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Thinkpad X210

geoff.greer.fm

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Re: Thinkpad X210

#351

Post by systemBuilder »

wiredfool wrote: post #144
0w4u2a wrote: post #25

Please, allow me to hijack this thread. What's the best Thinkpad I could get in Europe for ~200€ right now? (Off eBay of course). I don't care whether it's 13" or 15". Edit: thanks for all the replies.

I’ve got a T410 and a T430s. Keyboard on the 410 is way better, but I upgraded because I needed more memory and a stouter processor to do webpack compiles. They’re kind of a pain to disassemble, but it’s doable.

T430s is a horrible design mess. there is a middle layer of magnesium and all the wires go through random holes drilled in this magnesium and if you go through the wrong hole you will never get it back together again. the fan is on the bottom of the motherboard on the bottom of the computer and it takes 12 disassembly steps and 12 reassembly steps to fix the most commonly broken part which is the fan. Die T430s, die!!!

Re: Thinkpad X210

#352

Post by systemBuilder »

mxuribe wrote: post #85
0w4u2a wrote: post #25

Please, allow me to hijack this thread. What's the best Thinkpad I could get in Europe for ~200€ right now? (Off eBay of course). I don't care whether it's 13" or 15". Edit: thanks for all the replies.

I've had great luck with Thinkpad T420. I bought 2 over the last 2 years for about $225 (USD) from amazon. One of them i run linux mint without issue - my daily driver. The other one i kept with win7 (for kid as their school machine). I did replace the battery on one of them for a smaller physical size, and it apparently boosted the duration/power...so the original battery must have been aged. I can't complain becaus…

Unfortunately that generation of CPU (T420, i5-2520?) is just about the time when hardware video decoding was getting off the ground. You can play back 1080p video just barely and not always glitch-free with that CPU.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#353

Post by ekianjo »

Const-me wrote: post #325
ekianjo wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’re upgrade-friendly laptops on the market. yes, but very few, and going fewer and fewer as we speak. Even Lenovo which was famous for that ends up soldering RAM in their recent models and making the battery a hassle to replace while it used to be on the outside before.

Enterprise market is huge. Consumers like thin and shiny things, corporations don’t care, but they employ people with full-time job being counting expenses. Upgradeable laptops are good for them because they can get exactly right hardware without paying for what they won’t use. They rarely upgrade themselves, vendors do, but unless the laptop is designed upgradeable vendors gonna have hard time serving their enterpri…

> Enterprise market is huge.

Do you have any number to compare the size of the consumer market vs the Enterprise market?

Re: Thinkpad X210

#354

Post by systemBuilder »

TheCowboy wrote: post #211

It's a shame the Thinkpad Retro / 25 Anniversary Edition was released as a one time thing. I think it likely hurt the excitement behind buying one as you could end up with a machine that would be hard to find spare parts for in the future. I never got a chance to buy one because they sold out and didn't release more.

My friend bought TWO and it was totally meh. Yes they did put a nice retro keyboard on that thing. It had the same horrible scratchpad as other thinkpads. No thinklight. Basically it was just a t440 with a nicer keyboard. The CPU (I5-7200) was crap. NO GRAPHICS ACCELERATION AT ALL.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#355

Post by m0zg »

Just buy a Carbon X1 that's a couple of generations behind "current" - they're still being sold. Amazing battery life, trackpoint, high res screen (if you want it), super light, tough, good keyboard. And it's cheaper, too. What's not to like? Mine is 3.5 years old now, still going strong. Running Ubuntu since day one.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#356

Post by systemBuilder »

clydethefrog wrote: post #99
snazz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could most likely get an X220 for that amount. It has nice old non-chiclet keyboard (I like it even more than the X201 keyboard because it has big escape and delete keys) and is still plenty powerful.

I love my original X220 but it's just a bit too slow sometimes. Definitely would get one with a upgraded SSD and more RAM if you see one.

You can put an msata drive into a sata 2.5 enclosure and stick it in your laptop. There are also pata ssds from kingspec

Re: Thinkpad X210

#357

Post by mbrumlow »

weavie wrote: post #304
mbrumlow wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have just installed powertop and updated the settings. It doesn't seem to have made any difference... but that's probably because I don't know what I am doing. I'll read up on it further. Thanks for the tip.

What battery do you have? The thin one?

Re: Thinkpad X210

#358

Post by shasheene »

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…

Video card interface electrical standards may have changed, but GPU form factors have not.

Electrical interface changes just need to be paired with compatible motherboards.

Same with hard drives: the interface changed but the form factor has not. They are even compatible with their larger versions: a laptop 2.5" platter drive or SSD can fit in a 3.5" drive bay with a cheap bracket. The SATA versions were backwards compatible speed bumps. Performance was always the maximum supported on the motherboard.

M.2 is just PCIe in a different form factor, so on desktops a $5 passive adapter allows NVMe SSDs to be used on any PCIe slot on even on relatively ancient PCs (though use as a boot drive dependent on BIOS support).

Same with display interfaces. VGA is still supported on many systems, with DVI-I being backwards compatible with cheap passive adapters. DVI and HDMI are electrically identically (minus audio) so cheap passive adapters work.

The broader point is that large incompatible electrical changes are possible because they only mean the new motherboard just needs to be paired with a compatible component. There's still market pressure for backwards compatibility unless the leap is large enough.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#359

Post by ggreer »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #291
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…

What kind of numbers do you see in powertop between high and low load? (After running powertop --auto-tune and powertop --calibrate of course). I've noticed the i7-8550U in my HP Envy can easily drive consumption up to 22W during a parallel compile even though I spend most of my time idling between 5 and 7W while editing text. The extra cores seem to consume a lot of power compared to my older 5th-gen laptop with 2 p…

Powertop doesn't show any wattage numbers for me. I looked at gnome-power-statistics and saw that my laptop idles around 9 watts. That's all power consumption including the screen.

This afternoon I upgraded my kernel from 4.15 to 4.18. Then I removed the r8168 module that I'd tried to use to reduce power consumption. Using the open source r8169 module got me PC7 states. Now my X210 idles at 5 watts. I'm guessing I could go lower if I tweaked more, but this is a huge improvement in battery life. I'm glad I took the time to look into it.

I've gotten battery consumption figures as high as 30 watts when running something like `./minerd --benchmark --threads=8`. Intel claims the i7-8550U has a 15W TDP, but it can easily go above that if it has enough cooling.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#360

Post by userbinator »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #316
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 :-/

I used to wonder why my ThinkPad sometimes ran for 12 hours and sometimes 5. Turns out that Google Docs has an animated cursor that doesn't just blink, it fades in and out using javascript. Animation cost several W on average. UX guys love animations because I dunno they are just psychos.

Reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014

(I believe that the 13% CPU nentioned there is a rounded-up 12.5% of the whole CPU, or in other words a full 100% of one of 8 hyperthreads.)

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