Liked right out of the box...super sturdy/solid/durable, which explains its hefty weight despite its small size (it was designed for the K-12 classroom environment of hard knocks)...feels just as heavy as my 15.6" Thinkpad T520! The only small gripe I have is that the T520 has an old style keyboard, whereas the x130 has a chiclet keyboard...but it's quite nice for a chiclet keyboard anyhow.
I also appreciated the easy expandability...just 3 screws to take off the back panel, and you can replace the hard drive with a Solid State Drive and upgrade the memory. I ordered 2 sticks of 4GB memory to go with it, and it was a nice little upgrade, I like being able to leave a gazillion Chrome tabs open without fear of memory slowdowns. This is a distinct advantage over the super-thin "ultra-books" that are not upgradeable because the memory (and sometimes, even the hard drive) is soldered into the motherboard. I'd much rather have the expandability and accept having a little bit more bulk and weight.
The Core i3-2367 processor is more than adequate as long as you're not a gamer (I'm not), definitely a step up from the AMD processors often found in laptops of this size. Everything else works great, battery life is respectable, a solid 6 hours or so...I'm putting in an SSD this week, so I expect it to increase a bit. There is some bloatware but not that much compared to say, a Dell or HP, and it was easy to remove using the Revo Uninstaller freeware. It would've been nice to have a backlit keyboard or an LED worklight like my T520, but that's not a dealbreaker for me. Getting stuck with Windows 8 would have been, so I was happy that it came with Windows 7!
>> update 3/31/13: when installing an SSD or HDD, make sure it's the slim 9.5mm thickness not the standard 12.5mm ... I went with the Samsung Pro 128GB SSD which is the correct thickness, and have been very happy with it (see my review of that product). Did a clean reinstall of Windows without all the Lenovo bloatware, which now makes this baby SCREAMING fast!
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Love this laptop. You can see the thought in design of this little laptop. It's almost bulletproof and performancewise it is outstanding. The 11.6" screen makes this big enough for real use... It has Windows 7 Professional so no dealing with an unfamiliar "Metro" interface (Windows 8) . I highly recommend this laptop.
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