Should I upgrade to x60?

[hippojam1]

i've had an x40 for almost 2 years now. i love the hardware. i think it's a great piece of engineering and perfect for me. (big keyboard, thin, no cd drive, long battery life...perfect for offline word processing, which is what i need it for.)

however, i'm wayyy frustrated. my base model x40 is super slow, and all the thinkpad software hogs resources and makes it slower. plus, it seems like while i've had the x40 i've had to check online all the time for updates to drivers and thinkpad software....why are there always updates???....and since i don't want to be online much, it's very annoying.

but the worst thing is that recently the hard drive failed and i had it replaced (thinkpad warranty support is great, btw), and it took me all day to update windows xp security fixes and thinkpad software. an entire afternoon, and that's even before i installed any of my own software!

the slow speed and all the thinkpad redundant software really get annoying. so what should i do? should i upgrade to a faster thinkpad? should i just manually get rid of all the rescue/recovery partition junk? or should i switch to a manufacturer like panasonic that doesn't have these problems?

any advice would be much appreciated...

[christopher_wolf]

Depends, have you tried to squeeze all the performance you could out of your X40?

[Zeitgeist]

i think it's a great piece of engineering and perfect for me.

You just answered the question yourself.

[christopher_wolf]

i think it's a great piece of engineering and perfect for me.

You just answered the question yourself.

Well, there you go. Zeitgeist as a good point.

[SeanHayward]

Well you do list quite a few things that you don't like about the machine. If you want to upgrade, but you can still hold on, you might want to wait for the Merom cores to come out in the fall. Though, importance of 64 bit processing probably does not apply in your circumstance if you are primarily using it for word processing. Nonetheless, it will increase the life of the machine down the road.

Just as a question how much RAM is currently in your X40, and can you upgrade? That might remedy some of the problems created by the bloated software.

I am sure someone else can answer the question of removing thinkpad software better than me. My thinkpad is in the mail, and has yet to arrive, probably want someone with actual experience on that issue.

[bigtiger]

I think you can maximize your x40 by deleting redundant services. And then if your memory is less than 512, upgrade your memory.

That should significantly enhance your current performance.

For your current needs, I do not think you need to upgrade. Most often the time, people tend to over-purchase gears.

[Antioch]

Hopefully you'll never have to reformat a drive. But if you do, head over to the windows support forum here and read the sticky about making a normal windows pro installation CD. It doesn't have any of the thinkvantage stuff on it - it's a clean windows install. It should not only speed up your install times, but also your sytem performance if you think the thinkvantage software is bogging you down.

But I agree with everyone else. Try removing the thinkvantage stuff you dont use, that should make things a bit better. Upgrading the RAM might also do the trick.

[hippojam1]

thank youl. i think i'll look into increasing memory first. turns out i only have 256 mb!

[christopher_wolf]

Be careful to remove only the ThinkVantage applications you do not use and not just blow away the whole suite.

[fo0tprintz]

thank youl. i think i'll look into increasing memory first. turns out i only have 256 mb!

whoa, only 256? time to upgrade! that's your performance lag right there!