On 01.12.2016 18:50, Klemens Nanni wrote:
On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 05:04:36PM +0000, ron minnich wrote:
what's the latest best one? What's the battery life like (can't be worse than this mac pro that's always hot and now seems to have a life of 90 minutes, always). How much dram/ssd can I jam in it?
X230 if you'd ask me: 16G RAM, 12M ROM. runs fine with reduced (830K) ME and has a powerful Ivy Bridge CPU. USB3.0, miniDisplayPort as well as docking station has been working just fine for me although handling suspend/resume as well as mounted external storage *can* be somewhat tricky (in some scenarios the X230 would instantly resume from suspend after having been docked once).
Battery life under linux has been somewhere around 8 hours for me, OpenBSD gets about 5-6 out of it but YMMV.
The problem with the X series is that the UI degraded with every gene- ration. Keyboard layout got worse with every generation. X220/X230: only 1366x768 pixels, from X230 on: chiclet keyboard, X240: no track- point buttons!!! The X250 was the first fully usable again, but sup- posedly with BootGuard enabled :-/
If you can't live with the 1366x768 resolution (I couldn't), you can look for a T430s with 1600x900 screen, optionally with a replacement keyboard (the oldest that fits). Everything Klemens said about the X230 should also apply to the T430s. It's just 14" instead of 12".
The X series never features more than one disk bay, but this again depends on your use case: I'm totally fine with an 120G SSD, other people prefer a RAID on their W/T model ThinkPads.
Any 2.5" (7mm height) SATA drive should fit.
Nico