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Thinkpad X210

geoff.greer.fm

431–440 of 490 posts

Re: Thinkpad X210

#431
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely going to binge watch soon. I have thought of using Redox and writing my own tools. An obsucre OS, but still running across interent/ethernet...oh, wait, spawn a drone node on a Windows machine using MOSREF/Wasp Lisp in Rust or Shen (shout out to doublec/sdunlop!) [1,2] [1] https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/02/19/spawning-windows-comman... [2] https://github.com/doublec/shen-wasp/releases/tag/v0.8

And what have you found to be the issue(s) with running Redox as your OS?

I am not using Redox. I am looking into it currently for its potential of easily porting standard utilities and other programs.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#432
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For printers and external accessories, maybe? My experience with laptops has always been that every built-in component works with no configuration, which isn’t true for Linux. However, I haven’t bought a Windows laptop for quite a while, so maybe this situation is no longer true?

> My experience with laptops has always been that every built-in component works with no configuration, which isn’t true for Linux. Are you talking about laptops that shipped with Linux though? I suspect not. You'd have about as much fun putting macOS on a laptop that shipped with Windows, and vice versa, as you would putting Linux on either of them.

This isn't a valid comparison, since macOS doesn't have to goal that Linux and Windows do of running on a large variety of hardware. And this shows: it's a lot easier to install Linux on any old laptop (or even Windows, to some extent) than it is macOS.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#433

> 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…

> lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know really shouldn’t be. I have lived and worked with people for whom having their fan randomly turn on for no reason is completely normal, and I just can’t understand how they can bear it. If this happens to me, you can bet I’m digging through Activity Monitor and killing the culprit before the fans can get fully ramped up.

At a place I used to work, laptops were routinely getting bricked by the anti-virus software. Basically it would run a scan, the laptop would overheat and die.

At some point, it seems like the "cure" can be more dangerous than what it's designed to fix.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#434
post #262

> 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…

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.

and then the GPU fan turns on instead. :p

Re: Thinkpad X210

#435
> The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack.

The next time somebody asks why everybody has a problem with Electron, I'm referring them to this page.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#436

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…

I doubt that enterprises (or even their vendors) do much upgrading. Instead, they have those machines on a refresh cycle and replace them every three years. They do, however, often prize repairability: if you have a fleet of hundreds of the same model of machine, it's easy to maintain spares of the components most prone to failure/damage.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#437
post #90
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would allow smaller players to step in and to start grinding some market shares of the big players. It would also turn the laptop market from a high margin market to a low margin one. Standardization is just not in the interest of any big player so it's probably never gonna happen. If you are a small player and want to go that direction you're probably gonna be bought out. The only way i see would be to somehow…

It’s interesting how competition used to be encouraged in the U.S. and now it’s pretty much the opposite. It’s all about consolidation, oligopolies and monopolies. If standards lower margins and make entering easier, that’s what should be regulated for.

Lobbyists rule, and lobbyists are employed by large firms.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#438
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t think it is possible to get the consumption of T450s on X220. The T450s generation (and the generation before it) use ULV processors (ultra low voltage). The processors used in the T450s generation have a TLP of 15W. The processors used in the X220 generation have a TLP of 35W. On the flip side, the processors in the X220 generation (and in the next generation) are powerful, which is a good thing if you need…

The x220 gets about 80% my T450s, it also seems to compile emacs a few seconds faster... Later today I will try and post some screen shots of power consumption. The x220 for sure can last an entire day on battery.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's the definition of a discernible reason. If the CPU is being used hard enough to need more cooling, then the question is answered.

That's too limited a view at the issue. Why is the CPU running that hard? If the user is not doing anything CPU-intensive, yet the fans spin up, clearly the CPU is hot, but why? What is it doing?

Re: Thinkpad X210

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, the real P series (p52/72), which used to be w series, are probably the only thinkpads that don't throttle. And those have other problems like the inclusion of an nvidia card and off-center keyboards. They've also devalued the T series now.

If it's about the same as the P50 I picked up, the NVidia card is not the default, so it only factors in if the user selects it. The off-center keyboard is a minor nit, I really wanted the numeric keypad (and love the keyboard in general).

The issue with the nvidia card is the wiring for external monitors. Thinkpads (at least my w530) seem to choose something extremely dumb where only the nvidia card can drive the external display. So you cannot just ignore the nvidia card.
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