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Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display

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Re: Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display

#71
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I click on the wireless icon and click "turn off". For that, the laptop must be on and booted. The main advantage of the hardware rfkill switch is that you can flick it to disabled before booting or waking up the laptop, so that it doesn't even try to connect before you can get to the wireless icon. (I've done that before: on a plane, want to use the laptop, which is sleeping in the bag; just flick the rfkill switc…

> For that, the laptop must be on and booted. The main advantage of the hardware rfkill switch is that you can flick it to disabled before booting or waking up the laptop, so that it doesn't even try to connect before you can get to the wireless icon. Fair point. However, planes don't require turning off wifi or bluetooth during normal flight anymore. (And even when they did, no actual harm was done either way.)

> However, planes don't require turning off wifi or bluetooth during normal flight anymore.

When I last flew (domestically, last year), the instruction was still that devices could only be used if they had an "airplane mode" function. Things might be different in your country. (And yes, I know normal 802.11 probe request packets won't do much interference, if any, to airplane systems. Still, it doesn't harm to flick the rfkill switch to disabled.)

Re: Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display

#74
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For that, the laptop must be on and booted. The main advantage of the hardware rfkill switch is that you can flick it to disabled before booting or waking up the laptop, so that it doesn't even try to connect before you can get to the wireless icon. Fair point. However, planes don't require turning off wifi or bluetooth during normal flight anymore. (And even when they did, no actual harm was done either way.)

> However, planes don't require turning off wifi or bluetooth during normal flight anymore. When I last flew (domestically, last year), the instruction was still that devices could only be used if they had an "airplane mode" function. Things might be different in your country. (And yes, I know normal 802.11 probe request packets won't do much interference, if any, to airplane systems. Still, it doesn't harm to flick…

The requirement in the US, and other countries I've flown in or through, was to disable cellular radios, not wifi or bluetooth.

Sometimes airlines fail to communicate that well. A friend of mine had a flight where they first warned against using any device with any kind of radio transmitter, shortly followed by "please enjoy our in-flight wifi".

Re: Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display

#75
post #69
post #2

Will Lenovo ever produce a high quality notebook again? All I want is a real "ThinkPad". Give me a proper T460 with 32GB RAM, IPS display, a recent Intel i7 CPU, replaceable batteries and the notebook body of the T410 or better the T60 or IBM ThinkPad T41.

If they did, would you buy it, forgiving them for the Superfish debacle?

The Superfish debacle never really affected ThinkPad users. It was just on their lower end home user laptops.

Re: Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display

#76
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a W530 and it looks very similar to this layout (Return key is over 2 rows though).

Usually, European keyboards have the weirdly shaped enter/return key that's over 2 rows, and US keyboards have a single-row return key.

That "weirdly shaped enter/return key" is an ISO standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_9995

Re: Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display

#77
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other features they definitely need to add back before I'll consider buying another ThinkPad: - Non-chiclet keyboard with decent layout - HDD and network activity indicator lights - Hardware wireless-off switch - Latching lid They certainly don't need to make it any thinner -- I've had to carry some Macbooks around and the sharp edges are not very hand-friendly. I think 1" throughout is about right for a laptop thick…

> Non-chiclet keyboard with decent layout This. These cheap keyboards are very annoying. I hope Lenovo produces the old IBM style business quality keyboards for their brand new models. @Lenovo: have a look at your great T410 keyboard, build them again: http://cdn6.bigcommerce.com/s-blhknq8/product_images/images/... (only the cursor keys are a bit too small, otherwise great)

I find these Lenovo chicklet keyboards very pleasant. I have t420s which has it and R40 with old style keyboard. Tried to write on R40 recently and was surprised that it's not that big difference. I don't use F keys much so their layout doesn't bother me.

edit: "F keys" part readability

Re: Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an user of a X201 with an SSD, that's not really the case, the differences of blinking rate are noticeable.

AHCI and NVMe don't support this type of activity polling so I don't have a clue what your X201 bases the HDD usage off but it's really not the old IDE standard LED blinking, which makes me thing it's either faked intentionally or the same thing that will happen if you plug in a modern SATA to a motherboard with HDD activity monitoring it will just blink erratically regardless of what is actually happening. modern SA…

I don't see why would you need AHCI or NVMe support, the activity "reporting" is done at a lower level.

From what I can tell, this feature is called "Device Activity Signal", and it essentially says the drive can use the P11 pin of the SATA connector to indicate activity, and the board can use this to electrically drive the LED, there's no need for high-level protocol support.

Obviously this won't detect writes to the buffer, only when they are actually pushed to the disk, but when there's heavy IO, the two are usually correlated.

Here's a doc by Samsung about DAS from 2014: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisit...

As a user, I can tell you that while I obviously can't relate a single "blink" with a write to a file, the link between having a bunch of processes hung waiting for IO and a heavily active LED is quite noticeable - and can be useful if the UI is completely blocked.

Re: Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AHCI and NVMe don't support this type of activity polling so I don't have a clue what your X201 bases the HDD usage off but it's really not the old IDE standard LED blinking, which makes me thing it's either faked intentionally or the same thing that will happen if you plug in a modern SATA to a motherboard with HDD activity monitoring it will just blink erratically regardless of what is actually happening. modern SA…

I don't see why would you need AHCI or NVMe support, the activity "reporting" is done at a lower level. From what I can tell, this feature is called "Device Activity Signal", and it essentially says the drive can use the P11 pin of the SATA connector to indicate activity, and the board can use this to electrically drive the LED, there's no need for high-level protocol support. Obviously this won't detect writes to th…

DAS in SATA is pushed back over the power cable (pin 11) not the data connector like in ATA/IDE drives it's pretty much meaningless and up the the drive manufacturer to say if it's even supported, which is why for dekstop drives that are fed directly from the power supply the LED activity monitoring doesn't work at all and depending on your BIOS will either be off or just randomly signaling at best based on some data from your PCH.

Samsung for example only supports it on the DC (datacenter) series of their drives which is for enterprise storage the DAS in this case is only enabled in certain modes to note if the drive is active or spare/standby or to identify a specific drive there is no actual write/read iop activity feed back in SATA drives.

Also dear lord was that document auto-translated? I've expected this level of English from a 3rd tier Chinese OEM not Samsung...

>4. Samsung SSDs for data centers are

Basically, Samsung SSD 845DC PRO and 845DC EVO support the SATA 3.1 specifications. However, Samsung has adjusted only the DAS feature as “enabled” by default to make the LED blink regardless of the SATA specifications in the host systems.

Re: Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display

#80
post #73

I am using tablet with OLED screen for over two years now. It is great for video, but for text editing it does not have much advantages.

Text editing in low-light conditions is pretty interesting, I find it's good for keeping focussed. OLED would definitely let me take this to the extreme.
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