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Hadlock posted:I like how they manage to complain about the "tinny notebook-like sound" coming from a tablet, as if you can somehow stick in 4" woofers. Last time I checked desktops don't even come with speakers, and it's not like we've magically figured out how to hack physics to get Bose stereo sound out of a device obviously much smaller and thinner than one. Notebookcheck.net has a review. The main bad things I can say about the device so far are: - The screen does have some backlight bleed on the edges (evident on the bootup screen, but not anywhere else (haven't noticed it when reading Kindle apps with white text on a black background, or in an empty fullscreen Emacs buffer with green text on a black background, or in watching a movie)). - There is a fan problem that I got hit with, and I resolved it using the 3rd-party TPFanControl program. See this, it describes my problem exactly. - The buttons on the side of the tablet are hard to press. They're like tiny fingernail buttons. Especially the volume and screen rotation lock buttons. The power button is similarly overly recessed but slightly more pressable. They all need to be a little bit wider, or stick out more. - I configured Windows to go into Sleep mode when the power button is pressed. It doesn't work. Closing the lid works (when that's configured), though. There's no sleep key on the keyboard anymore, nor is there any hibernate key, now that they've got the keys mapped to fn-key behavior by default. Swiping and pressing Settings > Power > Sleep is the most convenient way. Maybe I'll turn 20 minute idling sleep back on. - The screen rotation lock button seems to be physically mapped, in hardware, to send a Windows+O when you press it. The problem is that when I'm in Dvorak layout, these key codes end up being interpreted as Windows+R, and it opens the Run menu. Swiping the side of the screen and pressing Settings > Screen > Screen Rotation Lock Icon isn't too bad, but still. I very rarely have wanted screen rotation lock, anyway. - The fn keys F9, F10, F11, and F12 are mapped to stupid redundant Windows 8 actions that are equivalent to Alt+Tab or pressing the Windows key. - It would be sometimes be nice if there was an elegant way to turn the screen off _without_ sleeping. Well there isn't even an elegant way to put it to sleep. - The headphones jack is at the top right of the screen, which is stupid in laptop mode. It should be at the bottom right of the screen. - If you take out the tablet and look at the ports where it connects to the base, you'll find slide-out drawers which, when you slide them out, reveal labels with FCC information. That sure does sound like a great way to use space when you had to give up the micro SD slot for more ventilation. (Wait for Haswell?) - It was rather disturbing plugging in the power cord when the machine was off and not seeing any LED turn on to indicate the machine was charging. The only LEDs on the machine are the two dots of the i's in the two Thinkpad logos on the back of the screen and on the palm rest. They turn on when it's on and "breathe" when it's sleeping. - I left the machine on in tablet mode and put it in the relatively spacious padded laptop container of my bag (which is the appropriate size for holding a T42p). Then some time later I opened the bag and the interior was really hot. It's still a PC, after all. Then, shortly after I started using the laptop again, after the screen turned back on, I noticed the backlight visibly flickering, even at full brightness! (I turned off ambient light detection, so I know it was actually at full brightness, so the LEDs should not be flickering at all -- they do flicker at high speed to dim the backlight on every laptop that isn't made by Apple, but at full brightness, they do not.) Turning the machine off and turning it on again (it had mostly cooled down by then) removed the flickering. This overheating in the laptop sleeve might not have happened at all with Haswell. - It would be nice if the screen could tilt back 5 degrees more (and if the weighting allowed that). But it is IPS, so it's not such a big deal. - The Wacom digitizer has typical Wacom digitizer behavior at the edge of the screen. The not bad: - If you're worried about the physical hardware or "build quality" so to speak, I wouldn't. I mean, it doesn't have some "roll cage" design like you could claim about the X230, but it's not going to fall apart on you, and the whole "rip and flip" idea works. Well, the "rip" works. You can "flip" but the only reason I'd see to do that is if you want the battery life in tablet mode, or if you're in a chair in a café or something. I also wouldn't worry about that weird magnetic flap on the back. The general principle of what this machine is, and how it's designed, works. As a high-speed alternative to the X120e, it works well (it's a bit heavier and larger though). - The device is tall and so much less shortly proportioned than other widescreen laptops. For example, the body of the X120e has the height of the break-off tablet. So you've got a lot of space below the screen -- it sits high above the keyboard. This is ergonomically good. (Now imagine them removing the Windows tablet button, removing the tablet break-off ability, and extending the screen all the way down to the hinge... this is basically a 4:3 or maybe 3:2 laptop in proportion, when it's closed and you're carrying it around. It's a shame the screen isn't the same way.) - I was able to get VGA working at 1920x1200 at 70Hz through a mini-DisplayPort to VGA adapter. I had to manually set the resolution and refresh rate in Intel's "Display Properties..." dialog, though. It couldn't detect the monitor's resolution options by itself -- it believed 1600x1200 at 85Hz was the max resolution. I think I could get 1920x1200 at 85Hz (which is the monitor's native recommended setting) if I manually configured the timings. You can also run this and run two other external DisplayLink screens at the same time. - In tablet mode it's a tablet. There's nothing special about it, compared to other digitizer-enabled Windows 8 tablets. Well, it has the Wacom pen slot in the tablet part. I could review Windows 8 for you (I'm perfectly happy with its abilities for reading PDFs, Kindle books, and web browsing in tablet IE), but the main reason to get this and not something like the Surface Pro is because of the keyboard dock with the Thinkpad keyboard, and for the extra battery inside the keyboard dock. - I haven't had problems with fonts being too small. This is because I went into Windows settings and set the font size to be scaled to 125%. - The trackpoint and trackpad are good. You have to turn the two-finger scrolling speed all the way up, though, and even then it's not quite fast enough. I could see why a reviewer would say the X1 Carbon's trackpad was just as good as an Apple trackpad, while others said it was worse -- Apple's are perfect, and I bet you could find some fault with this one. I know one: in Windows there's some Thinkpad trackpad program that handles gestures that spikes to 2% or 4% or sometimes even 9% CPU if you so much as touch the Trackpad. Killing that program made tap-to-click stop working, but physical clicks, including trackpoint clicks for middle and right mouse button, still worked property. So. If you have a desire to not use an iPad for watching things and reading things, and instead want a bulkier Windows tablet with lower dpi, that's heavier than other 11.6" laptops and heavier and more fragile than the X230, then, uh, maybe this is for you! The battery life is nice too. You should probably wait for Haswell. shrughes fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Jun 28, 2013 |
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Jun 28, 2013 11:54
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syzygy86 posted:VT-x will speed up normal VMs, but VT-d is only useful in certain circumstances. VT-d specifically refers to an IOMMU, which lets you pass through a PCI device such as a RAID card or network adapter to the guest. Unless you're doing PCI passthrough, VT-d does nothing to speed up the VM. VT-d speeds up desktop responsiveness by somewhere between a factor of 1 and a factor of 10000, depending on circumstance and what OS / desktop you're using. Namely, with VT-d desktop responsiveness is almost always identical to native responsiveness, and without it, alt+tabbing and other actions have noticeable lag, as does certain other redraws. This depends on how bad the OS is -- Ubuntu with Unity is atrocious, and while XFCE or OpenBox might still exhibit some sluggishness, at least it doesn't hang for minutes sometimes, or take seconds to alt+tab. VT-x is necessary for running 64-bit VMs, and in 32-bit VMs it doesn't necessarily speed them up. shrughes fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Jun 29, 2013 |
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Jun 29, 2013 08:54
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syzygy86 posted:Taking minutes to to alt-tab sounds like a different problem. Desktop responsiveness has nothing to do with VT-d (although you can passthrough a video card, its a non-trivial setup). Nope. You are wrong. VT-d causes drastic performance differences. I can invite you over to my house, have you watch me enable and disable VT-d in the BIOS on various laptops and desktops, and observe the performance differences if you'd like. I didn't say alt+tabbing takes minutes. Pressing the Windows key in Unity and then typing "terminal" might end up hanging for minutes sometimes, on the right versions of Ubuntu. Alt-tabbing merely takes between some noticeable amount of lag and a few seconds of lag, depending on desktop environment.
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Jun 29, 2013 21:17
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syzygy86 posted:Are you sure the setting you're toggling is VT-d? Can you provide links to information that can show these supposed drastic performance differences? The Unity dash is slow as hell when you don't have 3D support in the VM. If you have 3D support, which doesn't require VT-d, it'll run just dandy (although other desktop environments are generally faster anyway). You might want to read up on what VT-d actually is before you claim it provides drastic performance increases for basic desktop responsiveness. When I last checked this, I had 3D support turned on, graphics memory slid up to 128 MB, with 3D acceleration enabled, running a Unity VM in Virtualbox, and turning on and off VT-d resulted in the drastic performance differences in a full-screened VM. I just checked again today on a different machine, and in Ubuntu 12.04, neither 3D settings nor VT-d in any combination had any effect on performance! Turning 3D acceleration on and off, tweaking its memory allocated to it, didn't change anything. Note that the VT-d performance difference came with the observation that the differences were much more visible in VirtualBox than VMware Player. So that's at least _part_ of where to assign blame. I'm now running a newer version of VirtualBox than before, and maybe that's what eliminated the differences.
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Jun 30, 2013 11:03
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If cost is a big issue then don't get a MacBook Air. Anyway the 256GB upgrade is infinitely more useful than the i7 upgrade.
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Jun 30, 2013 14:42
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BobHoward posted:If it's to be a T430, is there any point in not upgrading to the Intel 2x2 B/G/N WiFi? It costs $0 over the default 1x1 "ThinkPad" radio, which is slightly odd. No, that's definitely the right upgrade to make.
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Jul 3, 2013 11:23
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Anti-Derivative posted:How does the X1 fare against the X230. The x1 looks like it has a much sleeker form factor, but is it a pile of poo poo? The X1 Carbon? It is not a pile of poo poo. It has a nice screen, better than the bad T430 screens that people talk about, and it has a the new "good" Thinkpad trackpads. They are good. The T431s is an alternative to the X1 Carbon that's worth considering. The screen's not as good, but it more battery life and accessible slots. Wait for Haswell?
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Jul 3, 2013 19:16
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Maybe you could get away with a T530. The relevant difference between that and the W530 is that you can put 32GB of RAM in the W530 and only 16GB in the T530. The other difference is the graphics card. I'm not quite sure if you need to dual-boot Ubuntu -- can you not run it in a VM?
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Jul 4, 2013 21:00
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Fortuitous Bumble posted:I had a look at Thinkpads and Latitudes but they all come with workstation GPUs and I'm not sure if that will cause problems vs the consumer equivalents. It won't cause problems, the only problem is that they're usually underpowered. I mean a Thinkpad W530 or Dell Precision will have a pretty unimpressive GPU considering the cost (it isn't as good as the GT 650M), and the previous generation of Latitudes had very weak NVS 5200M GPUs that exist just for some low performance purpose like multi-monitor. They were the same GPU you'd see on the Lenovo T430s, generally speaking the Latitude E6xxx was Dell's alternative to the Thinkpad T-series last year. But weirdly enough the new Latitude E6540 is now for sale with an i7-4800MQ and a Radeon 8790M. You can't order a configurable build yet, but the pre-configured one you can order is smartly chosen and $1400-something. I'm not sure that's quite a good choice, unless a 15" 5.6 lb laptop is a good choice.
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Jul 6, 2013 06:20
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 T440s will have FHD IPS screen option
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Jul 9, 2013 01:21
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My precious Pause/Break key!
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Jul 9, 2013 01:31
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The clickpad trackpoint buttons are fine.
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Jul 9, 2013 01:46
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Cream_Filling posted:And you base this on? I have a Thinkpad with clickpad trackpoint buttons.
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Jul 9, 2013 02:51
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Cream_Filling posted:If it's anything like the one on the helix or t431s, it's terrible and not at all suitable if you're going to use it for any reasonable amount of time. The 'buttons' take way too much pressure (which I noticed after even a medium-length session of use), are often weirdly laggy, and pretty frequently bug out and misregister middle as right or just miss your clicks, even with the "large" click zones and the trackpad turned off in the drivers. The Helix works great for me. Maybe you're just bad at computers.
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Jul 9, 2013 04:10
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Mu Zeta posted:They claim up to 6 hours with a 3 cell internal battery. That's a stretch and my bullshit detector is going crazy. I wish everyone was more like Apple and actually told you the conditions on how they get the battery life. The T431s advertised 9 hours on its 47 Whr battery, and it got 8:36 according to Notebookcheck on the do-nothing test. The T440s being advertised as 12 hours under Haswell seems rather proportionate and in line with their other battery life claims (that is, their other wildly unrealistic, minimal configuration battery life stretch mode claims).
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Jul 9, 2013 19:28
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So.. you don't really need as much CPU as possible? You could get a quad core CPU for under $1000. You could have gotten a T430.
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Jul 10, 2013 06:54
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The Alienware 18, the Clevo P570WM.
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Jul 11, 2013 18:26
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CharlesM posted:I'm trying to understand the Lenovo site, what is the lightest laptop they offer? The design is different -- it has a slot for the pen in the base, a different kind of hinge, deeper body. I think the minimum battery option is larger too.
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Jul 12, 2013 03:38
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Cheston posted:I saw the recommendation for a T430 in the OP- would it be a good idea to wait the 1-2 weeks for a T440s? It sounds like a T430, but with IPS and haswell. It could be more than 1-2 weeks, but... yes. The T440s will be more expensive. e: loving markdown syntax ruining my brain.
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Jul 15, 2013 10:45
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I don't know what you mean by a backlash against the T431s but if it's anything like the angry old man ramblings about the keyboard change and how they don't make things like they used to and don't apply the same durability standards for protecting $2000 worth of electronics as they do for protecting $300 worth of electronics, I'm sure they don't care at all.
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Jul 15, 2013 16:58
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A memory upgrade on my T400 worked fine. I think I used the Crucial configurator and bought it from their site.
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Jul 18, 2013 05:35
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Edit: think of something useful to say
shrughes fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Jul 18, 2013 |
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Jul 18, 2013 07:05
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Magic Underwear posted:When will I be able to buy a 13" Haswell laptop with a 1080p IPS screen? How about if I throw "convertible" in there too? Today, today. 13" Vaio Pro, 13" Vaio Duo. Also the Clevo W230ST.
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Jul 18, 2013 10:12
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GZA Genius posted:If there are only 2 dimm slots though wouldn't it just be better to replace the stock 4gb with 2x4gb sticks from the same manufacturer? So the $80 sticker is a moot point? If you actually have one 4GB dimm in your T400 right now, you should buy one 4GB dimm of Crucial RAM (or some other manufacturer) and then have 2x4 GB. You might have 2 x 2GB right now, though. e: also if Dell is selling a 0.7" Precision, I guess it'll only have 2 RAM slots. In which case.. it's not really a workstation 
shrughes fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jul 18, 2013 |
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Jul 18, 2013 20:50
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Basically the proper algorithm for laptop selection according to this thread is: 1. Do you want a gaming laptop? Yes -> goto 2 No -> goto 3 2. Oh really? Yes -> goto 3 No -> goto 3 3. Get a Thinkpad T430  No -> goto 4 4. Get a T430s? No -> goto 5 5. Get an X1 Carbon? No -> goto 6 6. An X230? An X230t? A W530? T431s? No, no, no, no -> goto 7 My username is sports -> goto 8 7. Wait for Haswell and get a T440 or T440s (or T540s!?). No, I really want a gaming laptop -> goto 8 8. Get a 13" MacBook Air.
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Jul 19, 2013 05:32
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Gophermaster posted:Anyone have any experience with the Lenovo ideapad Y410p? Beware that it has a glossy screen, but other than that, it has a good keyboard by "consumer-grade" standards and supposedly the trackpad isn't the best, but it works. I've heard it described as "clumsy". Also there's no Optimus, so good bye battery life. If you got the MSI GE40 or something, you'd have Optimus, but it costs more.
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Jul 19, 2013 05:52
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Why do people here believe that IBM still runs customer support for Thinkpads? I don't whether that's true or not, but I'd like to know if it is, and I don't believe that the people who say it is true know what they're talking about.
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Jul 19, 2013 06:27
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I tried Googling it (edit: yes, let's all pretend I'm not an rear end in a top hat) shrughes fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Jul 19, 2013 |
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Jul 19, 2013 07:12
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For somebody who does digital art, baaaaaad. Bad bad. Horrible. Worse than grayscale. We think the T440 and T440s will have IPS 1920x1080 screens that will be really nice (this fact was leaked for the T440s on Lenovo's website for a couple days) so maybe you should wait (until October?). Or get something else. The other reason to wait (as part of the general "wait for Haswell" advice) is that a Haswell CPU gets you better battery life, and slightly better integrated graphics. Or, if you must buy right now, you could get a T530 with 1920x1080 screen (which is high quality) or an X230 with the "premium" screen (which is a pretty good IPS screen) or simply a non-Thinkpad. The "nice screen" alternative that pops to mind right now is the 15" Vaio S. Its advantages are that it weighs 4.42 lbs instead of the 5.9 lbs (or something) that the T530 weighs. It has a nice IPS screen (if you get a new model from Sony, and not one of the older "orangegate" models from some vendor). It has good build quality, except that the screen is vulnerable to pressure damage -- some people reported bright spots in the backlight caused by weight being put on the screen. Other people said they didn't have this problem at all. So it depends on how you treat the machine. Maybe you won't get that problem as long as you don't put it in a bookbag with books and then throw it on a bed. The actual reports mentioned the VAIO logo imprinted as a bright spot, which sounds like it would take pressing the machine between two flat surfaces to create.
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Jul 20, 2013 07:51
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Apple's pricing remains pretty much constant through the generation, though. Lenovo's has fluctuated and generally trended downward already. At least upgrades cost less, the baseline T430s options disappeared. It would be interesting to play a guess-the-price game -- what will the price be on the baseline T440 and T440s on November 1, on Lenovo's main site? I'm going to guess $790 and $999.
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Jul 20, 2013 08:50
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Oh wow they've got evil maid protection.
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Jul 20, 2013 11:55
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I've also heard of reasonable prices for the MBA 13 in New Zealand. It was a bit less than the U.S. price after the exchange rate. I'm not sure what Thinkpads cost there, though.
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Jul 24, 2013 03:39
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I think you can tell -- look how fast the system boots -- but you don't care.
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Jul 25, 2013 05:21
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If you're a paranoid like me you shut down every time you leave your computer so that nobody can read the contents of your encrypted drive.
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Jul 25, 2013 06:10
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Thinkpad T42p Review I got a Thinkpad T42p! What a glorious beaut it is. Specs
 I formerly owned a T400 and W520 but now I've upgraded to this. Let's see what this beastie has got! Build Quality Upon opening the box and removing the laptop, you can feel that it feels solid. But then it feels weird -- is the top of the lid bent? No, it's an an obtuse angle with the back of the lid, naturally. But what about the base? The bottom of the machine is quite complicated -- there's a lot of letters, just one access bay, and three terraces, instead of the plain flatness you'll get with a W520. The palmrest is squishy. There's a plastic piece between the keyboard and screen that has a tendency to get popped out. The electrical connector from the laptop body and the screen is exposed to the world!!! And holy Christ, it detects the lid being closed by an external nubbin that gets depressed by a plastic bump at the bottom of the lid. Like, anybody could press that with their fingers! Somebody could spill Coke in that. The palm rest has a lot of give. You could imagine it cracking at the corners where it hooks up with the plastic parts to the sides of the keyboard. The keyboard has flex in the bottom right area. The delete key isn't oversized like on the W520, and when you type on the keyboard, you get this jangly feeling, instead of the solidly smooth depression direction you get on the W520 or modern AccuType keyboards. It's okay, though. A good keyboard, all around. But it doesn't have a Windows key. Even Linux demands that you have a Windows key nowadays. The trackpad's good. It's small, but who cares? Large trackpads are for morons. It's depressed into the palmrest, with nice slopage around it defining the boundary, and it's perfectly comfortable for moving your mouse cursor around the screen. I'd say it's an improvement over the W520 trackpad (which is a bumpy one) or the Helix trackpad. It Just Works. The hinges are asymmetric. One hinge is large and beefy. The other hinge, to the right, is only about 2 mm wide. Such a drop in quality. They sure don't make things like they used to. The battery has some damage on its corner. It looks like the machine was dropped onto the corner of the battery. But it lived, it's okay. The Screen Hello, dim, low contrast screen. It's 14", 1400x1050, 125 dpi. Imagine an X230 screen, extended upwards. It has pretty good viewing angles -- they seem kind of similar no matter which direction you move your head. You can see color inversion pretty quickly. I need to get a good background picture in order to judge the color on this thing. I'll take a screenshot so you can see how good/bad it is  Sound It sounds good. The sound seems like it has depth, it's not too tinny or anything, or if it is, it's a deep tinny. Installing Linux Installing Linux was a bit of a chore. First, the built-in DVD drive wouldn't read any of the burnt DVD's I put inside it. I got an external USB drive purchased in 2011. It worked fine. So first I tried 32-bit Debian. It ended up hanging in the network firmware detection. Then I tried Ubuntu, it didn't work because the installer uses a PAE kernel. Then I tried Xubuntu, it uses a PAE kernel but it hung in the network detection. Then I went back to the Debian installer, selected Advanced Mode, put "exit 0" in the right firmware detection script, and the network card ended up working anyway. Maybe it was the wifi? Then everything installed, I installed the non-free firmware, and a restart later, the wifi started working. And another restart later, the wifi worked and DHCP worked over the wifi. Battery Life I got 1 hour 20 minutes of battery life. Supposedly I could get a new battery and then realistically see 3 hours of life. Performance Debian Wheezy worked fine. Running Firefox worked fine. Then I tried watching a YouTube video -- with gnash it ended up using 70% of CPU, but it worked. Emacs has plenty of memory to work with. And when you full-screen an Emacs window, you've comfortably got two wider-than-80 character columns. And they go so much farther up the screen! The Linux installation didn't seem to go particularly slowly, for an installation off of DVD. The drive is an IDE, so you can't just pop in some SSD into the bay. There's no AES-NI instructions, so I wouldn't even consider taking the encrypted LVM option. Retrospective This laptop is so advanced, you might be surprised to hear it was made back in 2004. The laptop I had in college was a T42 with a 1.8 GHz CPU, and this one looks/feels the same. The one I had in school got me through all my computer science classes, my computer graphics classes, and plenty of fun and play with GHC and Haskell. Computers those days were your friends -- people still looked at automatic updating with suspicion, and if they wanted to relay your personal information to Microsoft, it was only after you went out of your way to set up MSN Messenger. You could install any program you wanted on them and it wouldn't cry danger, it would merrily boot any kernel you gave it, and the VGA output port didn't have a clue about what HDCP was. You'd download torrents in 320p and like it, and hope and pray they didn't choose some codec that your machine was too slow to play. TV episodes used your entire screen, YouTube even came in 4:3 perspective, and when you realized that your 80 GB hard drive was just too small to hold all the media you downloaded from the college network, you'd burn them out one by one to DVDs. It's amazing that I've forgotten how almost all of my filez I have floating around the older stack of DVDs and hard drive originated from that laptop, downloaded at the computing center so that the RIAA or MPAA could never pin it back to your dorm room. My T42 cost $2300 in 2004, and this T42p cost $125 a week ago. What I sometimes wonder is, if it hadn't died at the end of 2008, how long would it have taken me to replace it? I ended up replacing it with a T400. And I thought that was a fine laptop until I saw how long it took to compile my work project. shrughes fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Jul 27, 2013 |
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Jul 27, 2013 04:23
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TraderStav posted:Not sure if this question belongs here, but hey it involves laptops! I have a Thinkpad X220 that I'm looking to get rid of and conveniently my mother needs a smaller laptop. She has a 15" Thinkpad (edge I think, not the business lines) that she is using now. Instead of installing all of her software and transferring all of her documents can I just swap the hard drives and do a driver update? It seems so simple but I want to think it'd work. I'd be wiping and selling hers so the data on the x220 is not a concern. You might have to reactivate Windows? Or something.
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Jul 27, 2013 21:53
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I've never felt like I had outdated drivers on the Sony laptops I got. I'm wondering at what point my drivers will magically stop working. The first was a netbook, a Vaio P, that never really suffered much abuse (besides being put in a jeans pocket) and didn't have problems. The second was a laptop that survived a drop where its entire body getting warped out of shape by half a centimeter, and then it survived getting twisted back until it snapped back into alignment, without any components failing. Its main problem was the keyboard had no travel and it made you hate typing on it. When looking at other Sony laptops the first thing that comes to mind is how they might have messed up the keyboard this time around. The 11" Vaio Pro has too small a keyboard. The 11" Vaio Duo has a joke of a keyboard and that optical nipplemouse thing. The 13" Vaio Pro supposedly has a decent keyboard. The 13" and 15" Vaio S's didn't have great feeling keyboards but they'd be alright to use a long time. The Vaio Fit are supposed to have awful low-key-travel keyboards. Naturally, all the successor machines will have a completely redesigned keyboard. What Lenovo or Apple does, which is to redesign the keyboard, tweak it a bit, and then wind up with a few different variants on the same idea (featuring more or less key travel), has resulted in much better outcomes. I generally expect Sony to make good laptops with design flaws. If you find the design having no flaws, I'd consider going for it, especially if it's one of their higher-end models with more effort put into making a quality of machine.
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Jul 29, 2013 00:00
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I'm not sure about that. My point is: Why should I care if my drivers are up to date? The machine works. Nothing is broken. Driver updates will do nothing for me.
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Jul 29, 2013 00:57
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A year ago or so (maybe almost two years ago), I did an experiment turning VT-d on and off in the BIOS and using VirtualBox. It affected the performance of the Ubuntu 11.10 Unity desktop running inside of VirtualBox pretty drastically, taking it from completely unusable to usable. Later versions became less unusable in the absence of VT-d. I haven't tried this experiment recently, the one machine I have without VT-d has VMware Workstation running on it and it seems OK.
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Jul 29, 2013 03:19
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syzygy86 posted:In VirtualBox, unless you set it up manually, VT-d is not used: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#pcipassthrough Maybe it did do something more. I can confirm that the VT-d setting doesn't seem to affect performance on a fresh Ubuntu 11.10 installation on the latest VirtualBox version on a Thinkpad Helix, anyway. Someday I'm going to have to reproduce the W520 behavior. I'm pretty sure I have the old Windows installation on an mSATA drive somewhere around here...
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Jul 29, 2013 07:11
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