Showing posts with label thinkpad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thinkpad. Show all posts

Sunday 23 April 2017

New Thinkpad P50

It's been a while, but true to our 4 year hardware refresh cycle, I've just received my latest laptop - a Lenovo P50.  I've been installing it with Fedora 25 since Friday and configuring and copying data over this weekend ready to swap laptops first thing this week.  I'm looking forward to trying out the new machine although I'm not quite sure why as the specs are barely different from the machine I was given 4 years ago.  It's certainly the best indication yet I've personally experienced of Moore's Law coming to a complete halt as well as many of the other specifications not improving a huge amount either.  The two most noticeable differences are likely to be the more powerful graphics chip and the inclusion of an SSD.  That said, there is twice as much RAM in this machine and I had upgraded my previous machine with an SSD as well so that particular upgrade isn't going to be noticeable for me at least.

My previous machine was a W530 and the one I had before that was a T61p (with a T41p before that) and so I'm well used to this particular line of Thinkpad laptops.

Here's the specifications of the machine I've got, as ever there are variants of the P50 so if you have one or are thinking of getting one the specifications could be a little different but will be broadly similar to this:

  • Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz (5433.79 bogomips in Linux)
  • 32GB DDR4 2133MHz
  • Samsung MZNLN512 (PM871) 512GB SSD
  • 15.6" 1920 x 1080 IPS (non-touch)
  • 6 Cell Battery
  • Wireless A/C
  • NVIDIA Quadro M1000M 4 GB
  • Front Facing Web Cam, Mini Display Port, HDMI Out, Headphone, 4x USB3, Smart Card Reader, GBit Ethernet, Thunderbold, Fingerprint Reader
So looking at those and comparing in more detail to what I had before it seems my gut feeling was pretty good.  The CPU benchmarks are more-or-less exactly the same and certainly within tolerances of error as well as other performance increases that will effect the benchmarks such as the memory clock speed.  Here's the comparison between the W530 CPU and the P50 CPU:


The same can't be said of the GPU benchmarks though so it looks like GPUs are continuing to gain in power even when CPU speed increases have run out of steam:

The other noticeable difference I hadn't spotted before is the battery size.  That's very apparent when you pick the machine up as it's actually a little bit thinner (probably also due to the lack of DVD/combo drive) as well as not as deep i.e. it doesn't have the big battery sticking out of the back that has been common place on this line of Thinkpad machines over the past decade or so.  I'm guessing (without having done any research on the matter) that this is probably due to improvements in battery technology so I'd think Lenovo have probably moved over to Li-ion or Li-po batteries.

In terms of running and using the machine, it does seem very nice so far as one might expect.  It's running Fedora 25 very nicely and hasn't caused me any issues at all during setup.  I'm not really expecting any either as most if not all of the hardware seems pretty well support by Linux these days.  I think, in fact, Lenovo even offer to supply this machine pre-installed with Linux if you want.  That said, there looks to be one possible sticking point in terms of hardware support at the moment but this is very minor.  That is, the build-in fingerprint reader doesn't seem to have a driver available on Linux yet.  I did some very brief research into this yesterday and it's not clear why vendor support is lacking for the device at the moment although I did find at least one effort that has gone a fairly long way towards reverse engineering it and starting to write a driver so I would guess within the next year we'll see some sort of support for the fingerprint reader too.

All in all then it's a good machine even though it's not a huge upgrade over my 4 year old laptop!

Saturday 9 March 2013

New Thinkpad W530

It's been quite a while since I got my last laptop upgrade at work, coming up to 5 years in fact.  We have a 4 year refresh programme so I'm a little overdue but have just been given a shiny new Thinkpad W530 from Lenovo.  This seems to be our current standard issue machine for "developers" which is our way of saying "power users".  I'm part of the software development business and hence get one of these.  The up side of course is the latest and most powerful technology at a reasonably high specification, the downside is they're really quite big and heavy and the power brick - well it really is a brick.  I'll spare giving a full review of the laptop itself as there are plenty of them out there already and you'll know how to find them, however, there are one or two things I wanted to say about the machine and in particular regarding my preferred use of Linux rather than the software it comes pre-installed with.

Here's the specification highlights of the machine I've got (there is a bit of variation available with the W530):

  • Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3720QM CPU @ 2.60GHz (5187.87 bogomips in Linux)
  • 16GB DDR3 1600MHz
  • 500GB (7200rpm) HDD
  • 15.6" 1920x1080
  • 9 Cell Battery
  • Wireless N
  • NVidia Quadro K1000M
  • Front Facing Web Cam, Mini Display Port, VGA Out, Headphone, 2x USB3, 2xUSB2.0, Smart Card Reader, Firewire,DVD Burner, GBit Ethernet
It came with firmware version 2.07 which was only 3 months old but had already been superseded by two newer versions when I got it earlier this week (there is a firmware readme available).  The newer versions fixed a couple of well known issues with screen corruption under Linux and the fan always running at full speed (and hence being noisy).  So I downloaded and applied the updated version before I did anything else.


The next thing I did was tweak a few settings in the BIOS to my liking and install Fedora 18 with the KDE desktop.  The installation went very smoothly using the Integrated graphics card on the Ivy Bridge CPU.  The W530 has Optimus built in for efficient switching between the integrated card and discrete NVidia card for a great combo of power/performance, it is however, designed for Windows and Linux support hasn't quite caught up yet although there is an open source option available - which I'm yet to try.  Post installation I installed the latest NVidia drivers available from the RPM Fusion repository (304.64) ready to switch to using the graphics subsystem in discrete only mode.  The advantage of this is greater graphical processing power and also the ability to use external display devices.  The integrated graphics card is only able to drive the laptop screen and doesn't output via the VGA port or display port.  The down side to the NVidia card is a greater power draw so reduced battery life.  Also, at the time of writing the Nouveau driver doesn't support the Quadro K1000M card so you're forced into using the proprietary driver.  This situation can only improve over time and hopefully Optimus support will grow in Linux too but I'm not holding my breath on that one given NVidia's attempt to put support into the Linux kernel was refuted by the kernel developers last year due to it not being GPL code.

Away from the graphics subsystem which was always going to be the most difficult thing under Linux on this machine, the rest of  it appears to be very well supported.  There are a few bits and pieces I haven't quite got around to trying in the couple of days since I got it but my impression is generally quite good.  Speed, as you would expect is very good although nowhere near my home machine which is a similar specification but contains an SSD instead of HDD.  Consequently, I put the speed boost I see at home down to this more or less entirely.

I've also moved away from Gnome (I don't get on with Gnome 3) and gone back to using KDE once again which I had moved away from 5 years ago when I installed my previous laptop as KDE 4 was pretty shocking at the time as well.  I've used KDE a lot more than I have Gnome in terms of years of elapsed usage but I did get on very well with Gnome 2 for the past 5 years and I'm sure I'll miss it.  That said, I can't see myself ever moving to Gnome 3 unless the developers go back on their current manifesto of treating users like idiots.  It'll be interesting to see how the Mate desktop progresses and whether XFCE picks up as well given they both have benefited from Gnome 3's unfortunate design decisions and have a much smaller community of users and developers than either Gnome or KDE.

In general then, I'm pleased with the new machine.  It's up and running to my liking in a very short period of time.  The graphics are bound to be a pain until I get used to relying on the nvidia-settings utility once again.  However, the other benefits it brings in terms of larger memory and greater processing power over my old machine are probably worth it.

Wednesday 18 June 2008

New Thinkpad T61p

Gutted! A couple of weeks ago now I had a bad Friday, the train home from London where I'd been working with a customer all day was stupidly late and I had to change twice instead of going directly home. Then I get home and fire up my laptop to send the e-mail's I'd written during the day and the darned thing didn't work, argh! Seems in spite of working all day, my T41p had died on the trip home. After reporting the problem at work the following Monday it was decided the T41p needed a new motherboard and this wasn't economical to fix, so I was issued with a shiny new T61p a few days later.


I've been pleasantly surprised by my new laptop, I wasn't expecting great things since IBM sold the Thinkpad business to Lenovo but this thing is actually quite nice. I'll spare listing the full gory details to the technical specifications page. However, it has some nice additions over my previous laptop, namely built-in firewire (not that I'm likely to use it), built-in SD card reader (used that already), an extra USB port (always handy), a DVD writer, a hardware wireless off switch (presumably for use in planes), an enormous hard disk (compared to the T41p anyway), and a lovely 15.4" widescreen capable of 1920x1200 backed by a 256MB NVidia graphics card.

Unfortunately, it came pre-installed with Vista so that (along with the stupid Vista sticker next to the keyboard) were the first things to go. I've installed Redhat Enterprise Workstation 5.2 on it which may sound like an odd choice, but IBM have a layer of software designed to sit on top of Redhat to enable us to install things like Lotus Notes, Sametime, etc. This is known as the Open Client internally and works really nicely. Clearly, there are later and greater distributions I could use but on this issue I like to support IBM and the internal community of Linux desktop users so I choose to go with the officially provided solution.

I've been up and running for a week now with no problems so far, I've been able to do all the things I could do with my old laptop and all the things I need to be able to do in order to do my job. Of course, I make some modifications to the way things work to suit my tastes (such as running KDE instead of Gnome) but all these work well too which is a great reflection on the modular nature of all things involved with Linux. I hope I continue to be surprised and pleased with the machine, and I'm definitely surprised at the ease of transition between the two machines for me.

Tuesday 13 May 2008

Out with the old

I moved house pretty much spot on 6 months ago now and we're still settling into the new house. Aside from decorating, emptying boxes and all the other things you have to do at the time, it's also an opportunity for re-thinking some of the technology used in our previous house. To that end, one of the things I want to update is my audio solution. I shy away from saying media centre as that seems to brew up ideas of full on PVR systems for most people which would include recording television; something I don't care about as I have a commercial hard disk recorder I'm very happy with.

My current solution was documented at the time on Eight Bar as a description using an IBM Thinkpad built as a media centre with more details of the process, also on Eight Bar. This solution worked extremely well while having its problems at the same time. My requirements for putting the solution together were cost (it was experimental and needed a good wife acceptance factor so price was all important), fast start-up, easy and remotely controllable, and integrated with my current home stereo and speaker arrangement. I think I achieved this, it cost about 20 quid for the cables and keyboard, the Thinkpad was borrowed from work, I used the Amarok music player which made things very easy, hooked up my stereo remote control to the Thinkpad and integrated it nicely. See the no-expense-spared diagram below...

diagram Click to enlarge.
It's running Fedora Linux on the Thinkpad, with a KDE desktop and Amarok as I mentioned. I don't have a huge music collection so all my mp3s fit on the Thinkpad hard disk. I configured Linux to suspend to RAM and thus boot extremely quickly with auto-login to the KDE desktop and auto-start of various programs including the music player should a cold boot be required. The thinkpad has a serial port so I was able to hook up a serial IR receiver using LIRC to receive signals, with the audio cables going to my stereo using the minidisk port. With no minidisk attached I had spare keys on the remote control (such as play/pause/stop/next/previous) that had no effect when pointed at the stereo while other controls (such as volume) function as expected. This means I can program the spare keys to be picked up by the laptop IR receiver instead, in order to operate Amarok, and with no interference with normal operation of my stereo (so only one remote control needed for the whole solution). A nice bonus of this set up was the ability to display the screen on the television via the thinkpad s-video port. With a radio controlled keyboard and built-in mouse it's easy to sit on your sofa browsing the Internet or e-mailing with the convenience of your TV and wireless broadband.

This is all sounding marvelous and when described like that I wonder why I think about replacing it, but it does have issues. Browsing the web on your TV is great, but it's not particularly convenient when someone else wants to use the TV for its main purpose in life. Niether is it convenient browsing the Internet in 800x600 which is the highest resolution my CRT TV can cope with, then there's the wireless keyboard which is slightly fiddly but I'm just being picky now. The next major problem is a bug with the thinkpad firmware that causes the wireless to stay disconnected after a certain amount of uptime, which is unresolvable and requires a full reboot to temporarily fix until the next time it goes down. Another slight usability issue is user feedback. Browsing songs, playlists, podcasts and all in Amarok is stupidly easy, but controlling from a remote control when you can't see the screen (that was another idea for putting it on the TV) is not easy. It's great you've got the secondary screen you can use if necessary, but if you're trying to do something else or not in the same room it becomes much more difficult.

So, all these little niggles to what is in theory quite a nice setup have got me thinking of a better way to solve my requirements.