But it's still not a ThinkPad. Lenovo recently came out with several new models that piqued my interest, the Edge and the X100e. I started lurking around Lenovo's outlet site and finally found a deal on an X100e.
The specifications for the refurbished X100e that I got are:
Processor | AMD® Athlon™ Neo MV-40 (1.60GHz, 512KB L2) |
Operating System | Genuine Windows 7 Professional 32 - English |
Keyboard/Pointing Device | UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad) |
Total Memory | 2GB PC2-5300 DDR2 667MHz SDRAM SODIMM Memory |
Hard Drive | 250GB, 5400RPM Serial ATA 2.5" Hard Drive |
Display | 11.6” WXGA HD (1366 X 768) LED, W/ 0.3 MP Camera |
Graphics | ATI™ Radeon™ HD 3200 |
Ethernet/Wireless | 11b/g/n Wi-Fi wireless |
Bluetooth | No |
Integrated Camera | Yes |
The outlet price was 50% of list and since it was very slow to ship, Lenovo gave me an 10% "sales concession" (credit) so the price was very good.
Although Lenovo doesn't put a lot of crapware on their PCs, I wanted it running Windows 7 64-bit so I reformated and loaded Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. I had let Windows Update install all the drivers it had and then went to Lenovo to get all the rest of the drivers.
The only issue I had after the reload was that when running Google Documents using the new document format, highlighted text was barely discernible when on battery power. As you can imagine, that took a while to figure out what all the conditions were.
I turned to my favorite problem solver Google and came up with a solution. What had happened was that Windows Update installed a standard ATI driver but the Lenovo driver had the Catalyst Control Center included. This solution uses the Catalyst Control Center to turn off the Vari-Bright feature. With this off, the contrast is back to normal.
Just for fun, I installed Office 2010 64-bit as well.