use your computer in a corporate-style Microsoft domain, join the domain before you go crazy installing stuff. Note #2 to self and other Vista users: when installing "legacy" software, be sure to right click and select the "run as administrator" option, even if you are logged on to an account with administrator privileges. (Newer setups automatically elevate privileges, and Vista recognizes some older ones but not always.)

After joining the domain and cleaning up a bunch of registry permission issues caused by not using "run as administrator" and not belonging to the domain and running under its group policy, things went smoother and I had my development environment up and running in no time. My other "fun" stuff such as video and photo editing software installed fine with no problems.

Then came the real drama.

The Thinkpad came with a trial version of Windows Office 2007. Because I already have a licensed copy of Windows Office 2003 Professional that is supposed to work on Vista, I uninstalled the Office 2007 trial and attempted to install Office 2003. Hilarity ensued. There was something about an incompatible version of Business Contact Manager, but it wouldn't let me update or uninstall Business Contact Manager because the version of Business Contact Manager was incompatible, even though it wasn't listed as an installed program. Best I can tell it was something residual from the Office 2007 trial.

At this point I was worried that my registry was hopelessly trashed from this and all the preceding drama, so I decided to wipe the hard drive and start over. Lenovo doesn't send recovery CDs (actually they do, but they're for "upgrading" to XP, not recovering the system). Fortunately, like most PCs these days there's a hidden partition with a factory image. You get to it by rebooting, pressing the little blue button, and selecting the restore/recover option. (It appears to be a Norton Ghost image.) That worked great, and I was back to the starting gate. I reinstalled all my stuff, which went a lot smoother the second time because of all the practice I got the first time around.

Curiously, the "factory image" didn't include the Office 2007 trial. Worried that Office 2003 was going to be more trouble than it was worth, and thinking that Office 2007 would be more compatible with Vista, I decided to download the Office 2007 trial from Microsoft, prepared to cough up the $300 or so ransom if I could get it installed and working.

I installed the Office 2007 trial, and downloaded about 300MB more worth of service packs and installed them, and activated it. More hilarity ensued. Every time you launched an Office 2007 application like Word or Excel or Outlook, it started an install dialogue, saying "Please wait while Windows configures Microsoft Office..." until it got to a point where it wanted to reboot. When you tried to reboot, Vista said you shouldn't because an installer was running. When you canceled the reboot, the Office installer gave an error saying it couldn't continue because you tried to reboot in the middle of the installation. If you canceled that message, it ran another setup or two, and then your application opened. If you let it reboot, it did the same thing the next time you tried to launch an Office application, ad infinitum. No matter what you did, Office tried to re-install itself every time you used it.

I Googled the problem, and apparently thousands of people have had it. And not just on Vista, and not just with Office 2007. I tried all kinds of suggested ridiculous registry hacks and a bunch of other stupid tricks, traced the whole process using a process monitor in an effort to diagnose the problem, but nothing worked. The Microsoft online support Knowledge Base was blissfully unaware of this specific problem that at least thousands of other users have encountered. (There was a very similar incident, but the solution didn't work.) They offered to charge me $49 to discuss it.

So after a day or so of messing around with all this, I gave up, uninstalled Office 2007 trial, and went through the registry cleaning up anything Office related (which Microsoft's registry cleanup utility couldn't or wouldn't find). Then I tried to install Office 2003 again on my relatively "fresh and clean" installation. It worked like a champ. Go figure. Note that I did not install the Office Business Contact Manager either time, for 2007 or 2003.

The whole episode is pathetic, and ought to be an embarrassment to Microsoft. But they're big enough that they don't have to care any more, I guess.

PHOTOS:

Side by side, X61s (right) next to my old T43 (left)

Open view, X61s (right) next to my old T43 (left)

X61s stacked on top of the T43

Stacked, side view

X61s with a notebook on top, illustrating it's truly a "notebook" size PC

Ultrabase docking station and Bluetooth mouse
(No comments about the condition of my twenty-year-old lucky desk.)

Fired up and ready to go

Just for laughs, our very first notebook PC on the left. It's a 386 Compaq that ran Windows 3.1, circa 1992, and if I recall it has 512K of RAM. They're about the same size! Believe it or not, it still works. It only has DOS on it now, and runs a device emulator that we use to test a serial device control interface. In fact we have used it in the last month for testing.