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Thinkpad X210

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Re: Thinkpad X210

#241

Post by xiphmont »

ggreer wrote: post #232
leiroigh wrote: post #222

I am a happy owner of an x62. This article almost convinced me to buy an x210 next. Minor gripes: (1) The dispayport-hdmi thing, (2) the mainboard is split (sound + rhs usb are on a separate board) and the small part has pretty flimsy attachement inside the case, (3) the CPU (i5 broadwell engineering sample) is pretty lackluster but perfect for development (no turbo, no throttling, no surprises), (4) finding an ok sc…

I'm not sure what screen you got off Alibaba but if you want something better, you might want to try the daylight LED mod.[1] You won't get better color gamut, but you will get insane brightness and better battery life. I did that mod to my X62 and it made the screen actually usable. 1. https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/thinkpad/led-kit.shtml

It'll be a little while before I'm offering them again. Still clearing new projects out of the way.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#242

Post by eitland »

sosborn wrote: post #214
freehunter wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your machine spins up its fans for no discernible reason throughout the day, it's broken and you should fix it.

> no discernible reason What if the "no discernible reason" is just poorly coded software?

Then the PC and the OS is off the hook and the search continues with the software.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#243

Post by rayiner »

ggreer wrote: post #207
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…

I don't lie about battery life numbers. People like to say, "I get 9 hours of battery life." when they mean that they get 9 hours if they do doing nothing but let their computer idle with the brightness at minimum. 4 hours with a 55Wh battery is an average consumption of 13 watts. That's because my typical workflow involves running a VM containing cassandra & postrgres (among other services) and recompiling go and ja…

At least my 2013 MacBook Pro would get 10 hours of battery life with the screen at medium brightness, WiFi on, and using Safari and Word (which is not a particularly light workload given how heavy the web is these days). Working in Emacs/SBCL would result in even longer battery life. Unless you’re rebuilding Chrome from source every few minutes, the compile-edit cycle is mostly typing into your editor with short bursts of activity in-between. Even more so for languages with lightweight compilers like Go and JS.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#244

Post by uxp »

twblalock wrote: post #229
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…

Standardization limits innovation. If we had standardized on laptop form factors in the late 1990s all laptops would still be an inch and a half thick, and all screens would still be 4:3.

I doubt this.

The standard ATX form factor has been upgraded to reduce size over various years with the vast majority of accepted iterations maintaining the same mounting hole and IO panel locations. I literally have a mini-ITX board sitting in a case I purchased in 1999. This probably fits more into the fear you state in your comment with a reasonably new technology "forced" to consume more space than is necessary, but I think it argues for the opposite by showing that incremental changes to a standard format can allow for wide ranging compatibilities.

For an example, when ATX was altered by squaring the board to the shortest length (microATX), it didn't require a new case or a new power supply to be placed on the market in order to be consumed because it fit within the "too big" ATX case. Then when cases that only fit microATXe became abundant and another incremental change to the motherboard size to DTX, we again didn't have to release new cases or power supplies or IO cards to start to consume this version. It allowed consumers to purchase and use the boards until they decided they wanted to reduce their case size, amortizing the upgrade costs over months instead of requiring larger up front payments.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#245

Post by [deleted] »

GordonS wrote: post #119

Is anyone happy coding on such a small screen, even if it is high-res? I have a 2016 13" MBP, and find the screen too small for coding. It's high-res, but that means everything is super-small unless you increase the scaling, which of course reduces the available screen real estate. The screen is annoyingly reflective too, but that's another problem entirely. My daily driver is a 15" HP Zbook G3 with a 1080p display,…

[deleted]

Re: Thinkpad X210

#246

Post by mbrumlow »

ggreer wrote: post #207
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…

I don't lie about battery life numbers. People like to say, "I get 9 hours of battery life." when they mean that they get 9 hours if they do doing nothing but let their computer idle with the brightness at minimum. 4 hours with a 55Wh battery is an average consumption of 13 watts. That's because my typical workflow involves running a VM containing cassandra & postrgres (among other services) and recompiling go and ja…

I get about 9 hours of battery life on my T450s and about 6 on my x220 under load, youtube, vms, coding. That is under load.

My idle times, browsing something like HN, or sitting in #emacs I get near 20 hours on my t450s and about 13 on my x220.

I think low low low idle power consumption is key to long infrequent charges. This is because the second you are not using your computer then it should also not be using power. For example, my t450s without adjusting the screen bigness idles at 2.8W, so tons of idle time with a 97WH battery.

You can't really optimize power for when you are using it. If you are compiling, you want the fastest compile time and use the most power. Same for other things that take power.

I go all weekend not charging my personal laptop and the only times I close the lid is when I am going to bed. Otherwise I leave the lid open, same brightness and walk away for hours and come back and continue where I left off.

So I see your point about people saying "I get 9 hours of battery life." doing nothing, but even 9 hours of doing nothing is fairly low, given I can make a 10 year old laptop get close to 18 hours, and a 4 year old one get near 21 hours "doing nothing".

Re: Thinkpad X210

#247

Post by wibble10 »

kortilla wrote: post #217
eggy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What WiFi dongle do you recommend for good Linux wireshark support?

If you’re looking for something bigger for aircrack etc I use al alfa networks “AWUS036NHA” which is 5dB and you can pick up off amazon for about 30 euro.

For normal dongles a search for “Anadol Gold Line Wifi AWL150 Micro 150Mbit/s USB WLAN S” shows the one I use in various bsds/linuxes with no problems.

Both re0/run0 chips.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#248

Post by emiliosic »

eitland wrote: post #238
ggreer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't lie about battery life numbers. People like to say, "I get 9 hours of battery life." when they mean that they get 9 hours if they do doing nothing but let their computer idle with the brightness at minimum. 4 hours with a 55Wh battery is an average consumption of 13 watts. That's because my typical workflow involves running a VM containing cassandra & postrgres (among other services) and recompiling go and ja…

> My fan comment was a joke about Slack's efficiency. It's less of a joke and probably just a statement. Seriously: even something as small as someone adding an animated emoji makes slack eat CPU :-/

My office decided to move from Jabber (Pidgin / Adium) to Slack. Much of the office upgraded computers. Whether Jabber is negligible, Slack used más two to three Gb RAM. It’s simply the most inefficient software I have to Tun continuously on that PC

Re: Thinkpad X210

#249

Post by archon810 »

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…

Whatever you buy, don't buy the ThinkPad X1 Extreme. Its fans are on all. the. time, and the CPU goes into thermal throttling even when idle.

https://www.google.com/search?q=x1+extreme+fans

Re: Thinkpad X210

#250

Post by squirrelicus »

adrianN wrote: post #131
hopler wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers prefer super-thin soldered machines, sadly. The proof is in the shopping.

Consumers don't know that they have the option to fix their machines. They are trained to toss devices (not just computers, but also cellphones, TVs, and appliances) instead of taking them to a repair shop.

In the defense of upgrade culture, you ever wonder where those old phones you trade in go? Phone companies have been turning them into profit by shipping them to the developing world. We live in an era where the even the most remote and impoverished places on Earth have, at minimum, a cell phone in their villages. And it's that crappy circa 2000 Nokia you had that plays snake. Now they can call emergency services on demand or keep in touch with long distance loved ones.

Capitalism is such a blessing.

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