THIS, is the computer equivalent of the child of the original Hummer and the Prius. Tough[ish], rough on the edges, powerful, but with the stamina of a horse. If this sounds like a commercial, that's because it practically is: I got this baby a few months ago and I STILL love it like it was my first day.I ended up giving my model a few upgrades: a solid state drive and 8 gigs of ram. Lenovo also lets you add in extra features such as bluetooth, GPS and mobile broadband (essentially, a SIM card slot), and a smart card reader -so if you're looking to make the ultimate business machine -you've picked the right vendor.
With my current specs, I can easily run multiple virtual machines at the same time (and if you use VMWare Workstation 7, run 'em in a seamless Unity mode!) and not notice any performance degradation. Oh yeah, it's FAST too. Blazing fast.
Cold boots take seconds (I'd be betting somewhere in the 10 second range), and sleep/unsleep is pretty instantaneous. If you go for the 9-cell battery (which you should) -this thing can run on its own juice for HOURS. And by hours, I mean at full brightness, wifi, music, browsing, writing software, etc... for 4+ hours. Maybe longer -I never tried to run it all the way down.
The battery can hot-swap as long as you are plugged in (duh), and there are spill drains on the bottom of the keyboard for water, coffee, and beer. I don't personally recommend doing any of those three (or eating over it) -but apparently the engineers at Lenovo (and previously, IBM) thought about all these concerns and built it into their laptops. There are stories out there of a beer-soaked X201 being brought back to life, though I wouldn't dare try it myself.
As for the Lenovo/IBM brand, it has a reputation for a reason: reliability and longevity. When you make an investment like this, you don't want it to go down the drain in a couple years. My friend is still using a ThinkPad from 2005, and he still swears by it. While I'm not nearly as attached to my laptops, it's good to know that I can smash the keyboard of my X201 for many years to come without worrying about things breaking or parts coming loose.
The only, and absolutely only, complaints I have are that the 'joystick' or TrackPoint tends to get a little carried away sometimes and move the mouse on its own for a little bit after you use it for a while. Apparently this is common and doesn't get worse as the laptop ages. It's a pretty mild inconvenience that is easily overcome, but it's the only thing I can think of mentioning. That said, there are also some issues with the TrackPoint scroll mechanism and some applications (e.g., Office 2010, etc..) -these can be overcome fairly well by editing a few text files, though it's certainly a process that could be made more easy. Ultimately, if you're not too picky, you can always go over to the right hand side and drag the scroller or press the arrow keys -however the scroll mechanism for the TrackPoint does make the TrackPoint almost as efficient as using a mouse. I should also mention that cleaning the TrackPoint is easy and fast.
If you don't like the TrackPoint, they offer models with a touchpad as well, or a touchpad exclusively.
I'm not gonna be the best reviewer for this product since I don't have a bunch of crunched, digested numbers for you. But don't take my word for it -do some research, read some of the more involved reviews (I think there was a 5 8 page one somewhere that convinced me) -and read up on what others have to say about this particular model.
Bottom line: FAST, powerful, lightweight (even with a 9-cell, it's pretty light!), and reliable. Well worth the $$$.
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