211–220 of 490 posts
I never got a chance to buy one because they sold out and didn't release more.
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> A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades We don't even have to go that far. Just ensuring that laptops can be serviced by their own users would go a long way to reduce e-waste. i.e. not soldering RAM chips to the motherboard, making it feasible to remove every single part (not gluing the keyboard to the MB for example), etc... instead of pursuing an ever thinner laptop design, whi…
There’re upgrade-friendly laptops on the market. I’ve replaced RAM, disks, keyboard, LCD, CPU, wireless cards in my laptops. Soldered CPUs are unfortunately inevitable on modern ones, but many other components are still replaceable if you pay attention at the time of purchase. Usually voids warranty but I don’t care too much. As a nice bonus it sometimes saves money. I’ve only picked my netbook for CPU (i3-6157U, 64M…
So yes, laptops should absolutely be made easier to modify, the components get old really fast and I don't wanna buy the whole thing each time I want an extra bit of RAM or some small part gets broken. It's one of the things that make me steer way clear of Apple stuff.
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If your machine crashes, overheats, or has graphical artifacts at 100% load, it's broken and you should fix it.
If your machine spins up its fans for no discernible reason throughout the day, it's broken and you should fix it.
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If your machine crashes, overheats, or has graphical artifacts at 100% load, it's broken and you should fix it.
If your machine spins up its fans for no discernible reason throughout the day, it's broken and you should fix it.
What if the "no discernible reason" is just poorly coded software?
I have a Lenovo T430u running Kali, and it is rock solid. I love the keyboard, and I use the TrackPoint for CAD work in FreeCAD. I never feel like it is going to slip from my hands when I pull it from my backpack. It is so easy to open up, that I open it twice or more a year to clean out the fans, which are usually clean anyway; I like seeing the internals like a car mechanic who likes to check under the hood ;) I co…
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You say that's horrible, but I have never gotten more than around 5 hours from my MacBook Pros (my own and my work's). Maybe I could if the only thing I ran was Safari and iCal, but that's not my use case. If their number is from normal use, I'd consider it normal. :shrug:
iStat Menus (macOS app) gives you a HUD in the global top bar for things like network and CPU usage. It will quickly show you how many random apps and browser tabs will explode with resource usage over the course of the day. Or why your internet seems slow -- some app is saturating your bandwidth somehow. Spotify, Slack, and Discord are major culprits, like if someone posts a single gif (are they animated manually by…
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Lenovo/Thinkpad + Kali sounds like a match made in heaven. May I ask what wifi chipset is on board? 'lspci | grep Network' should show it. The product page just says a/b/g/n which isn't terribly useful.
It's a 2013 T430u with an Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230 chip. It only supports 2.4 GHz, and not 5 GHz. I use a second, external USB WiFi dongle for Wireshark and other uses. It's six years old and great to use for more than I thought it would be.
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> One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know really shouldn’t be. I have lived and worked with people for whom having their fan randomly turn on for no reason is completely normal, and I just can’t understand how they can bear it. Yeah, but try standing in their shoes: they too are probably wondering how you can bear getting worked up over such small things such as fans g…
>getting worked up over such small things such as fans going off Fans spinning up is an indicator of something. Usually an indicator that the machine is under heavy load and you need to watch out for the things that come with machines under heavy load: slower performance, overheating, graphical artifacts, potential crashing, etc. If my fans spun up when I was not aware my computer was under heavy load, I would believ…
I'm not an expert in CPU thermals by any means, but from what I've gathered, in order to eek out a tenth of a gigahertz for their marketing materials (with rapidly diminishing returns because physics), manufacturers usually set Turbo Boost Power Limits 5-10 (or more) watts too high. Since Turbo Boost usually maximizes a single core's frequency and the heat generated increases exponentially, it creates a very concentrated heat spike in the silicon. Even if the CPU heat sink is good enough to passively dissipate that much heat from all of the cores, the turbo boost hot spot forces the fans to spin up early before the CPU knows how long the boost will be needed (otherwise Turbo boost would significantly reduce the lifetime of the CPU). Combined with random scheduled OS tasks that take a split second of turbo to run a process and firmware configured with a minimum fan running time to avoid even more annoying pulsing, these power limits cause many mass market laptops to needlessly spin up their fans all the time.
It's ridiculous but I've been running ThrottleStop/the equivalent on Linux to under-clock every laptop I've owned since Turbo Boost was introduced. A small 10-20% reduction in turbo boost power limits is rarely noticeable unless you have a very specialized and irregular CPU-bound workload but it makes a significant change in the amount of heat it generates and gives the passive dissipation enough time to absorb a boosted workload instead of spinning up the fans in an emergency.
That's amusing and sad.
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> A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades We don't even have to go that far. Just ensuring that laptops can be serviced by their own users would go a long way to reduce e-waste. i.e. not soldering RAM chips to the motherboard, making it feasible to remove every single part (not gluing the keyboard to the MB for example), etc... instead of pursuing an ever thinner laptop design, whi…
MacBook Pros not being user serviceable at every component level doesn’t mean they’re not environmentally friendly - not by a long shot. In fact, building a device like that might even shorten lifespan in a laptop form-factor, not to mention no one wants to carry around a heavy, clunky machine so it likely wouldn’t sell anyway. Here’s an example report that mostly has to do with the production and recycling aspects:…