Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thinkpad X210

geoff.greer.fm

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 490 posts

Re: Thinkpad X210

#341

Post by systemBuilder »

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.

It was 4th generation Haswell (4000-series CPUs) that cut power consumption in HALF! In fact Haswell was so awesome Intel didn't make measurably better CPUs until 7th generation(Kaby Lake)!

Re: Thinkpad X210

#342

Post by systemBuilder »

tbrock wrote: post #166
syntaxing wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would be awesome for the retro thinkpad scene if someone started making new batteries for the old stuff.

You can just crack open a ThinkPad battery and put in New 18650 cells!

Re: Thinkpad X210

#343

Post by shasheene »

caycep wrote: post #221
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…

My experience has been limited by the fact that components increase at the same rate, and to get everything to place nice(r) with each other, you have to upgrade everything. "A new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU" is almost buying an entirely new computer. You save a few hundred bucks by keeping the PSU (or maybe change it too after 5 years) and casing, assuming the ports didn't change.

Being able to continue to use the display, keyboard, mouse/trackpad means you can choose higher-end components.

Even if you don't want to keep your widescreen DVI display from 2008, the interoperability means that when you drop it off at a e-waste center, it's more likely to be reused in its current state for a few more years, rather than immediately recycled (reduce, reuse, recycle!)

I do agree there is some degree of changes in interfaces overtime (like IDE to SATA to NVMe M.2), but if you build a system for a similar intended use case the changes within any given 5 year period are small. This means the upgrades you do over a 15 year period will go from a 2.5" platter drive to a 2.5" SATA drive, or from 800x600 to 1024x768 resolution display, but not both at the same time (with a different but significant set of components being shared every upgrade)

Re: Thinkpad X210

#344

Post by systemBuilder »

Riada wrote: post #132
saagarjha wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run Linux exclusively on my fanless Chromebook and remote computers, so I guess I kinda do the same thing ;)

What Chromebook do you use if I may ask? Do you use Crouton or did you completely flash Linux on it?

If you can find an Acer c720 i3 it's a superb machine no fan and pretty fast, faster than an old ThinkPad and extremely comfortable to carry! It's still the number one selling Chromebook of all time! I have a 4GB RAM 256 gigabyte 2242 SSD and IPS display in mine! 7 hour battery life (new), 6 hours for most of the design life. Totally trivial to repair!

Re: Thinkpad X210

#345

Post by akiselev »

swiley wrote: post #255
akiselev wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Turbo Boost power limits have to be changed using the Intel Tuning utility or a similar piece of software that sets the correct registers. Operating systems usually leave those lower level details to the BIOS so installing a new operating system won't do anything unless the system default is set correctly and some bloatware driver is updating it at boot. Usually the manufacturer does it in the BIOS so you have to overwrite it every time you boot; or they do it at the factory, in which case just setting the registers once will be enough (I believe they're nonvolatile?)

Re: Thinkpad X210

#346

Post by dgzl »

killjoywashere wrote: post #320
dgzl wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long lasting battery is the feature I appreciate most from a laptop. My T430 with the extended slice battery gives me 7-10 hours, and could probably get another 3+ if I swapped out the CD drive for the Power Bridge battery. Long live the ThinkPad. Edit: This is with mostly casual use on an Arch Linux setup. I think the next killer feature I want/look for in a laptop is the ability to see the screen in bright sunlight…

> I would mind spending a few hours by the waterfront coding. I do this with an OLPC XO. I also have a Cr-48 with Lubuntu. There's a tradeoff: the XO has a brighter screen but a smaller keyboard.

Is a brighter screen what we want though? E-ink type screens are excellent in the sun, but lack gorgeous colors... And I'm almost ok with it.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#347

Post by Barrin92 »

ahstilde wrote: post #81

Can someone help me understand why Americans still buy Lenovo computers after Superfish and Lenovo Service Engine? Why isn't Lenovo as much of a security risk as Huawei?

Honestly, because it has no relevance to me. I own a Huawei phone and a Lenovo laptop. I don't work any kind of government security related job and I run linux on my laptop so I don't see what I'm risking from the standpoint of a personal consumer and developer.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#348

Post by b3b0p »

ww520 wrote: post #340
b3b0p wrote: post #328

I have a MacBook Pro (2017, 15" top model). I came from a Thinkpad running Red Hat and FreeBSD later. I have been for the last couple years putting a Thinkpad (P52 or X1 Carbon/Extreme or P1) I'm lusting over in my cart, but not hitting the buy button. After owning this MacBook Pro, my first question is how replaceable are the keyboards? I want to have a spare in the case of spills, crumbs, dirt, etc and so forth. It…

I stocked up thin silicon membrane keyboard covers, put one over the keyboard, and replace it every 6 months. It prevent spills and scratch. Keyboard can get really dirty. Replacing it once a while is like getting a new keyboard.

This is what I have on my MacBook Pro now, since the millisecond I took it out of the box. It's just not as pleasurable to type on, especially comparing to say, a Thinkpad keyboard. I was thinking how much peace of mind I would have using a bare Thinkpad P52 keyboard with a spare in the closet and knowing I can just go to Lenovo's parts site and order up a new one for a reasonable cost.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#349

Post by systemBuilder »

efficax wrote: post #203
noir_lord wrote: post #137

I wonder why Lenovo doesn't lean into this. Clearly there is a market for people wanting this kind of machine to the extent they are jumping through hoops for it. I have a maxed out T470P (stock) and it's a cracking little machine and while the keyboard is by modern standards excellent that's because the bar shifted, it's still not as nice as the one on my old R50 was.

Lenovo knows about the love for the retro Thinkpads, and even tried to take advantage of it: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-ser... It was a decent showing, but not what I wanted (an X60 form factor with a 4k 4:3 screen)

A friend of mine who loves thinkpads bought two of those T25 anniversary models (2017). Sadly the only thing that was ThinkPad about that model is the keyboard. The CPU was a meh i5-7200. The motherboard was stupidly designed and the power switch had to come up through a hole in the keyboard. That's not how T4x/T6x series thinkpads work. Also there was no thinklight. Overall what they did was bring back the keyboard and then quit.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#350

Post by tbolt »

systemBuilder wrote: post #339

You guys thinking ATX is a standard has me laughing my head off. On those motherboards we had 6 bus 'standards', 6 video card 'standards' (AGP, AGP 2X, AGP 4X, ...), 6+ disk 'standards' (IDE, EIDE, PATA, SATA-1,2,3, M.2, PCI, and the list goes on). the biggest joke is that CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years and yet we are still fooled into buying entirely new systems every two or three years by the Int…

Can you provide some evidence that “CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years?”
Post reply on HN