Hey Nick, everybody here -almost- are with T430s, so give us details please, touchscreen is useful to draw with capacitive pen? just fingers? hinge?, heat?, your second review course, etc., thanks!

Hey all,

It's too early to tell what battery life is like as I haven't run it down, but I'll keep an eye on it and let you know. I do have a baseline, as I was getting probably 3.5 hours out of it before. This may be wishful thinking on my part, but with normal use I'm hoping for about 5.5 to 6. It looks like it could give me that, but it's all just speculation at this point. Again, I'll let you know.

The touch screen was unaffected; in fact, everything worked fine in the fresh install even before I reinstalled the ThinkPad drivers. The only thing I have to find is a driver for the TrackPoint - it still works quite well, but the scroll button in the middle doesn't behave consistently. Windows thinks it's a standard PS2 mouse at the moment.

There is less heat from the right side of the unit, though the fan does still come on once in a while to cool the graphics processor. Other than that, it's so quiet it's kind of creepy. I keep forgetting I've got a full-on computer here.

jcmdelmar - I can't find my stupid pen, so I can't give an answer on how the screen works with it. I should just break down and buy a new one, but the one I have is really good, so I'd rather find it, haha! The touchscreen itself is very responsive, though - it took me all of about 8 seconds to start using it instead of the keyboard and TrackPoint wherever possible. In fact, I've gotten into the habit of trying to drag windows using the screen on my Alienware now - you should see the looks my coworkers give me!

As to the hinge, I've owned other swivel-hinge laptops before and this is definitely the most solid. That's not to say I entirely trust it, but it should last for quite a while. The screen does give a little when you're poking at it in laptop mode, but not enough to affect usability - it's no worse than the HP Envy and other touch screen laptops I tried.

It's a very good unit, when all is said and done. My iPad has seen very little use of late, despite its smaller size and larger variety of Angry Birds.

Anyway, gotta work! I'll keep checking back and try to answer any questions. For those of you thinking of doing the SSD upgrade, it's definitely doable and with little difficulty, particularly if you're doing a clean Windows install.

Cheers,

Nik

I just Upgraded MY Twist to a Samsing 256GB SSD and I have to say I love the performance. I reinstalled windows 8 from scratch as I own the 32 bit DVD. I can get it to boot in 9 seconds from a cold stop. Drivers did not seem to be an issue except the trackpad. I can't seem to find those drivers for the life of me.
 

Did anyone find these drivers?

I just downloaded the one at the following link:

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=DS019164

It's working great so far, even though I didn't see the Twist on the supported list. I've only been running it for an hour or so, but no explosions so far ;).

I'm considering buying the S230u, but if I bought the one with the 128GB SSD drive, will I still be able to upgrade it to a larger 512GB 7mm 2.5inch SSD?  Some laptops vendors use the soldered in SSD instead to save space and weight.

My Twist came with the 500 GB standard drive, but I can't see there being a difference in construction between the SSD and HDD models. It's just a removable panel in the side of the unit with a single screw holding down the drive cage, and I'd imagine that cage would be the same no matter what you buy. It doesn't save Lenovo any money to do the two models differently - if anything, it would cost them more.

Having said all that, I knew from the time I purchased the machine that I'd replace the stock drive with a 500GB SSD unit. Since the model with the old-school 500GB platter drive was cheaper than the 128GB SSD model, the choice was simple. If you're going to buy one just to swap the drive (something a guy in my position can't help but admire), it might be a more cost effective route.

And keep in mine you need to get the 7mm ssd or it will not fit. 

So are you still allowing it to "smartcache" to the 20gb msata drive?

I wonder how much better the battery life would be replacing the msata drive and taking out the hard drive altogether...

>disco_fever, I had a similar thought. I have a UK model arriving next week with the 320g HDD and am considering replacing it with a Samsung 830 SSD (for its SSD speed, but also for its reasonable power consumption). I think that caching then would happen on the Samsung, effectively making the mSATA just another drive and therefore consuming power. So, logic suggests that removing the mSATA would reduce the power overhead slightly...

I would go for a 500+ G SSD, but the budget doesn't allow it. So, I'll make use of my Google Drive account and keep the amount of data stored locally down.

Has anyone any idea on the power consumption of the standard fitted mSATA? Is there any further power-saving/speed advantage in replacing the mSATA with a large capacity and ditching the HDD, as Disco_fever suggested

EDIT

Further thought - there is a limited choice of mSata available, so it would probably end up being a 256 Crucial M4 mSata. There is no price advantage, so the only benefits of mSata over full size would be weight (only a small amount, 10g against about 80-ish g) and possible slightly lower power consumption (but I can't find any real-life figures).

I think I'll stick with the original plan to replace the HDD with a 7mm Samsung 830 SSD and remove the mSata altogether from the machine.