Many thanks to Lenovo Technology Norway for sponsoring a laptop for this project.
Many thanks to colleague Christian Haug at DnB NOR for putting me in contact with Lenovo. In 2004 IBM sold it’s PC division to Chinese Lenovo. I am very happy to be using a Chinese laptop while walking the entire Great Wall of China.
The ThinkPad is a solid workhorse with a conservative design, but lots of horsepower under the keyboard. It is one of the most reliable laptops out there. My Lenovo came with a solid state disk (SSD) which means that it is far less vulnerable to sudden movements or being dropped, than those with moving parts in hard disks. My version weighs just above 1,5 kilos. I have a slightly larger battery than standard. This gives me five hours operation. If I turn down the brightness of the screen, even longer.
Absolutely all pictures on this, the Chinese and www.picturesfromchina.com are made using this laptop. I have taken several thousand pictures and more than 90% of them are taken in the RAW format. Each picture is about 12 MB big when imported from the cameras and 50 to 100 MB big when I have finished editing them. I use advanced photographic editing programs in my workflow, and thanks to the X200 this is no problem at all. With 4 GB of memory, a fast processor and disk, it happily churns away although the workload is high.
When I kayaked the length of the Norwegian coast, I also used a ThinkPad. Small details like a LED light to illuminate the keyboard in dark conditions and a system to easily drain water away from the keyboard make this a good companion on a long walk like this.
It is difficult to get much more functionality out of such a small lightweight laptop. A bigger SSD disk would be practical, but this is a matter only of cost. Also a screen that separates colours a little more would be nice.
All together, I would be very happy to recommend this computer to other adventurers looking for a laptop they can trust.
I’m very glad to see you have added an equipment category. I like the solid state drive of your laptop. What’s its capacity? How do you make backups of your photos and GPS tracks? And how do you connect to the Internet?
I look forward to seeing your other equipment. For example, tent, backpack, GPS, camera, shoes, poles, and so forth.
wonderful,It”s cherry here,visited you here………………….
Does the hard disk work well?
Hi Bryan – The solid state disk has 64 GB capacity. I take backups to a small 1.8″ disk I bring with me, and also to http://www.mozy.com. Have just got a larger disk as I take about 10 GB of pictures a month. Because Mozy only backs up what is on my C: drive, a friend and my sister download backups to their computers in Norway before I am forced to delete pictures from my laptop. In that way I always have two backups of all pictures. More information about equipment coming.
Cherry – The disk works well thanks.
Great idea to share some more information about your equipment. I look forward to see what kind of camera equipment you use.
Kim – I have just posted a review on the mobile phone I have used. Camera and other equipment coming up! (Why is it we boys always start with the gadgets?)