I’ve had a Lenovo X60 for about 18 months. For almost a year, I was well pleased with its combination of light weight and decent performance, but then it developed a nasty thermal problem. Its idle temperature suddenly went from 45C to 55C, and any time I tried to do anything demanding, it would go into thermal shutdown after a minute or two.
Since the machine was still under warranty, Lenovo repaired it, and I was very pleased by their responsiveness at the time. I sent the machine off on a Tuesday, and got it back on a Thursday.
A few months later, and now I’m not so happy. The bloody thing just developed the same overheating problem again, only now it’s idling at 61C, and its warranty just expired. I’m going to call Lenovo support and see what they say, but Jeremy has seen the same problem on his X60, too: I suspect that this line of laptops may just be prone to having its heat sinks come loose.
Regardless, it’s an annoying situation: I can’t do anything more intensive than text editing and web browsing without the machine dying, and a repair will probably be expensive and simply fail again after a short while.
When I was looking around at alternatives to the X60 from other manufacturers, they were all inferior, most often in several ways at once: more expensive, slower, poorer specs, and heavier. Fast forward a year in the market: the X61 has a few minor spec improvements over the X60, and comparable models from other companies are still mediocre and bulky. The only change is that I’m now reluctant to spend the money on new Lenovo kit. What do I do?