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| Brandon | A Thinkpad with Win 8I had heard all sorts of bad things about Windows 8, and because I run Windows 7, Linux, and OS X almost equally, I decided I better try out the latest Windows. So that I could advise people who ask me about it. The computer I chose is a Lenovo Thinkpad Twist. I had been waiting for the new Thinkpad T540p to come out with the optional high resolution screen but was pulled in by the low prices on refurbished Twists. For $500 you get an i5, an IPS touchscreen, 4GB (non-upgradable) RAM, a 500GB Hard drive, a 24GB SSD, and Windows 8. The twist isn't a normal Thinkpad however, it is a convertable with a swivel screen like the X60,X200,X220, etc, but it is an Edge. When I read reviews, everyone was overly critical of the Twist because it wasn't a perfect combination of the two things that they wanted it to be: an iPad and a Thinkpad. I've had tablets in the past and their OSes and lack of physical keyboards really limit the amount of time I like to spend with them. I'd rather just use a laptop with a keyboard. However, I have to say that at $500, the Twist is an unbelievable value. An iPad at that price wouldn't have nearly the storage or the keyboard, but would have iOS and better battery life. A "true" Thinkpad at that price would have to be bought used or refurbished and would be much less portable. My first hurdle was that I had a 256GB SSD that I wanted to use to replace the 500GB Hard drive. I could not get Lenovo's recovery tools to work at all, between the UEFI crap and the fact that the SSD had linux on it previously, meant that I never got it working. But, I did have a copy of 8.1 from my University that installed from a DVD and works fine. After all the bad things I had heard and all the trouble I had getting 8 installed, it's actually not that bad. Metro is a very nice Tablet UI. The problem is that there are almost no Metro apps, and on a machine without a touch screen Metro makes almost no sense at all. For the most part, once you are in the Desktop 8.1 is like 7, just with a fancy full screen start menu. Perhaps my favorite part of Metro is that you can swipe an application to a side and multitask, no tablet OS I've seen has been this good at multitasking. Now, after a month, I find that the new has worn off of Metro and I don't use it anymore, I just use the desktop like I would if I was running 7. | 2014-01-07 | 1:31 PM |
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