Friday, August 8, 2014

Review: Lenovo ThinkPad X130e Review

Today we look at another ultraportable laptop from over 2 years ago featuring AMD APU. The ThinkPad X130e actually has both AMD (Zacate) versions and Intel (Sandy Bridge) versions. The particular system we look at has an AMD E-300 APU (Zacate).

Two latches secure X130e's user removable battery

X130e features an user removable battery. This type of batteries usually has better aftermarket availability thus contributing to a longer service life of the laptop.


Three screws to lift bottom cover

The bottom cover is basically a large 'service door'.


Two SODIMM slots and one 7mm 2.5" SATA HDD

Even though Lenovo specifies only 8GB max RAM, there is some chance 16GB RAM might work in X130e although I haven't seen any user confirmation of it working, other than a confirmation for an Intel based X131e model running 12GB RAM. X130e also features 3 USB 2.0 ports and 1 Gigabit Ethernet port.

Bottom line:

Well, what can I say? A low-end 11.6" ultraportable featuring easy-to-access 2.5" hard drive, 2 SODIMM slots, 1 mini PCIe (WWAN), 1 half mini PCIe (WLAN). Really so there is no excuse for ultrabook designers to not include 2 SODIMM slots. Mind you this was two years ago when mSATA wasn't yet very popular so Lenovo didn't support mSATA with the full size mini PCIe WWAN slot, but of course it can be done easily nowadays. So X130e design is one of the most upgradable and user serviceable 11.6" laptops we have ever seen. The design is carried over to ThinkPad X131e (AMD version here) and ThinkPad X140e as well.

Score card:

Upgradability: 7/10
Serviceability: 9/10
Portability: 8/10
Connectivity: 6/10

Expected service life: 7 years

(Images courtesy of Jonathan Mergy)











No comments:

Post a Comment