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DrDork posted:Agreed, there's not much you can do about choosing to buy a laptop with crappy build quality. The ThinkPad/Yogas are not in that category, however, and if you break one, it's probably your fault. That's comforting! I assume my father must have just dealt with a lot of people who treated their laptops like crap, yeah.
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# ? Oct 7, 2013 10:11 |
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# ? Apr 24, 2024 19:02 |
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Ugh, it would appear that Yogas are part of the 'idea' line and the idea line is not available in Australia. I was hoping to get a chance to hold one before any purchase.
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# ? Oct 7, 2013 10:15 |
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Haswell XPS 12 Review http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/review-xps-12s-haswell-upgrade-improves-an-already-good-convertible-pc/ Bob Morales fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Oct 7, 2013 |
# ? Oct 7, 2013 13:27 |
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Bob Morales posted:Haswell isn't the savior I thought it'd be - the XPS 12 only gets 5 hours (at full brightness) of battery life You linked the 2012 review of the Ivy Bridge version? http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/review-xps-12s-haswell-upgrade-improves-an-already-good-convertible-pc/ That's the new review. They don't have a full brightness test, but but they did post pretty nice battery life for their browsing test. quote:Opening the laptop up reveals one remaining difference over the Ivy Bridge system: a 50WHr battery that’s slightly larger than last year’s 47WHr version. Between the larger battery and Haswell, the new XPS picks up a couple of extra hours in our Wi-Fi browsing test, which loops a set of webpages continuously with the screen set to 50 percent brightness until the computer dies. The Haswell XPS 12 lasted for seven hours and 58 minutes in this test, slightly longer than the seven hours and 11 minutes that the Haswell S7 lasted in the same test. As with the S7, Haswell has taken a laptop with merely OK battery life and made it into one that should last for most of a work day on a single charge. bull3964 fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Oct 7, 2013 |
# ? Oct 7, 2013 13:35 |
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bull3964 posted:You linked the 2012 review of the Ivy Bridge version? Between the larger battery and Haswell, the new XPS picks up a couple of extra hours in our Wi-Fi browsing test, which loops a set of webpages continuously with the screen set to 50 percent brightness until the computer dies. The Haswell XPS 12 lasted for seven hours and 58 minutes in this test Good, but not quite the 12 hours of the Haswell MacBook Air
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# ? Oct 7, 2013 14:08 |
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Bob Morales posted:with the screen set to 50 percent brightness
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# ? Oct 7, 2013 14:21 |
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Bob Morales posted:I clicked on the link from their front page today - somehow I must have clicked on a link to the old review from inside there and shared it. poo poo. Does anyone have a good sense for how much of that is the 1080p (possibly brighter?) display? Does touchscreen vs. non-touchscreen or TN vs. IPS make a difference? I don't doubt the Air is really well optimized, but I wonder whether it is realistic to expect a high resolution screen with a comparable battery to come close to matching it, or if these laptops are to some extent bumping up against a display vs. battery life tradeoff.
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# ? Oct 7, 2013 14:26 |
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RVProfootballer posted:Does anyone have a good sense for how much of that is the 1080p (possibly brighter?) display? Does touchscreen vs. non-touchscreen or TN vs. IPS make a difference? I don't doubt the Air is really well optimized, but I wonder whether it is realistic to expect a high resolution screen with a comparable battery to come close to matching it, or if these laptops are to some extent bumping up against a display vs. battery life tradeoff. The screen plays a big part. They had to make the iPad 3 thicker than the iPad 2 to get more battery in there. The 13" Retina MacBook Pro has a 73w battery, the 13" classic MacBook Pro has a 63w battery. The Retina also has a few other power-saving features like DDR3L RAM, but they have similar battery life. I'm sure a big part of that is the extra battery capacity required to drive the Retina display. Adding a touchscreen would increase power draw even more.
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# ? Oct 7, 2013 14:30 |
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The Air also has a slightly larger battery. I don't know anything about batteries, but 54 vs. 50 is a decent amount percentage wise.
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# ? Oct 7, 2013 14:31 |
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Good thing I'm not a minority who has to play hide-and-go-gently caress-yourself with keyboards laid out in my own language or buying a computer would be really irritating.
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# ? Oct 7, 2013 18:01 |
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Crossposting from the SSD thread because I'm an rear end in a top hat, but it's also a specific y410p thing so. Anyway, computer works, I'm typing on it now, the SSD is great - the problem is the HDD which I put in the ultrabay slot. Right now, the BIOS recognizes it (It's a SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8 ST1000LM024, for reference). Problem is, nothing else does. Not the windows version of Seagate (and I can't run the DOS version of it since I don't have a disc drive...), not HD tune, not computer management or disk management, and device manager doesn't have anything. I've tried mucking around in the BIOS to see if I can't fix it, but I can't find anything. I enabled legacy support in order to get the SSD to run, but besides that, nothing. Anyone have a possible solution?
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 11:06 |
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New Google/HP Chromebook http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/hp-chromebook-11/ Doesn't look like it's much different than the current one in tech specs.
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 14:55 |
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Bob Morales posted:Doesn't look like it's much different than the current one in tech specs. IPS, magnesium chassis, fanless, looks pretty interesting
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 15:04 |
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How does it compare up against the other Chromebooks?
MikeJF fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Oct 8, 2013 |
# ? Oct 8, 2013 15:13 |
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mewse posted:IPS, magnesium chassis, fanless, looks pretty interesting
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 15:15 |
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I really wish I had a use case for a Chromebook because I think they're really neat. I think it's me just mostly being mad that something like that didn't exist 13 years ago when I was in college. Notebooks were super expensive unattainable things back then. Having a light, durable, sub-$300 thing like that to do things like write papers, take notes, and browse the internet would have been amazing.
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 15:40 |
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MikeJF posted:How does it compare up against the other Chromebooks? Same CPU and SSD I think I could swear that a month or two ago Samsung said they were coming out with a new Chromebook using the next revision of whatever chip they are currently using. 8-core etc. Bob Morales fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Oct 8, 2013 |
# ? Oct 8, 2013 16:41 |
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The Iron Rose posted:Crossposting from the SSD thread because I'm an rear end in a top hat, but it's also a specific y410p thing so. When I did my y410p SSD install I had a similar problem and it ended up being that because I'd left the original Windows install in the mechanical HDD, Windows was having trouble recognizing both drives since they were both active drives with Windows installations on them (basically, two "C:" drives). I ended up having to boot off an Ubuntu LiveUSB install, ran gParted, went into the drive's Flags and turned off the "boot" flag. This allowed me to access the mechanical HDD's files normally (it sounds complicated but it's really not). That said, if you've gone into gParted and you don't have anything worth keeping on the HDD, you might as well just go ahead and format it right then and there.
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 17:44 |
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Ur Getting Fatter posted:When I did my y410p SSD install I had a similar problem and it ended up being that because I'd left the original Windows install in the mechanical HDD, Windows was having trouble recognizing both drives since they were both active drives with Windows installations on them (basically, two "C:" drives). Yeah, that's definitely it. Quick question, as I've never used Ubuntu or gparted before in my life - do I just put gparted on one usb and ubuntu on another?
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 18:07 |
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The Iron Rose posted:Yeah, that's definitely it. Quick question, as I've never used Ubuntu or gparted before in my life - do I just put gparted on one usb and ubuntu on another? Ubuntu's install disc acts as a "livecd" where you should be able to run the included version of gparted without a separate download
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 19:12 |
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The Iron Rose posted:Yeah, that's definitely it. Quick question, as I've never used Ubuntu or gparted before in my life - do I just put gparted on one usb and ubuntu on another? No, no. gParted is an Ubuntu application (well, a Linux application, but whatever). It's super simple. Just download the Universal USB Installer and fire it up. On Step 1 select "Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop amd64", check the box on the right that says "Download the iso (Optional)". A file will start downloading on your browser of choice. When that's done, on Step 2 browse for the file you just downloaded. On Step 3 choose your USB drive (you'll probably need a 1gb pendrive or more). Step 4 is optional, it lets you set a small persistent file inside the USB drive that will serve as Ubuntu's "hard drive" for storing files and such. Since you'll probably just be using this Ubuntu install for gParted and nothing else, you can skip it. That said, if you can spare the USB drive, an Ubuntu install can come in handy for other problems down the line, and setting your persistence file to a reasonable amount will let you download other apps or save settings within Ubuntu. After that just go ahead and hit "Create". After the USB drive is ready, just go ahead and shut down the laptop. Hit the Novo button and choose "Boot Menu". From there select the USB drive. If it doesn't show up then you need to go into the Bios settings (the option to access the Bios is in same list as "Boot menu") and enable "Legacy devices" in the Boot options. You might also have to disable "Secure Boot" (or something like that), which is in another page of the Bios options. Once you've booted off the USB drive, you'll get an Ubuntu welcome screen which will give you the choice to either "Try" or "Install" Ubuntu. Just choose "Try". After Ubuntu has loaded, choose the first icon on the application bar on the left side of your screen. A search bar should come up; just type "gparted" and the program should appear. Open it up. On the top right hand side of the gParted window you'll see a dropdown menu with all your drives (they'll be labeled something like dba1, dba2, etc.). The easiest way to identify the mechanical HDD is by it's size (assuming your SSD isn't also 1TB). Select the correct drive. On the main part of the window, you'll now see your drive with all its partitions. There'll be a whole bunch of System partitions ranging from 0-1000mb. After those you'll see your main partition (around 900gb), and the Lenovo Recovery partition (around 25gb). Now, if you're only interested in clearing the HDD so you can use it for storage, you can just right click on each partition and delete it. Once you've deleted every partition you can create a new one (if you don't know which file system to use, just choose FAT32) that takes up the entire drive. If you feel like it you can create multiple partitions to your liking. However, if you need to access the files inside the HDD for some reason, then you're going to right click on the main partition (the 900gb one) and select "Flags". In there you're going to deselect the "Boot" option. After you've configured the drive to your liking, hit the green check mark on the top section of the gparted window, and it'll start executing everything you just set up. It shouldn't take very long. In both cases, on the application bar to the left of your screen, at the very bottom, you should now have a few more icons corresponding to the partition or partitions that you've just created and/or enabled. If you want, you can just go in and copy/paste whatever file you want from inside Ubuntu. Then you can format the drive if all you needed was to retrieve some files. If for some reason you kept the original Windows install on the HDD, I presume that if you reboot back into Windows you will now be able to access the drive within your new Windows installation (the drive will automatically be assigned a new letter that is not C), but I honestly have not tried this. This got a bit long, but it's really not complicated (as long as nothing goes wrong!). Good luck! dpkg chopra fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Oct 8, 2013 |
# ? Oct 8, 2013 19:21 |
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GParted has its own Live USB. It doesn't really require you to boot through a separate operating system to use it. Of course, if you're using Ubuntu for something else, then there is no reason to get the separate GParted image.
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 20:06 |
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gParted + the Ubuntu LiveCD (on a USB stick or otherwise) are great utilities and make fooling around with several disks a much easier prospect If you've still got a Windows USB Install stick then you can also use it to delete the partitions on your HDD (back up things first). Just delete the HDD partitions, leave the SSD alone, and reboot without installing anything
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 20:07 |
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QuarkJets posted:gParted + the Ubuntu LiveCD (on a USB stick or otherwise) are great utilities and make fooling around with several disks a much easier prospect Yeah, this might be a bit simpler if all you need to do is reformat the drive, but if you need to recover any files off the original HDD you need something a bit more powerful that lets you gently caress around with the Boot flags so that the OS will let you browse the files. Plus, I don't think the Windows Install disk lets you create new partitions (other than the one needed to install Windows), but I might be wrong. dpkg chopra fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Oct 8, 2013 |
# ? Oct 8, 2013 20:11 |
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Bob Morales posted:New Google/HP Chromebook My MacBook Air doesn't even have an IPS display I really like the design of that Chromebook though. Much better than the 4 pound Chromebook 14. Trying to give myself a reason to pick one up. Someone convince me.
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# ? Oct 8, 2013 21:18 |
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teagone posted:My MacBook Air doesn't even have an IPS display I really like the design of that Chromebook though. Much better than the 4 pound Chromebook 14. Trying to give myself a reason to pick one up. Someone convince me. I would buy this right now if it was available in Canada.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 02:41 |
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Are there any resources for helping me calibrate the screen on my y410p? I don't need to do it for any professional applications, but if somebody could share some settings or an icc profile I'd appreciate it.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 03:17 |
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I'm so tempted to pick up that Chromebook, having never used one before how usable are they running Ubuntu ?
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 03:19 |
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So there's pretty much no chance a higher-res Macbook Air is being released before the end of the year, right? I am going to purchase a new ultrabook and while I love the 12-hr battery life of the Haswell MBA the screens on the Win8 ultrabooks are crazy good. And 7-8 hour battery life is still impressive (especially considering my 4 year old Thinkpad barely gets 4 hours even with a fresh battery). So since all the new Haswell offerings are either out now or coming soon I'm thinking I might as well just buy one now. But if there is any indication of a MBA screen refresh I would put it off since I really don't need a new laptop until December.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 03:24 |
Butt Soup Barnes posted:So there's pretty much no chance a higher-res Macbook Air is being released before the end of the year, right? I'm sort of in a similar situation. I'm looking for a lightweight laptop/tablet for work that has a great battery life. I'm not sure if I'd be happier with an iPad + keyboard, a new Surface Pro, ultrabook, or something as simple as a Chromebook. My main requirements is that it has to be able to run Citrix XenDesktop, have some ability to connect to 3g or 4g(preferably directly but via usb is ok too), and last for at least a full day of on and off work. Any recommendations on what would work best?
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 04:42 |
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I feel like the MacBook Air 13 won't be really upgraded in terms of screen until next summer. I really wish it had a really nice IPS screen, but that battery life more than makes up for it (for now). I'll sell this one and get next year's upgrade if the screen is at least IPS.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 08:28 |
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What would my best bet be when buying a laptop cooler/cooling? Is there some piece of arcane knowledge passed through the ages from one grizzled computer nerd to the next, father to son (or Mother to daughter, whichever you prefer) that will help me pick it out or should I just find the one with the most/biggest fans that moves the most air? Does it matter if its USB powered or if it has an external power supply if it doesn't have some sort of built in USB hub that wouldn't be used anyways? For reference, I bought one of the 14" razer blades in mid July (feel free to mock me for my terrible ideas and wasting money, most everyone else has) which I love, however it becomes hot enough when strained that it can become physically painful to touch after an hour or two. If you could harness the thermal energy this thing produces, you could probably power a small town fairly easily. I apologize if this was the wrong place to put it, but since it is related to laptops, there wasn't already a thread on cooling in general that I could find and I didn't feel it warranted its own thread, I placed it here.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 09:51 |
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Butt Soup Barnes posted:So there's pretty much no chance a higher-res Macbook Air is being released before the end of the year, right? It's all just rumors right now, but wait until at least the 22nd. That's the supposed date for Apple's iPad announcement, and some other places are saying they're going to announce anything else they have for this year then too.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 14:38 |
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Hadlock posted:This is kind of interesting. Bay Trail (atom i.e. x86-64) processor, Win 8.1 Pro, 1280x800 screen. Looks a lot like an 8" Samsung Tab or Samsung Note, except it's an entire computer. Price isn't half bad considering what it is. More Atom powered tablet-laptops keep rolling out, at least a few of them have IPS screens. Prices aren't bad, especially if you bring your own keyboard+mouse.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 17:43 |
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My y510P is out for delivery right now. I'll give a review of it based on my criteria(speaker volume, screen quality) Friday when I have a bit of time. Any yX10P owners have recommendations upon bootup? Things to tweak, software to download? I think I'm going to put an SSD in there at some point, but I need some more free time first.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 19:39 |
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Is there a major difference between that lineup of tablets? That Lenovo for $300 looks tempting. The same thing for $600 from Dell? Not so much. Obviously the last one is bigger.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 19:40 |
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Martytoof posted:Is there a major difference between that lineup of tablets? That Lenovo for $300 looks tempting. The same thing for $600 from Dell? Not so much. Obviously the last one is bigger. The extra ones Hadlock posted are last-gen dual-core atom tablets with an extremely slow GPU. They're actually still great tablets, but they don't come with the improved quad core atom CPU in Bay Trail, which is what that new Dell Venue tablet is rocking. Edit: The $600 Latitude 10 tablet (not the Latitude 10 essentials tablet) is a dual core atom tablet that also comes with a pressure-sensitive digitizer pen, which adds significantly to the price.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 19:48 |
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The difference between Bay Trail and Clover Trail tablets is probably bigger than Ivy Bridge to Haswell. Battery life gets better, GPU performance gets a decent boost but there is also some huge CPU gains as well (and not just the 2 to 4 core count, but major things like out of order execution). Look for the Z3770 and don't get anything else.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 22:02 |
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Socrates16 posted:My y510P is out for delivery right now. I'll give a review of it based on my criteria(speaker volume, screen quality) Friday when I have a bit of time. Any yX10P owners have recommendations upon bootup? Things to tweak, software to download? I think I'm going to put an SSD in there at some point, but I need some more free time first. Here's my short review: The screen is pretty good, the speakers are ok. The build quality feels solid, I could probably break someone's skull with it and it would still boot. The touchpad and battery life (~4h power saving mode while watching movies/surfing, no tweaks) are poo poo, but I expected that. One huge annoyance is that you can't enable the intel gpu when you run sli to squeeze a little more battery life out of it. I ran into the adaptive brightness bug when I did a fresh install of windows but it went away randomly when I rebooted. In short: If you can you live with the short battery life and the fact that it's a pretty massive 15", it's really good value.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 22:48 |
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# ? Apr 24, 2024 19:02 |
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Speaking of the yX10p, is the thing supposed to be throttling down the gpu/cpu when running on battery? I was playing Just Cause 2 last night, and when plugged in it would run it like a dream, but then I unplugged it and took it over to my TV so I could play it on the home theater setup. I didn't bother plugging it in because it was just going to be a short session. Performance went way down when on battery. I tried lowering the resolution and pretty much every setting, and I barely got it up to playable FPS. Plugged it back in at my desk, and performance was back up to normal instantly.
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# ? Oct 9, 2013 23:19 |