| Product: |
IBM Thinkpad X20 2660 |
| Date: |
02/11/08 (21 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Hugely reliable, lightweight
Disadvantages: Specs are also a bit classic
I bought the X20 second hand some years ago as my first laptop... I was not disappointed despite its age!
IBM certainly made their Thinkpads to last. Mine is 7 years old and has been bashed about more than I care to mention, yet it continues to work beautifully. Into the bargain you also get Cardbus, CompactFlash and 2 USB 1.1 slots. The hard disk is also housed in a very useful caddy which allows removal simply by sliding it out with no unscrewing required. Note that there is no floppy or CD/DVD drive but you can get a dock which will take them.
The unit is tiny and can be lifted easily with one hand. The 12.1" screen is of excellent quality and offers good viewing angles and visibility in all conditions, even at low brightness.
The graphics chip is quite a relic and certainly won't handle any modern games - but they're not what you buy a Thinkpad to run! Anything from the Quake 2 era and before will work just fine, however.
A minor gripe is the upper memory limit of just 320MB (there's 64MB soldered to the motherboard and it can take a single 256MB DIMM). It must have seemed quite huge when the laptop was released but it's a little restrictive these days. Careful software setup can allow you to keep on working just fine.
Like the memory limit, the CPU speed is paltry by today's standards. However, you won't be buying one of these to run power-hungry applications. What it can do extremely well is run Linux - all the hardware is supported, as is hibernation.
Battery life with a good battery is supposed to be in the order of 5 hours. Mine is knackered and won't go for more than 5 minutes, so I'd advise getting up a new one if you plan on being away from mains electricity!
They can be picked up for next to nothing these days and spare parts, should you happen to need them, are easy to come by and rather cheap.
Summary: Perfect for light use
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