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Thinkpad X210

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Re: Thinkpad X210

#51

Post by NullPrefix »

snazz wrote: post #32
saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

If you tweak your power management daemon to force your CPU to stay in the lowest couple of SpeedStep levels, you can keep it much cooler at the expense of performance. This is effectively undeclocking on the fly. When you do something fancy, your CPU clock frequency will increase, but not enough to heat it to the point where the fans turn on. Most MacBooks doesn’t turn their fans on until the aluminum bottom is tend…

The key is not in just disabling the fans and letting it all boil, the key is in not producing the heat, because of the undervolt.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#52

Post by snazz »

NullPrefix wrote: post #51
snazz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you tweak your power management daemon to force your CPU to stay in the lowest couple of SpeedStep levels, you can keep it much cooler at the expense of performance. This is effectively undeclocking on the fly. When you do something fancy, your CPU clock frequency will increase, but not enough to heat it to the point where the fans turn on. Most MacBooks doesn’t turn their fans on until the aluminum bottom is tend…

The key is not in just disabling the fans and letting it all boil, the key is in not producing the heat, because of the undervolt.

Yep. My X220 runs at 800 MHz unless I’m watching a YouTube video, at which point it switches to 1.2 GHz-ish. I don’t let it get much above that level otherwise my battery life and temperatures suffer.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#53

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

saagarjha wrote: post #31
xaduha wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not, for the record, "working out of the box". I have no doubt that some other distros would work just fine without any changes, you're nitpicking.

I am yet to see a distribution that works out-of-the-box on a wide variety of hardware like Windows does. Sure, there are some distributions that generally work on most hardware, or some laptops that are “optimized for Linux”, but none of these come close to general hardware compatibility.

You've genuinely never had to install any drivers or change any settings after installing Windows? I find this very hard to believe.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#54

Post by PedroBatista »

smcl wrote: post #13
saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

Yep the fan spinning up when nothing special is happening is infuriating - for me 99% of the time it's Debian's "unattended upgrades" which I now realise I should just turn off since I update/upgrade/dist-upgrade relatively frequently anyway.

Yep, with this unattended upgrade thing I can’t make fun of windows update anymore. It’s horrible.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#55

Post by blattimwind »

syntaxing wrote: post #43
saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

You should see my X62, the battery is so bad. I even bought a "brand new" battery and it last about 2 hours. We don't notice it but battery technology has really pushed forward since a decade ago.

> You should see my X62, the battery is so bad. I even bought a "brand new" battery and it last about 2 hours.

That's probably a fake or aged battery, or your power management is set up incorrectly. A X62 with a fresh battery lasts a lot longer than 2 hours.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#56

Post by NullPrefix »

snazz wrote: post #41
setquk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might be knowledgeable but you got shipped what is colloquially known as a “shed” here in the UK. They’re ok when they work but when they don’t they can burn your house to the ground or empty your entire NAS to a random IP in China. You never know if you’ve won.

The only real solution is to firewall it off from the internet and very carefully inspect the power supply and temperatures.

>very carefully inspect the power supply

How are you gonna do that? Run a stress test on it for two years? If it's working now doesn't mean cheap caps won't blow the night after.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#57

Post by sorenjan »

syntaxing wrote: post #43
saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

You should see my X62, the battery is so bad. I even bought a "brand new" battery and it last about 2 hours. We don't notice it but battery technology has really pushed forward since a decade ago.

Even if it was an unused battery it might have been old and degraded. One of the problems with replacing batteries in older devices is that if the battery isn't produced anymore the replacements will not have full capacity either.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#58

Post by zhte415 »

0w4u2a wrote: post #25

Please, allow me to hijack this thread. What's the best Thinkpad I could get in Europe for ~200€ right now? (Off eBay of course). I don't care whether it's 13" or 15". Edit: thanks for all the replies.

For what it's worth, I still use a circa 2011 T420 for my work PC (decent spec for the time with i7 and 8GB RAM) which will probably be around or under your price. Great ThinkPad keyboard (non-chiclet), and instead of following the company upgrade cycle I opted for an SSD and new battery.

A lot of corporates off-load perfectly good laptops (as 'company property' they've often been taken care of reasonably well, or just left on a desk, or kept in a cupboard as backups) as part of their procurement cycle. Find such a reseller and you'll likely not only have a cheap laptop, but one with years more life in it too.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#59

Post by saagarjha »

shasheene wrote: post #48

This is a good time to bring up the fact there was never an industry-wide standardization effort for laptops. A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades: the laptop case, power supply, monitor, keyboard, touchpad could all be re-used without any additional effort. This improves repairability, is much better for the environment, and means higher-end components can be selected with the…

Nobody is going to do this, because good components are a competitive advantage. I can’t see any good manufacturer wanting their good {trackpad, keyboard, case} either being put in a computer that undercuts them or being forced to dumb down their computer to fit the “lowest common denominator”.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#60

Post by cyberpunk »

saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

Slightly off topic; but on fans I recently got a totally fanless mini-pc (zotac) loaded it up with 16gb of ram and a tb ssd and the utter silence in my office is amazing. Since switching off apple (I used the fanless 'macbook' models for a while) I'd normally work with headphones, but I've found the difference to be noticeable.

FWIW it runs OpenBSD and is currently at 52C.. When doing a heavy compile or something it can get up to about 80. Mounted to the back of a monitor, can't even see it.

10/10 would recommend.

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