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Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

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Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#161

Post by malfist »

nameless912 wrote: post #159

I had a hilarious experience the other day with an (HP) laptop that I thought might be fun to share here. I've been getting into astrophotography recently, so I went out to my local Astronomy club's dark site in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Ohio, star tracker, DSLR, lens and nearly brand new HP Gaming Laptop I bought specifically for this purpose in tow. It was cold as shit outside - 25 with a wind chill of just under 15 degre…

Ha! That's a right of passage, lithium ion batteries state of charge drops to almost 0 when it's below freezing. If you left your phone out with your laptop it'd have the same problem. There's actually special phones you can get that are meant to keep functioning below freezing, usually by means of a battery heater.

I too have done the same thing you experienced.

Now I run everything off of a minipc with a lead acid UPS.

This is also why most of your power packs to run astronomy gear are still lead acid and not lithium. Celestron's not just trying to sell you last generation equipment at a steep mark up, there's a reason for it

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#162

Post by tmerc »

freehorse wrote: post #131
speedgoose wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laptops waking up in the backpack until the thermal security triggers or the battery is empty is a Microsoft Windows thing.

Ime turning windows laptops off is really hard. You tell them to shutdown and they restart for some reason, and it does not seem to be update related because it happens with laptops completely offline too. So you may think that you have shut them down, close the lid, but actually they reboot and when you get to them again they are dead. This happens with some dell laptops but I do not think it is just them. Not all t…

I haven't found a way to tell Windows 10 to hibernate other than making that the power button action in power options. Maybe because it's a laptop but it starts immediately after hibernating and your have to hold the power button to fully turn it off. This works and skips any forced updates Windows wants to do. It is very janky and I think ms does it to make skipping updates harder.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#163

Post by firefax »

I remember people I knew at conferences who were extremely fond of Thinkpads due to being Linux geeks (at a time when it was harder to find hardware support for things we now consider basic features like wifi) complaining when it went from IBM to Lenovo the build quality went down. OTOH they were looking at migrating to Dell...

I've had good luck with a Macbook Air and running a Debian VM for anything of import. The build quality is good and I can go to a physical location for repairs.

(Though over time more and more can't be fixed on site sadly.)

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#164

Post by markus_zhang »

rozap wrote: post #115
brooke2k wrote: post #89

I got a Dell XPS for work a couple years ago on someone's recommendation... one of my worst-ever decisions. The touchpad sucks and routinely breaks requiring restarts, constantly having driver issues (and you have to deal with the capital-N Nightmare that is SupportAssist for drivers), graphics card is busted and makes the display driver crash once a month. Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly tur…

The recent-ish Dell XPS I had for work was the worst hardware I've ever had in my entire life, full stop. The touchpad was an abomination. Like, nobody bothered to use it before it shipped. Just completely broken. I also experienced everything else you experienced with regard to power management. That fact that a team of human beings could create something so awful actually made me depressed. Very happy with my frame…

Does your job actually give you a Framework? Where do you work?! I’d like to join.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#166

Post by estimator7292 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #100
estimator7292 wrote: post #59

I recently got a new Thinkpad for work, can't recall which model. I think L series? The build quality is nicer than my T530. The bottom cover doesn't have access panels anymore, but it's got just a few captive(!!) screws and the whole bottom comes off. Everything is neatly exposed and you don't need to access the top of the board at all. The bottom cover has plastic clips along with the screws, but they're spring loa…

You actually have three, AI accelerators: the CPU's SIMD, the NPU, and iGPU. Using them simultaneously could be interesting. It might require custom work, though.

If there are any LLM frameworks that can shard over disparate processor architectures I haven't heard of it.

It'd be pretty cool for sure, but you'd be absolutely strangled by memory bandwidth, I'd expect. LLM sure the chipset would not at all enjoy trying to route all that RAM to three processors at once.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#167

Post by estimator7292 »

Telaneo wrote: post #94
sgc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same xps nightmare. I fixed it by getting a PTM7950 phase change thermal pad for cpu and gpu, and swapping to Linux (which I would have done anyways). Went from 100c to 49c idle. PTM7950 is incredible.

On the one hand, PTM7950 is really good. On the other hand, a 50 degree temperature drop can't really be explained by anything other than something being terribly wrong to begin with. That thing might unfortunately be Dell, but I'd imagine if more than three brain cells were involved in temperature management design of that machine, it wouldn't have been quite as catastrophic.

The XPS I have very aggressively keeps the fans off. They don't kick on at all until 80° or so. Of course there's no way to change it other than a userspace daemon.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#168

Post by nickpsecurity »

estimator7292 wrote: post #166
nickpsecurity wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually have three, AI accelerators: the CPU's SIMD, the NPU, and iGPU. Using them simultaneously could be interesting. It might require custom work, though.

If there are any LLM frameworks that can shard over disparate processor architectures I haven't heard of it. It'd be pretty cool for sure, but you'd be absolutely strangled by memory bandwidth, I'd expect. LLM sure the chipset would not at all enjoy trying to route all that RAM to three processors at once.

No doubt. I had a few ideas for what might be done:

1. Put the tokenizers or other lower-performance parts on the NPU.

2. Pipelining that moves things through different models or layers on different hardware.

3. If multiple layers, put most of them on the fastest part with a small number on the others. Like with hardware clocking, the ratio is decided to ensure the slower ones don't drag down overall performance.

In things like game or real-time AI's, esp multimodal, there's even more potential as some parts could be on different chips.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#169

Post by mwpmaybe »

davsti4 wrote: post #109
mwpmaybe wrote: post #27

Yes, it's a race to the bottom for most. Lots of plastic and soldered, non-upgradeable components, and a lack of ports. The used market is tricky to navigate thanks to the proliferation of model names and numbers, so little to no salvation there either. Spend a bit more for something that will last a bit longer (MacBook) and/or be upgradeable (frame.work), or accept a cheaper model (e.g. Dell Pro) that will likely ne…

HP Probook or Elitebook models have upgradable ram, SSD, and are generally serviceable. You can usually find the previous generation on ebay for an inexpensive price.

I scored an "open box" Dell Pro 14 Plus on eBay for about 600USD. It's got two USB-A ports, two USB4 ports, built-in Ethernet, 4G LTE, upgradeable storage, and decent Linux support (on Ubuntu LTS at least). The battery is field-replaceable but the 32GB RAM is soldered. (There are other models with upgradeable RAM.)

It's got a middling display (the 2-in-1 display is better) and a somewhat dated Hawk Point SoC, but it's fine for running to a client's site for imaging or network troubleshooting or what have you. I still don't think it's going to last very long, but it's a nice complement to the MacBook I use for client dev work and it didn't break the bank.

Re: Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?

#170

Post by mwpmaybe »

jaffa2 wrote: post #65
mwpmaybe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Power management on Macbooks is unbeatable in my experience, both Windows and Linux have really serious issues dealing with sleep and low power modes. I've been dealing with this recently. Linux won't hibernate if you have Secure Boot enabled, even if your swap is encrypted. So I either have to leave my laptop plugged in all the time or remember to shut it down before unplugging it so it doesn't completely drain it…

this just sounds absolutely horrendous. I could not operate like this. Is this a general linux on laptop thing or just a specific to your situation thing?

It's... not great. It's a dual-boot laptop that I take out into the field so I'd like to encrypt the Windows and Linux volumes with BitLocker and LUKS respectively, and ideally I would leave Secure Boot enabled for that extra bit of security. Ultimately I'll need to decide whether to disable Secure Boot or patch the kernel to let me override lockdown mode. I know SuSE has implemented it but I don't know if their patch series will apply cleanly to a mainline Ubuntu kernel.
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