Netbooks were basically “beautiful Chinese IED bricks of brittle plastics and lowered expectations,” and I stand by that. In this video I take a look at the ThinkPad X120e—Lenovo’s follow-up to the X100e—and why it’s one of the few netbooks that actually brought real ThinkPad pragmatism to the tiny form factor. It’s an 11.6-inch, 3-pound machine, but it sacrifices basically nothing in I/O: full-size HDMI, VGA (yes, both), three USB ports, SD card reader, Ethernet, webcam, mics—the whole deal. Even the 1366x768 TFT display is surprisingly okay for the era, and the classic ThinkPad keyboard/TrackPoint setup still makes it feel like a “get stuff done” machine. Then the “insect shitstorm” starts: performance. Mine has the single-core AMD E-240 APU (the “budget-minded masochist” option), so I maxed what I could—10GB DDR3 total and a 128GB SATA SSD—just to isolate the bottleneck to the APU. I test Windows 10 Pro and elementary OS (I use newer supported OSes; Windows 7’s days are numbered). Windows 10 is basically unusable on this CPU, while elementary OS is smoother and more responsive, but still not daily-driver material. The real takeaway: the cheap single-core X120e is awesome as a self-contained experiment box or portable low-power server, and for ~$20 it’s hard to hate.