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Electrical tape leaves a gross residue that is hard to clean though.
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Feb 6, 2024 08:14
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Lockback posted:This is going to check someone's boxes That is an insanely good deal. I bought the 2022 / 3060 model last year for about ~$1,600.
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Feb 6, 2024 08:36
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Lockback posted:This is going to check someone's boxes Why is AMD more desirable?
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Feb 6, 2024 08:58
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Mantle posted:Why is AMD more desirable? Current AMD chips run cooler and consume less power. The AMD Legion machines have significantly better thermals than their Intel counterparts.
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Feb 6, 2024 09:32
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Mantle posted:Electrical tape leaves a gross residue that is hard to clean though. And by 'hard' you mean fuckin' impossible.
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Feb 6, 2024 16:26
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Mantle posted:Why is AMD more desirable? Lord Ludikrous posted:Current AMD chips run cooler and consume less power. The AMD Legion machines have significantly better thermals than their Intel counterparts. Yeah, for mobile gaming you're trading extremely marginal top-end performance for fairly significant power and heat savings. Hitting thermal limits on the GPU is still very common and if you're cutting 25watts from your CPU that means you can dump a lot more heat from your GPU since the space, therefore the thermals, are so tightly shared. Intel CPUs are still quite good, but for mobile AMD really is an advantage.
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Feb 6, 2024 16:45
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The Zen 4 chips, especially the 8 core ones, are very performative in multithreaded tasks. And they retain a lot of that performance at lower power levels. Gamers Nexus tested a desktop 7000 series chip at different power limits and the chip performed very well. Like, less than 10% performance loss running at 100 fewer watts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6aKQ-eBFk0 Notebook check also tested a mobile Zen 4 CPU against a 13th Gen Intel at different power limits and in multithreaded tasks the Ryzen chip beat up on the Intel at low(er) power.  https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-R...X.705034.0.html
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Feb 6, 2024 17:55
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Mantle posted:Electrical tape leaves a gross residue that is hard to clean though. It's a small/cheap 256GB SSD. I'm not terribly concerned about any residue left over. Just don't think it's worth trying to drill out the snapped off screw. Some residue left over on the drive is fine. Messing up my laptop trying to get a completely optional SSD screwed in would be tough to accept. slidebite posted:Is this an m.2? I mean....it should be idling most of the time.....being used almost strictly for storage. Figure that should help keep temps down.
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Feb 7, 2024 04:04
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I would worry about heat loosening the adhesive over time.
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Feb 7, 2024 04:50
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IT LIVES! IT LIVES!     What a beautiful fat heavy machine! Powered on with no problems and as far as I can see everything works. There’s some backlight bleed and minor pressure damage to the display but it’s perfectly usable. I’m thinking I’m going to repair as much damage to the casing as I can and will replace the thermal paste on the CPU. Provided I can find all the required legacy drivers I’m hoping to do a fresh XP install and will get some games going on it. Lord Ludikrous fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Feb 7, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 13:33
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Lol at registry mechanic and spy bot search and destroy . That brings back painful memories
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Feb 7, 2024 15:04
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So the plot thickens. I've been able to more or less confirm the specifications: AMD Athlon XP-M 3000+ @ 2.2Ghz 512MB RAM (speed and configuration unknown, the BIOS doesn't say) 40GB IDE 5400rpm HDD Radeon Mobility 9600 64MB VRAM Oh, and along with the upward firing speakers it has a subwoofer. To try and see if there were any issues with the GPU, I installed Unreal Tournament 2004. Which took loving ages given its an old DVD drive installing onto a 5400rpm IDE drive. Upon trying to launch, it came up with an error saying that 3d acceleration was disabled. For whatever reason the drivers weren't working and it was using the bog standard Windows XP ones. Luckily the drivers had a reinstall utility which I was able to use and ultimately launch the game.  It looks nice enough but performance was severely lacking - I'm not talking about low framerates, rather lots of stuttering and hitching often coinciding with hard drive activity. Fresh from boot Task Manager is showing 170 - 190MB of RAM free, which seems a bit low. Going by file save dates, I stopped using this machine in early 2008, and gave it to my parents to use and they look to have used it until at least November 2011. Unfortunately, boomers gonna boom and that means there has been 4 years of use with no updates and no system maintenance, so its probably chock full of poo poo. I was rather hoping to get away with a system restore to an earlier point but I think a full clean install is the only option here. The restore disc that came with the laptop is long gone, so I'll have to see if I have an XP disc buried somewhere. I have access to a DVD writer so I can create one if need be, assuming I can find any DVD-Rs to burn to. Credit where its due though, while the lid has seen better days the main chassis is rock solid, and literally has less flex than any of my other much newer laptops. Well done ASUS.
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Feb 7, 2024 18:32
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I immediately started hearing the Factions theme song when I saw this, thanks for the nostalgia trip
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Feb 7, 2024 20:47
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Lord Ludikrous posted:The restore disc that came with the laptop is long gone, so I'll have to see if I have an XP disc buried somewhere. I have access to a DVD writer so I can create one if need be, assuming I can find any DVD-Rs to burn to. Rufus claims to support Windows XP SP2 images, if your BIOS supports USB boot. Sent you a DM with some more information.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:58
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Lord Ludikrous posted:. Which took loving ages given its an old DVD drive installing onto a 5400rpm IDE drive. Oh god this gave me flashbacks to when installing a game took up a giant chunk of an afternoon. I think this week I’ve installed 100GB monstrosities in less time than it took me to install BG2 in high school.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:58
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Lord Ludikrous posted:
I know PATA speed throughput is absolutely archaic by modern standards, but maybe some flash memory could spice things up? Maybe one of those little IDE-to-SD/CF adapters would work.
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Feb 8, 2024 01:31
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Mental Hospitality posted:I know PATA speed throughput is absolutely archaic by modern standards, but maybe some flash memory could spice things up? Maybe one of those little IDE-to-SD/CF adapters would work.
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Feb 8, 2024 16:30
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and quieter
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Feb 8, 2024 18:03
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I remember upgrading my first laptop with an SSD and how cold and dead it felt compared to the friendly clicking and whirring that happened when you did stuff. Almost like I had lobotomized my sidekick or something 
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Feb 8, 2024 19:32
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Hadlock posted:I remember upgrading my first laptop with an SSD and how cold and dead it felt compared to the friendly clicking and whirring that happened when you did stuff. Almost like I had lobotomized my sidekick or something https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZKttBr2Y8g I saw a post somewhere lamenting the loss of even disk access LEDs on modern laptops because the light and formerly the sound used to be an obvious sign of heavy I/O which software developers could easily notice as unexpected, where now if you have a high end NVMe SSD it's easy to do something that inadvertently triggers gigabytes of file accesses without any obvious sign.
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Feb 8, 2024 20:05
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Thank you to the goon who messaged me regarding the USB bootable image. I’ve got a bit of an interesting update. So I decided to give the power supply and case exterior a good clean, which went well. I’m leaving cleaning the screen until I find my supply of microfibre cloths. The BIOS doesn’t specify USB as a bootable device, but does allow for “Removable Storage”, so it may well be able to. In the meantime, I dug out my CD wallets to see if by chance I still had an XP disc knocking about. By luck, one of those discs was what appeared to be the driver, utility and recovery disc for the laptop, and it did indeed start booting from the disc with a Windows XP environment, but stopped cold with this message.  No idea what that’s all about, could be it doesn’t like the partitions or something. Still, plenty of other discs to look at. Unfortunately in true teenage me fashion, I hadn’t bothered labelling any of them, so it turned into a game of disc roulette. One of them turned out to be a bootleg copy of Star Trek Armada II.  Numerous discs turned out to be music CDs. Note how helpful Windows is asking if I wanted to rip the tracks off the disc.  One DVD turned out to be a surprisingly good quality recording of the 2005 episode “Dalek” from Doctor Who, recorded from BBC1.  DEAR GOD NO  One turned out to be an attempt I made many eons ago at making a DVD from a downloaded copy of the 2003 BattleStar Galactica miniseries, which went horribly wrong and everyone sounded like Dalek chipmunks (video has sound). https://i.imgur.com/cwR3Lud.mp4 Surprisingly given how many machines XP was in use at with my family at the time, and that I had numerous licence keys from the college I was attending at the time, despite having discs for Windows ME, Vista and 7, I don’t appear to have a single one for XP. Unfortunately my supply of mystery discs was exhausted. Not wanting to deprive my future self of the fun that is mystery disc roulette, and more importantly not having a marker pen to hand, I did not label any of the discs. They get to be rediscovered again at some unknown point in the future. I started poking around the system utilities to see if I could figure out why the restore failed. I did discover that while no system restore points were available that would be of any help, this system was in use until at least March 2012. Making for an impressive 8 years of service, especially considering that even with boomer parents it would have been horrendously outdated by that point. I set this machine up with two partitions when I handed over to my parents, reason being that when my parents inevitably hosed Windows up or loaded it with too much poo poo for it to handle, their documents could be stored on the second partition and I could easily wipe the first one and do a fresh install. Never happened, clearly. Figuring the recovery disc didn’t like the extra partition, I went into the disk management utility to see what I could do, and found something interesting.  A recovery partition! One that my younger self wisely left intact. The only question was how to access it. Turns out you have to hammer the F9 key when the ASUS logo appears on startup.  It asks you 4 times if you are absolutely sure you want to proceed, and away we go!  Good lord this music brings back memories (video has sound). https://i.imgur.com/PYPESo6.mp4 I opted to keep the same background as before, because frankly its cool.  I did a few more bits, updated to XP Service Pack 3, updated the Radeon drivers to the final supported version (which was fun because the drivers from AMD refused to install so I had to track down OMEGA drivers instead). I also took the opportunity to remove the antivirus that comes with it (something called PC-Cillin), but mercifully it comes with very little bloatware. While performance is massively, massively improved from before, its still suffering from hitching, stuttering, and the machine can freeze for extended periods at time when its trying to do stuff. Taking into account the horrendous noise the hard drive is making at times, along with how long the machine was actively used for leads me to believe the HDD is indeed on its way out and needs to be replaced. So I’m thinking something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Multibao-C...ps%2C230&sr=8-4 and a 64GB flash card? I know that IDE can go up to a maximum of 130MB/s but I was reading online that 5400rpm drives will typically only reach around 75MB/s, so even a compact flash card that runs at 120MB/s should be a substantial improvement. I would however like to keep the recovery partition, so is there an easy way I can clone the hard drive as is to the compact flash card? I have a SATA/IDE/USB adapter somewhere that I can use to hook them up to another machine.
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Feb 8, 2024 23:05
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Lord Ludikrous posted:So I’m thinking something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Multibao-C...ps%2C230&sr=8-4 and a 64GB flash card? I know that IDE can go up to a maximum of 130MB/s but I was reading online that 5400rpm drives will typically only reach around 75MB/s, so even a compact flash card that runs at 120MB/s should be a substantial improvement. quote:I would however like to keep the recovery partition, so is there an easy way I can clone the hard drive as is to the compact flash card? I have a SATA/IDE/USB adapter somewhere that I can use to hook them up to another machine. There's a CloneZilla live image but I personally prefer using the live image from the related DRBL project for one-off operations as it has GParted and a few other useful tools available alongside CloneZilla.
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Feb 8, 2024 23:15
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Lord Ludikrous posted:
Ah yes, 44.1khz vs 48.0khz sampling rate errors  Nothing like spending 2 days DiVX encoding a DVD on a 550mhz laptop only to find out you selected the wrong sampling rate in the drop down menu
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Feb 9, 2024 00:00
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Is the Lenovo info in OP still good? Looking for not a Chromebook that can handle some real minimal stuff, I’ve just preferred Lenovo Have a desktop PC but finally need a portable PC for some office tasks Hell a decent tablet with a keyboard would be fine prolly Just tired of using my phone as a portable work tool, I need screen real estate and a keyboard
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Feb 9, 2024 00:35
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N. Senada posted:Hell a decent tablet with a keyboard would be fine prolly Thoughts on an iPad? They finally stopped using that stupid lightning connector so it's a viable choice now. iPad OS has pretty excellent support for both USB and Bluetooth mouse and keyboard now. It's not ideal for web development but probably sufficient for a Chromebook user
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Feb 9, 2024 01:08
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The stuff in the OP is several years old, so the recommended models are not going to be on point anymore. If you want Lenovo I'd recommend checking the outlet first, since the refurbs are as good as new in my experience and ship quickly: https://www.lenovo.com/us/outletus/en/laptops/
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Feb 9, 2024 01:34
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Short review on the Legion 16" Ryzen 7 7840 w/4060 & 16gb RAM Its fast, plays everything in my Steam library at acceptable settings on the native display and my 1440p monitor. Relatively thin for something with a graphics card and it has 2 m2 slots. The display is great for a laptop, the extra screen size compared to my 14" Yoga is nice though I do miss having the touchscreen occasionally. The biggest downside is the power brick (230w) by itself trips the outlets on planes by plugging it in with or without the laptop connected, the smaller brick (65w) from my old Thinkpad will not charge it even with the laptop off. Without optimizing anything I can get just over a hour playing Civ V on battery. I might return it because of this if I cant find a workaround, I bought it for playing games on long flights after all.
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Feb 9, 2024 14:44
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Is this the standard Lenovo 20V + rectangular plug brick? There are much smaller models out there, I'd see what it does with the 135W version that they include with docks.
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Feb 9, 2024 15:13
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SpeedFreek posted:
Is that a USB-C charger or a barrel charger? To charge on planes you'll need a USB-C. I think plane outlets are rated for 75 watts but I've run 100 watt chargers without issue in the past. On the lower end you need a 65 (not 60) watt which will be 20v/3.25A, and the Legion should charge with that through USB-C. If that charger you're using is USB-C I'd confirm it's 65 and not 60 watt. You're using a 16" on a plane? With a 65 watt charger it will still drain while you play, but you should get quite a while. TBH, on a plane a Steam Deck is kinda king.
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Feb 9, 2024 15:15
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100w has been the official maximum allowed by airline seats whenever I've looked, and the 130w charger on my previous laptop would trip the breaker if I tried it anyways. Using an underpowered charger while gaming isn't particularly recommended because simultaneously charging and drawing power will absolutely trash your battery life for the future. If you can set power limits to stay inside the charger's envelope though it could work out.
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Feb 9, 2024 17:09
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isndl posted:100w has been the official maximum allowed by airline seats whenever I've looked, and the 130w charger on my previous laptop would trip the breaker if I tried it anyways. A Battery can be charged or discharged, but not both at the same time. Your not simultaneously charging and discharging, your using the power from the low-power charger and supplementing the rest from the battery. This isn't any more harmful for the battery than just using the battery. The only things you need to be concerned about are: 1. Heat, as your battery is heating up like it would be under use but you're also bringing in more power so your GPU/CPU is probably not power limited. So just watch that your not overheating. A plane seat tray is probably adequate to vent that heat. 2. To your point, you may end up down to like 10% battery, low-power mode switches on, the laptop uses less power and your battery starts charging again until like 12% then it goes back to full power and starts draining. That's not good for your battery but isn't the end of the world if its only cycling through there a few times. I'd just stop playing when your battery gets low. If you do that you won't do any more harm than just using your battery down to 10% 3. If you're right on the edge you could end up switching between charging and discharging rapidly, but I was under the impression most modern battery control modules would prevent this. There is an outdate notion that you shouldn't charge a battery unless its discharged, but that's from older battery chemistry and doesn't apply to LiPO batteries. So in short, using a lower power charger is fine as long as it works and you stop when your battery gets critically low.
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Feb 9, 2024 17:46
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Lockback posted:A Battery can be charged or discharged, but not both at the same time. Your not simultaneously charging and discharging, your using the power from the low-power charger and supplementing the rest from the battery. This isn't any more harmful for the battery than just using the battery. I am not an electrical engineer, but I've seen reports of USB-C charging not utilizing a battery bypass for different laptop models (G14, Flow x16, probably others I can't think of off the top of my head). If it's not bypassing the battery then it has to be going directly into the battery, otherwise how's the power getting to the CPU?  The common factor seems to be that those models use a barrel plug as their standard and have USB charging as an extra feature, so presumably it's related to internal wiring layout. As such, I'll amend my statement to "don't use underpowered USB chargers in place of a barrel charger". If your device is USB charging only you'll probably be fine.
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Feb 9, 2024 18:30
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isndl posted:100w has been the official maximum allowed by airline seats whenever I've looked, and the 130w charger on my previous laptop would trip the breaker if I tried it anyways. Ah, mea culpa - I haven't dealt with airplane AC jacks personally. There are 90W models of the Lenovo 20V charger too, so maybe that would work?
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Feb 9, 2024 19:09
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Both the old Yoga charger and the new Legion charger are the rectangular Lenovo connectors, my docking station (Dell) at home does 65W over USB-C and the taskbar showed it was on battery (unplugged) when it was connected but all the other docking station functions worked. I have a workstation Thinkpad at home and I'll see what wattage the brick for that is next time I'm there. Third option is my work laptop came with a 90w universal charger and I could try finding the rectangular tip for that next time I'm in the office. I can live with turning settings down for flights if that's what I need to do, sure cant fall asleep on a plane without something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w_cm26Mbes
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Feb 9, 2024 19:48
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A battery has (at it's core*) two terminals at a certain voltage determined by the chemistry and layout. If there is a higher voltage across those terminals, then the potential of the battery rises due to a chemical reaction that goes in one direction. If there is a draw, then the potential drops due to a chemical reaction in the other. There is no situation where you can have a higher voltage charging the battery but also the battery supplying the voltage the rest of the system needs. Where you see bypass issues is when a laptop is plugged into a (say) 65w source and instead of working with the battery you end up having the 65w source doing all the work and the battery only charging if there is extra power or not doing anything if there isn't (putting a power limit on everything). I don't believe the Legions have this issue, but in this case there is no risk to the battery. I think it was the old ROG Flows that would actually use the battery and power unless the battery was at 100% in which case it would bypass the battery completely, meaning you had a higher power limit if your battery was at 50% vs 100%. That was a bug though. I have a 2020 G14, the big problem with the bypass there is if you have the barrel charger and a USB charger plugged in at the same time the controller won't always bypass in time and you can fry your mainboard. So you may be thinking of that. Otherwise I can say with confidence if you're running USB-C power it will either drain slower when using a high power load or charge slower (than you would if it was off) if you were running a lower power load. The Legion would probably do the same thing, but it needs to be enough power for it to actually even turn on that spigot. *The entire battery unit has more logic and inputs but beyond those inputs is what I am describing
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Feb 9, 2024 19:54
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I figured a modern gaming laptop could play Civ V for more than an hour on battery. Make sure it's running on the integrated 780m graphics. I don't think the game really needs the 4060.
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Feb 9, 2024 19:57
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SpeedFreek posted:Both the old Yoga charger and the new Legion charger are the rectangular Lenovo connectors, my docking station (Dell) at home does 65W over USB-C and the taskbar showed it was on battery (unplugged) when it was connected but all the other docking station functions worked. I have a workstation Thinkpad at home and I'll see what wattage the brick for that is next time I'm there. Third option is my work laptop came with a 90w universal charger and I could try finding the rectangular tip for that next time I'm in the office. Docking station might show it differently, can you try plugging in the USB-C charger directly to the Legion? A 65watt cable going into the docking station still needs to power all of the docking station stuff so it's not going to be 65watt going into the laptop. I suspect you're going to need to use USB-C for a plane ride. Legion 5 slim USB-C is rated all the way down to 65 watt but the rectangle power plug probably has a higher lower limit. Google search seems to indicate 75 watts being the top on airplanes https://www.seatmaestro.com/guide-t...%20to%20charge. and if you're above that it might turn on and off on you.
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Feb 9, 2024 20:01
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After a lot of looking and researching I think I finally settled on the 14'' Legion Slim 5 with Ryzen 7 7840S, RTX 4060, 32GB RAM and an OLED screen. It's checking all of my boxes: lowkey design, portable, nice build quality, beautiful display, great battery life, great gaming performance for what I would play. The only thing bothering me is the RAM is soldered, and you can only get the 32GB configuration directly from Lenovo. It totals around $1400 USD. First am I wrong for being bothered by the soldered memory? I typically get 3-5 years out of my laptops, I just want to know if onboard has legs compared to SODIMM. And while $1400 seems pretty good is it worth waiting for a sale or do I risk it being memory-holed for the 2024 version?
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Feb 10, 2024 06:11
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No, 1400 is a good price and it'll be months and months before we're on another good laptop sale and I doubt the 32gb will be on sale. I think you'd be and to survive with 16GB, but it's worth the extra couple hundred if you intend to keep the laptop that long. Write up a review when you get it. I'm still a ways from my next one but I'm between another G14 or going with the 14" legion
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Feb 10, 2024 06:52
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It's the slim part that gets you soldered on ram usually. Ram sockets are usually 6mm tall, which is too tall for modern "slim" designs.
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Feb 10, 2024 08:46
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