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Thinkpad X210

geoff.greer.fm

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Re: Thinkpad X210

#271

Post by mbell »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #257
sosborn wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

MacOS always tracks the energy usage stats so you don't have to keep activity monitor open, just look at the 'Average Energy Impact' column. iStats menu also uses a fair bit of CPU, similar to Activity Monitor, it's just split into a couple processes so it doesn't show as much, not that this is a reason not to use it, I love it and use it daily, it's not a good contrast point with the activity monitor.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#272

Post by weavie »

mbrumlow wrote: post #246
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…

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 powe…

I've just unplugged my x220 and it is telling me it has 4:36 battery remaining. I only have firefox open and not doing anything else, so that 4:36 is probably quite a significant overhead. It will drop as soon as I do something.. Yup, just fired up emacs and now it is saying 3:44 remaining.

Would you mind sharing what setup you have that lets you get such long battery life?

Re: Thinkpad X210

#273

Post by johnnycab »

setquk wrote: post #27
dbg31415 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14219918#14223933 I bought a NAS off Amazon a few years ago... one of their 3rd party sellers had the same product for $50 cheaper so I went with that. Anyway, what happened next was really amusing to me. I get the product about 8 weeks later... I had tried to cancel because it was so slow, and Amazon wouldn't let me -- they said I had to receive the product and then send it back…

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.

>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.

I have never come across the term 'shed' in this context, either in urban slang or formal speak, please can you provide a valid source and/or clarify the origin of this term?

Re: Thinkpad X210

#274

Post by mbell »

tbrock wrote: post #102
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…

That's because it's a random chinese board that attempts to provide up to date performance but not focused on up-to-date thermals/efficiency. If a modern 13.3 screamer with battery life is what you are looking for however, check out the just released Thinkpad x390. It's even more modern and the battery life is a staggering 17-18 hours.

It has a 15W CPU in it, it's not a screamer. It's not hard to have extremely long battery life in a laptop, just toss an extremely low power (15W or less) CPU in it and get the battery as close as you can to the somewhat arbitrary 100Whr limit that isn't really a limit but no one will sell a laptop you can't take in the cabin of an airplane.

What is hard however, is getting long life out of a performance laptop with a 45-60W CPU when you're capped to a 100Whr battery.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#275

Post by mbrumlow »

weavie wrote: post #272
mbrumlow wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 powe…

I've just unplugged my x220 and it is telling me it has 4:36 battery remaining. I only have firefox open and not doing anything else, so that 4:36 is probably quite a significant overhead. It will drop as soon as I do something.. Yup, just fired up emacs and now it is saying 3:44 remaining. Would you mind sharing what setup you have that lets you get such long battery life?

Currently in charge of th baby.

But get power top installed. Make sure in the 4th screen in power top and make sure all settings are to "good". I made a systemd unit to do this for me know boot. I also installed tlp and have it set it's settings. Some of those cross over into what powertop does.

I set some things on the i915 driver but that will have to wait until baby watch is over.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#276

Post by dep_b »

villedepommes wrote: post #261
manmal wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a MacBook Pro Late 2016, I can only dream of 4h battery life with the workload you describe. It has a bigger screen though.

My work laptop is a mbp 2018 (i9, 32GB). The battery life is abysmal. I typically get a little bit over 2 hours. I'm not going to lie though: I'm always running Atom or VSCode and there's lots of opened tabs in Chrome.

Chrome used to half my battery life on a MacBook Pro. On a brand new machine with a full battery I could program all day in Xcode if I forgot my charger until one day it was empty halfway the day. Finally I figured out it was Chrome that killed it so fast.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#277

Post by mbell »

admax88q wrote: post #267
mbell wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.

Why should I need GPU acceleration to read irc messages.

Almost all the pixels on your screen are rendered through a GPU accelerated pathway, if they weren't even the desktop with no apps open would be rather sluggish.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#278

Post by mtw »

> doing something intensive like... scrolling in Slack

There's something wrong if you go thru all of this and Slack consumes significant resources on your laptop.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#279

Post by recursive »

admax88q wrote: post #267
mbell wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.

Why should I need GPU acceleration to read irc messages.

Because you're using a graphical ui.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#280

Post by dangban »

It looks like the 13 year old Thinkpad R60 I keep as a backup (mine also has a mini trackpad). With 3 gigs of RAM and a 480gig SSD. The first version of Windows 10 Pro works on it, but I can't get the Windows 10 Pro product key to work on it. More recent versions of Windows 10 Pro do not install on it.

Anyone know how to get a legal Windows 10 Pro product key working on the first (July 2015) version of Windows 10 Pro?

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