Thinkpad X270 - 1 year review

It's March 19th, 2024. I come back home to unpack the thinkpad that I purchased for $82(330zł) four days prior. That's how it started. Now, it's March 19th as well, but 2025 instead of 2024. In this blog post I will describe my experience of using my Thinkpad X270 over the past year. And in general write about topics related to it.

The laptop came with Windows 10 preinstalled, of course I didn't want to use it with Windows, but also I wanted to test its performance before installing Linux on it, so I kept Windows for a part of that day to just try using the laptop in general, and see if it performed well. It did. And so, at the end of the day I installed Linux on it. I went with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I don't remember the exact reasoning behind that, but I think I wanted something else than I had on my PC(I had and still have Linux Mint on it), wanted to try KDE Plasma, wanted a rolling release distro without it potentially breaking causing problems, and also wanted to try out OpenSUSE in general as it was something that I considered to have on my PC before, not really Tumbleweed though, because I want the distro installed on my PC to be stable, and some might say that rolling release distros are stable, but there's still a risk, even if it is small.

At the time I didn't have a specific idea of what I'll be doing with my thinkpad, but I started bringing it to school, and with time I've been doing that more and more often. Currently I've been bringing it to school everyday for a while. But let's go back, to the times when I only sometimes brought it. One day, when programming a school project on it, the cursor started drifting, which I will describe later on, and I restarted my thinkpad to try to fix it like I've already done a few times. But that one time, the system wouldn't boot up, and I was left with a black screen. It was a bit of a problem, because I didn't know how to get out of it. I tried hard restarting almost at the start, but I held the power button for too short... And so I wasted quite a bit of time trying to fix it until I did a hard restart by holding the power button for a properly long amount of time. After turning back on, everything worked fine. I'm not sure if that's was caused by the distro or not, but I chose to move to a stable one after that, also hoping for that to fix the cursor drifting.

So, cursor drifting... Pretty sure that's the only hardware issue that I have with my thinkpad, and it's an annoying one when it happens. It's related to the trackpoint, which is a core feature of thinkpads as it's mostly unique to them, and that I personally really like and use instead of the touchpad or a mouse. What happens is that sometimes the trackpoint somehow gets stuck and keeps the mouse moving in a set direction. I don't know a permanent fix for that, and the temporary fixes aren't exactly clear either. If you've also experienced this issue, and know more about it, feel free to message me, thanks in advance. Anyway, this bug used to happen more often to me at first than it does now, and was harder to fix, I usually just restarted the system and that somehow fixed it. It's also possible to fix by moving the trackpoint with force to a neutral position, but that can be hard sometimes, as in not always work. Luckily nowadays it doesn't happen often, and even if it does it drifts very slightly.

Either way, back to the main storyline - I moved to a more stable distro. I chose to switch to Mint, I still wanted something different from what I had on my PC but there just weren't any options that I wanted to use. I tried using Pop!_OS on a live usb, but the UI was too big, I scaled it down and then it turned out to be inconsistent... So I installed Linux Mint. The newest version was 21.3 back then, and it was really nice to use, and I've actually used it for a pretty long time after 22 was released. I upgraded to Mint 22.1 from 21.3 last month. It's a nice system too, but there's one new feature that is technically an improvement, but I feel like it makes it worse for me. The power profiles. On Mint 21.3, they just didn't exist, and I had a good battery life in addition to good performance. Now, I have to use the performance mode to have good enough performance, but it feels like I get a bit less battery life with it. Likely might just be an illusion though.

I've just mentioned battery life. Would be a nice thing to include in a laptop review. The Thinkpad X270 has two batteries, an internal one, and an external one. My unit came with an internal battery at 92% health, and the external one at 0% health. Pretty good combination considering that the external battery can easily be replaced... if one wants to do it. I was skeptical about that at first, mostly because I was uncertain whether the replacement battery will be as light as the original one. In addition to that, the internal battery lasted for around 3 hours of coding for me. And so, I just used the internal battery until less than 2 weeks ago when I finally decided to get a working external battery. I got one from Movano, and to my surprise, it's even lighter than the original, dead one. The producer wrote to discharge the battery until the laptop turns off, but to me that seems like a description that excludes laptops with two batteries. In case you're wondering, I couldn't just check the percentage of it while it was discharging because it didn't show up yet. So, I just used it for a while until I felt like it was enough for it to discharge, didn't want to discharge the internal battery fully as well. Then I was meant to charge it for 14 hours straight according to the producer, I didn't have this much time and I only charged it for 12 hours but it was enough. I was then meant to discharge it fully, as in, until the laptop stops using it, so at a few percent, and charge it fully thrice, which I kinda did but not exactly. I discharged it fully, and charged it fully, but just once before taking a 3 day break from using it, because weekend came and I also didn't have any time to use it on monday, because as I already said I bring my thinkpad to school, and that's the main time when I use it, so my thinkpad usually goes unused on weekends, and on mondays I don't have much time at school to use it. But after that I did the two other discharges and charges, and ended up at 90% capacity... Could be better, but it's not very bad either. Discharging it artificially without actually using it just to do the three primary charges felt wrong to me, but from the perspective of time I think it would be better if I tried to do that. I actually did that, but just for the first discharge as it was partially discharged after I came back from school and I had to fully discharge it. I left it with a chill driving game, slowroads.io, running on autodrive mode to finish discharging the battery.

The weight is a big positive of the X series. My Thinkpad X270 with a 3-cell external battery weighs around 1.3kg, and it's very easy to hold with one hand. Doesn't add a lot of weight to my backpack either. Despite its weight, it has the chonky style of old thinkpads. It's the last X series thinkpad with this design, and also the last X series thinkpad before many other changes than just visuals, such as the newer models having soldered RAM, mini or no ethernet, no external battery, etc. The chonky design itself looks really nice to me, and also adds to the durability of the device which in general is good in thinkpads. My thinkpad has survived falling on an asphalt road, and being hit by a ball during PE four times. Works perfectly after those incidents. I should probably clarify that a bit, three of the ball hits weren't very strong and didn't cause any damage, except of the last one that hit the lid from the back while being open but didn't cause anything serious either. The fall on the asphalt road was caused by my backpack having somewhat broken zips, the fall caused some visual damage on the corner of the thinkpad with which it hit the road but it's nothing big. One thing that might look scary at first, is that after being dealt damage, the bezel lid partially goes off, happened to me with the strong ball hit and the fall on the road. It's really easy to fix though, it only requires pressing the bezel against the lid. Regarding the lid, it's covered in a a rubberish material. It's easy for it to get slight scratches that are visible from close up and in the sun, but only then. And you can get rid of them by just wiping it with something, like a material for example. And in case you're wondering why I use my thinkpad during PE, the teacher usually doesn't have high requirements, and I just mostly do programming.

The display is 12.5 inches in size, and depending on the unit, can be either IPS or TN, and either 1366x768 or 1920x1080 in resolution. Mine's a 1366x768 TN one. And it's pretty nice, the small resolution isn't very visible on the small screen, and saves me from having to deal with scaling, as most things would appear too small on a bigger resoltion on a screen this small. It being a TN screen is also a bit nice for my use case. I use it at school, and TN screens are hard to see from an angle, so its harder for other people at school to see my screen. I don't need to hide what I'm doing from them a lot, but I'd still consider it a positive in most cases. The negative of it is bad color accuracy. The colors appear too blueish or cold, and slightly washed out. I made them warmer using software. I don't need high color accuracy on it though, but if you do, you'd probably be way better off with an IPS screen.

Performance and specs. My thinkpad has 256GB of SSD storage, 8GB of upgradeable RAM, and an i5-6300U processor. It was meant to have an i5-6200U but when it arrived it turned out that it has an i5-6300U, not going to complain. My main use case is doing programming, usually frontend web development, and so I usually have VSCode + a browser open. It works perfectly fine with that, although it can get warm at times. It has ran almost everything that I've ever wanted it to, the only exception being Android Studio, which I needed for school and which is very bloated. So bloated that if I knew about that I wouldn't even want to use it. What I had to do during the first class froze my OS, and later when I switched to a school PC, it took almost the entirety of its 16GB of RAM. If you want some gaming berchmarks, I've played some Luanti games on it, all ran smoothly.

The keyboard isn't mechanical unfortunately but it's good enough for me. My unit came with a backlit one and it looks cool when its backlit, but I have that disabled most of the time. One negative regarding the keyboard is that my thinkpad has a nordic keyboard which can be a problem when I let someone else who doesn't have the special keys memorised use it. More than I thought it will be, although it doesn't happen often fortunately. The port selection is good for me too. Having a full-sized ethernet port is nice, unfortunately Lenovo decided to make X series slimmer starting next model so X270 is the last one with a full-sized ethernet port. Can't rate the touchpad because I don't use it, but the trackpoint is nice if you don't count the occasional drifting. And the touchpad buttons are nice to click, when using the trackpoint at least. The speakers are far from perfect, but are usable. I don't use them often though. And I can't rate the camera or the microphone, as I've never actually used them.

Many thinkpad users from the FOSS community have stickers on their thinkpads. I have some, but not a lot. Although I've considered getting more but decided not to, at least not for now. I have a shiny foxxo sticker next to the intel sticker that it came with on the palm rest. It being shiny really makes it fit there in my opinion. It also has golden edges. Got it many years ago, and found it while searching through my room some time after getting my thinkpad. The second sticker that I have is a Linux sticker. The thinkpad originally had a small Windows sticker on the bottom. I left it there for a while, but someday decided to get rid of it and designed a Linux one in similar dimensions and printed it. It turned out that it printed in black and white, so I actually had to paint it myself making it look, just not good, but it's on the bottom of the laptop so it doesn't matter a lot. It's printed on regular paper, but that wasn't a problem because the glue from the Windows sticker was partially still on the thinkpad even after removing the sticker, so I just used it to stick the Linux sticker to it. There's also a sticker from the company that sold me the thinkpad, Shoplet.pl. It's on the bottom too, and I don't see much point in removing it, also it looks kinda nice.

Would I recommend it? Yes. But it also depends on what you need. It's pretty powerful but it runs on 6th or 7th gen Intel CPUs, so it has its limits by modern standards. It's small and light, which is a very positive aspect if that's what you're looking for, but if not there of course are other series of thinkpads like the T series. It's tough and pretty cheap as well. It's really good for my use case and I've enjoyed using it for the past year and look forward to using it for longer.

Published on 19 Mar 2025 22:53 UTC