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Thinkpad X210

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Re: Thinkpad X210

#481

Post by willtim »

Joeri wrote: post #442
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…

> Long live the ThinkPad. This year's models are doing away with replaceable batteries for the most part. T490 has a built-in 50 Whr battery and no ability to extend or replace that without removing screws. It also gets rid of the 2.5 in drive option, one of the RAM slots (but it adds a soldered one), and it replaces the full size SD with a micro-SD. All of that for a small reduction in weight and thickness. So, basi…

Well if it was a MacBook, everything would be glued-in or soldered, but yes the trend is worrying. I guess the popularity of MacBooks, despite their form-over-function, is what is driving this. But surely they could have kept the T490 like the T480, especially as the T490s exists.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#482

Post by iSnow »

askafriend wrote: post #174
ekianjo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades We don't even have to go that far. Just ensuring that laptops can be serviced by their own users would go a long way to reduce e-waste. i.e. not soldering RAM chips to the motherboard, making it feasible to remove every single part (not gluing the keyboard to the MB for example), etc... instead of pursuing an ever thinner laptop design, whi…

MacBook Pros not being user serviceable at every component level doesn’t mean they’re not environmentally friendly - not by a long shot. In fact, building a device like that might even shorten lifespan in a laptop form-factor, not to mention no one wants to carry around a heavy, clunky machine so it likely wouldn’t sell anyway. Here’s an example report that mostly has to do with the production and recycling aspects:…

>My old 2011 MacBook Air is still going strong and being used by my mother.

Coincidentiall, this is also a machine where you still can swap the SSD. With the help of some Alibaba engineering, you can even use a stock m.2 SSD.

The latest Macbooks are bullshit, you cannot exchange anything.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#483

Post by lucideer »

s_ngularity wrote: post #454
lucideer wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron is far from ideal, and it may be argued it's incredibly difficult to make a relatively efficient Electron app (vscode is often cited as one, but Microsoft has plenty of resources). However, for all the efficiency challenges Electron brings, Slack is universally cited in types of comments such as the above. This makes me highly suspect that—beyond being just written in Electron—Slack is actually an extremely…

I think the disproportionate noise about Slack is just due to it being (often without choice) used by so many people, and hence to cite that people only complain about Slack as evidence that Slack is worse than other Electron apps isn't very convincing.

> people only complain about Slack as evidence that Slack is worse than other Electron apps isn't very convincing.

Spotify is almost certainly used by many more people than Slack, and vscode's usage is probably at least within an order of magnitude. The general feedback in comments is that Spotify is bad but not exceptionally so, and that vscode is actually very performant (not when compared to Vim, but it seems to do fine in the context of GUI IDEs).

The other app that there has been a lot of complaints about in the past has been Atom. These have declined recently due to improvements by the Atom team, but also: Atom being the very first ever Electron app probably didn't help here either.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#484

Post by lucideer »

ecshafer wrote: post #462
lucideer wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron is far from ideal, and it may be argued it's incredibly difficult to make a relatively efficient Electron app (vscode is often cited as one, but Microsoft has plenty of resources). However, for all the efficiency challenges Electron brings, Slack is universally cited in types of comments such as the above. This makes me highly suspect that—beyond being just written in Electron—Slack is actually an extremely…

Slack is a massive company with a singular product. Can they really not afford to write their product natively? Their backend should be reusable, and they could write a core of the application in C++ that should give them a core functionality in all operating systems. Then have a native team take over for iOS, mac android, and windows, Linux. There are cross platform libraries that gets you a ui pretty far, or they c…

> A billion dollar company has few excuses in my opinion.

There are plenty of wealthy companies with huge resources that make bad software. The size of your developer pool is not the sole key to quality.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#485

Post by poutrathor »

lucideer wrote: post #448
dotancohen wrote: post #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.

Electron is far from ideal, and it may be argued it's incredibly difficult to make a relatively efficient Electron app (vscode is often cited as one, but Microsoft has plenty of resources). However, for all the efficiency challenges Electron brings, Slack is universally cited in types of comments such as the above. This makes me highly suspect that—beyond being just written in Electron—Slack is actually an extremely…

> Slack is universally cited

Because it's a running gag nowadays.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#486

Post by olivil »

kjaer wrote: post #305
pixelmonkey wrote: post #71

If you can still find one on then used market, I'll put in a plug for the Lenovo X1C 4th Gen (2016 model) as an ideal Linux laptop. It's what I switched to after the x220, and I describe it here: https://amontalenti.com/2017/09/01/lenovo-linux Fan never turns on, matte display, awesome connectivity, great battery life, and everything on Linux just works.

I recently switched to a X1C6, and I wholly agree. It's an amazing laptop in terms of hardware and build quality, but it does have a bunch of Linux compatibility problems.

I have an X1C6 on Linux as well since launch, but since they added s3 sleep support it's been 100%. What compatibility issues are you having?

Re: Thinkpad X210

#487

Post by Kliment »

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.

There are two types of scrambling here - one is the bitswapping and byteswapping that you use to make DDR3/4 routing possible. The other is the whitening function for high speed data that ensures you don't have long sequences of the same value without a transition. The latter is a simple pseudorandom scrambler with a fixed random seed generated at boot. It is not cryptographically secure. The former is a simple substitution and quite easy to reverse (and trivial if you have either a schematic or a board to reverse). Both are deterministic and extremely vulnerable to known plaintext attacks. This is not a security feature.

Source: I'm working on a DDR4 layout right now, and the memory controller scrambling and swapping functions are documented in publically-available intel datasheets (for example, see https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... sections 2.1.6 and 2.1.8)

Re: Thinkpad X210

#488

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #417
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get mini-ITX cases that are smaller than console sized with full sized graphics cards inside... they cost like $300 bucks though :(

Not really, they are mostly around 100 bucks, some have integrated PSUs and might be >200, but 300$ seems like a lot to me. I'm using a Silverstone ML08 (about 100$ at the time), which is slightly bigger than a PS4 pro but fits a full length, double slot GPU. The ML05 is even smaller, costs about 50$ but fits only a single-slot GPU.

I might be getting one of these.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#489

Post by kjaer »

olivil wrote: post #486
kjaer wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched to a X1C6, and I wholly agree. It's an amazing laptop in terms of hardware and build quality, but it does have a bunch of Linux compatibility problems.

I have an X1C6 on Linux as well since launch, but since they added s3 sleep support it's been 100%. What compatibility issues are you having?

The trackpad didn't work out of the box, I had to change some settings; annoying, but no big deal. What's a bigger problem is that the trackpad buttons don't work after suspending/hibernating, and I still haven't been able to fix that. Also, the fingerprint reader and NFC do not have any drivers on Linux.

The Arch wiki page[1] has been tremendously helpful in getting set up. However, I think the length of the article goes some way toward showing that compatibility is far from perfect.

The trackpad / NFC issues seem to only be present on laptops with NFC behind the trackpad, so my recommendation would be to avoid that one if it's possible to get a similar model without.

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...

Re: Thinkpad X210

#490

Post by nimnio »

freehunter wrote: post #197
jrockway wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your machine crashes, overheats, or has graphical artifacts at 100% load, it's broken and you should fix it.

If your machine spins up its fans for no discernible reason throughout the day, it's broken and you should fix it.

Most people will categorize crashing, overheating, and graphical artifacts as a more severe problem than "what's that small noise I hear once in a while".
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