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Thinkpad X210

geoff.greer.fm

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Re: Thinkpad X210

#251

Post by eitland »

hedora wrote: post #235
mavhc wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soldering ram is helpful for preventing people cooling the ram and removing it to attempt to copy private encryption keys

Modern intel (and probably most other) boards use hardware scramblers for other reasons (storing all zeros or all ones causes signal integrity issues / current spikes), and secure the scrambling routine with a different code at each boot. So, unless I’m mistaken, cooling the ram and moving to another doesn’t work any more.

Seriously interesting. Any pointers?

Re: Thinkpad X210

#252

Post by dmcgill50 »

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 :-/

/collapse

Re: Thinkpad X210

#253

Post by taf2 »

maxerickson wrote: post #125
taf2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a flash cartoon that circulated around 2001 or 2002 with a guy flying through air talking about all he had to do is mod probe or patch his kernel and was like a wizard in the classic kind of flash style animation... I wish I still had the flash file or someone could recreate it in a viewable format for today...

Maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LsxmQV8AXk

Yes thank you!

Re: Thinkpad X210

#254

Post by swiley »

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…

If you throttle the machine instead of using a fan the battery life only changes by less than half (about 25% in my experience) so machines with bad cooling which I feel like the sort of person who would exaggerate battery life would be more likely to use will actually get better battery life when performing more intense tasks.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#255

Post by swiley »

akiselev wrote: post #218
freehunter wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It surely is an indicator of something but if you have a modern laptop with factory configuration from one of the generic Windows laptop manufacturers, chances are it's an indicator that the power settings are set up for marketing/benchmarks and not real world use. Every single ultrabook and workstation laptop I've had outside of Apple products have been poorly configured, especially the Intel Turbo Boost settings. I…

> if you have a modern laptop with factory configuration from one of the generic Windows laptop manufacturers

The general advice is to never ever leave the factory configuration in place (if you're not going to install Linux at least reinstall windows)

Hardware manufactures are, in general, not your friends.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#256

Post by leiroigh »

xiphmont wrote: post #241
ggreer wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Damn, 15 minutes after getting pointed to your mods the disappointment :)

Also, thanks for all your guides on the thinkpad forums.

Would you mind writing a small idiosyncratic guide about "51nb procurement for dummies"?

Like: Buy one of these models of chassis. These aftermarket batteries. These screens (possibly with aliexpress links). Use this preferred method of ordering. Remember that you also need to procure (ram, wifi, ssd).

I was lucky enough to have a chinese collegue who dealt with everything for me (I sent him the taobao link and gave him cash, next time he visited family he brought me my board). Without that I would have been lost.

(seriously, taobao? no way to enter a non-chinese address? Take my money already! There must be somebody in China who wants to make a quick $50 per item for just reshipping 51nb boards to the West, e.g. via aliexpress or ebay, instead of imposing on the time of hackers / hardware engineers who have better things to do than reshipping packages)

Re: Thinkpad X210

#257

Post by hombre_fatal »

sosborn wrote: post #216
hombre_fatal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The default Activity Monitor does all of that plus energy usage. It won't go in the menu bar however.

Activity Monitor itself also consumes a lot of CPU. And you tend to only use it when you've already suspected a problem, like when your fans start running.

What's nice about having a global CPU graph is that you get used to normal idling levels and will start to notice anomalies.

You're also just closer to the pulse of your computer. What exactly are normal bandwidth consumption levels over the course of a day? What speeds are you normally getting? Which apps and which actions seem to be the hardest on your resources? I think these are just nice things to know about the device you use every day like how you might get used to the sounds and feel of the car you drive every day.

For example, I often see HNers suggest that a good computer confers no benefits for web browsing. Meanwhile, I can say that web browsing is the most resource intensive thing going on in my computer. What your CPU graph as you click around the internet. Or when decoding a high res Youtube video or a muted autoplaying video on some news article. Or scrolling Facebook/Instagram.

I have an older machine that stutters while playing 720p+ Youtube videos unless the CPU is idle, and busier webpages take much longer to render and lock up the UI before I can click around. A better computer can save an impressive amount of time in the long run. It's not for nothing!

Re: Thinkpad X210

#258

Post by swiley »

Not an X210 but you can get refurbished X201s for just about nothing. They suck for games but I don't really know how to improve them as a homework/development computer (maybe EFI would be nice but that actually exists as part of the open source replacement firmware.)

Re: Thinkpad X210

#259

Post by jjeaff »

emiliosic wrote: post #248
eitland wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

They have raised so much money and have so many engineers. Is performance of their app so low priority that no one is working on that?

Re: Thinkpad X210

#260

Post by eitland »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #118
lelf wrote: post #10

> The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack . That’s intensive. And sad.

I don't get why people don't just use Slack on Chrome. Everything people rant about when using the Electron-app doesn't happen in Chrome.

If something doesn't work in an up to date Firefox then it just doesn't work.

Same if it doesn't work in Edge (or Chrome for that matter.)

I refuse to run Chrome when I can avoid it (not even installed on the majority of my machines.)

In Firefox (or standalone) Slack eats CPU when someone uses animated emojis in a thread you have open.

Maybe it works in Chrome but I guess not and I'm not gonna install Chrome for that or even for testing it.

When the standalone app doesn't work properly && the web app doesn't work properly in all major browsers it is broken.

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