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So I picked up one of the Haswell refreshed xps 15s. It doesn't have a DVD drive on it and I want to get (ideally) a fresh win8 install on the 2.5 ssd I plan on jamming in there. Is there a way to do it other than picking up an external DVD? Or can I clone it or somehow find an oem win8 installer on a flash drive?
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Nov 11, 2013 21:22
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Is the Lenovo order status page down for anyone else? Is there another way to check on an order?
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Nov 11, 2013 21:22
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Bakalakadaka posted:Mostly some source engine games like TF2 and schoolwork TF2 will run on a toaster nowadays. You can get by on stock graphics for games like Skyrim and most (all) indie games. Kerbal Space Program even runs on the HD3000, but much better on the HD4000, and is pretty flawless once you get to orbit (something about how the water is rendered nukes your framerate).
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Nov 12, 2013 00:01
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Well, it looks like the yellow problem with the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pros has been resolved. Kind of. 
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Nov 12, 2013 00:17
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The idea of a non-Lenovo employee making 3,822 posts on the lenovo support forum freaks me out. Who does things like that?
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Nov 12, 2013 00:21
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Hadlock posted:TF2 will run on a toaster nowadays. Well that's good to know about TF2, but now that I think about it I will probably want to play some of my more demanding games like Saints Row 4 or maybe even PlanetSide 2 if I ever get back into it. I was looking at this laptop earlier: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834313582 which looks like a better deal if I'm going for something that will play games, and its 20bux cheaper. The GT745M looks like a decent card and I'll probably be better off with the 1TB drive than the 128GB SSD, though I might miss that sweet boot speed.
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Nov 12, 2013 00:34
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Magic Underwear posted:The idea of a non-Lenovo employee making 3,822 posts on the lenovo support forum freaks me out. Who does things like that? The idea of people listing the computers and devices they own in their sig is what freaks me out.
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Nov 12, 2013 00:49
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shrughes posted:The idea of people listing the computers and devices they own in their sig is what freaks me out. That's been a thing on any computer-related forum for like decades now. It's dumb and basically just used to show off how much disposable income they have.
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Nov 12, 2013 00:55
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Bakalakadaka posted:Well that's good to know about TF2, but now that I think about it I will probably want to play Planetside 2 crawls on an HD4000 at about 20fps, but from what I've heard it's even slower now that they've added a bunch of stuff.
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Nov 12, 2013 01:36
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Hadlock posted:Planetside 2 crawls on an HD4000 at about 20fps, but from what I've heard it's even slower now that they've added a bunch of stuff. Yeah even my desktop has had some problems with PlanetSide 2 but I heard they were working on optimizing it a little better. I think I'll go for the 17" one because it looks like it'll be able to run most of my games so I can get my fix and do whatever it is I'll need for classes (which I don't actually know yet because I can't register for them until about two weeks before the semester starts). Thanks for the input.
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Nov 12, 2013 01:50
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I'm actually hoping I can crank down Planetside 2 to lowest settings and get a good game in here or there on my T440s. HD4400 isn't going to run it well, but as long as I can just walk around and use a medic tool at like 20fps I'll be happy. But I'm not expecting miracles, mind you.
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Nov 12, 2013 02:02
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Somebody pasted this into an IRC channel, it's not my fault for reposting, don't shoot the messenger please.
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Nov 12, 2013 05:47
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Alright, here's the dealio. My girlfriend is wanting to spend less than $800 on a new laptop for graduate school that needs to be super reliable. She's a biology major. Needs a touchscreen, which I know carries a premium, but a laptop with touch functionality, not a stripped away tablet cause this is gonna be her everything computer. Needs to be able to run Minecraft, heh....suggestions? Best bang for buck.
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Nov 12, 2013 06:21
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That's a really lovely screen capture with really lovely looking text, why would you post something so lovely? It's not even funny, or relevant for that matter. Many of the downsides have gaming laptops have been mitigated, and at this point the only real downside is worse battery life while you're gaming. Plug it in, problem solved
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Nov 12, 2013 09:47
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shrughes posted:Somebody pasted this into an IRC channel, it's not my fault for reposting, don't shoot the messenger please. The funny thing is, something like a Vaio S series with a 640M LE is perfectly fine for gaming in a small form factor. There's a difference between gaming on medium settings for modern games and having it be perfectly playable, and being one of those fools that wants one of those enormous plastic hulks that sounds like a wind tunnel and will crush your legs if you try to use it as a laptop. But yes, that image is absolutely awful.
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Nov 12, 2013 10:06
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89 posted:Alright, here's the dealio. My girlfriend is wanting to spend less than $800 on a new laptop for graduate school that needs to be super reliable. She's a biology major. Needs a touchscreen, which I know carries a premium, but a laptop with touch functionality, not a stripped away tablet cause this is gonna be her everything computer. Needs to be able to run Minecraft, heh....suggestions? Best bang for buck. Why do you think it needs a touchscreen? Has she already used a laptop with a touchscreen and actually found it useful for anything?
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Nov 12, 2013 11:09
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dissss posted:Why do you think it needs a touchscreen? Has she already used a laptop with a touchscreen and actually found it useful for anything? Some people enjoy reading text through a haze of finger grease? I don't know.
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Nov 12, 2013 11:29
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Alright, I've talked to her a little further and she's open to the idea of a laptop without a touchscreen and thinks a stylus would be more functional for her needs. So, I feel like a jerk asking such a vague question, but with what I listed, what direction do I need to look for maybe a $500-$700 laptop that'll get the job done? - Super reliable, this is her grad school computer - Great battery life - Needs to run Minecraft, which I know every computer will. It doesn't have to be hot on the graphics card. Just incase there's any crazy deals out there like, at this moment... 89 fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 11:50
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89 posted:Alright, I've talked to her a little further and she's open to the idea of a laptop without a touchscreen and thinks a stylus would be more functional for her needs. So, I feel like a jerk asking such a vague question, but with what I listed, what direction do I need to look for maybe a $500-$700 laptop that'll get the job done? You're going to need to give more information about what she's going to use it for - if she needs a stylus does that mean graphic design? Photoshop? It has a big impact on how much power, screen size, etc she needs. Is she going to carry it to classes? What is she used to using? I don't know of any laptops that have a stylus but aren't touchscreen. I'm not in the US but over here Vaio Pros are £750, light, high res, Haswell, touchscreen.
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Nov 12, 2013 13:57
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89 posted:Alright, I've talked to her a little further and she's open to the idea of a laptop without a touchscreen and thinks a stylus would be more functional for her needs. So, I feel like a jerk asking such a vague question, but with what I listed, what direction do I need to look for maybe a $500-$700 laptop that'll get the job done? There is a big difference between a capacitive stylus and an active-digitizer styles (like a Wacom tablet - pressure sensitive). Here is a list of convertable tablets with active digitizers - and somewhere there is a spreadsheet with prices I believe. For 500-700 you're looking at something like a Surface 2 Pro for Haswell, or if you want a bigger screen, then one of the last gen models.
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Nov 12, 2013 15:17
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The Thinkpad Yoga would be perfect but it's way out of that price range.
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Nov 12, 2013 15:26
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So apparently netbooks aren't a thing anymore. What would be a similar laptop? Cheap, light, doesn't need to do anything fancy, I basically just use it for presentations and stuff anyway. LaTeX is about the only thing I need it to run. Suggestions?
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Nov 12, 2013 16:56
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There actually is a sort-of spiritual netbook successor, the Asus Transformer Book T100! It even comes with Office out of the box, and should handle LaTeX just fine.
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Nov 12, 2013 17:02
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So, I took the plunge and bought myself an MSI GE40. Ordered it at 4pm Thursday afternoon, and it was in my hands 1pm the next day. Thanks NewEgg! I wanted a smaller form factor laptop so it would fit in my bag and I could carry it around without having 10 lbs of extra crap dragging my shoulders down. So far, it really fits the bill, even with the powerpack on top it doesn't weight more than 6-7lbs total. Very convenient! The build quality leaves a little to be desired, the screen is a touch too matte so it sometimes washes out unless you're staring at it head-on but I mainly use it plugged into a monitor for games anyway so it doesn't affect me so much. The plastic around the screen feels slightly flimsy, bus considering how small it is the whole thing feels really nice overall. Solid, but light. Power-wise, if you're playing games it heats up a lot and sounds pretty loud. The speakers are ludicrously tinny so if you don't have the settings adjusted just right or have the volume down it can sometimes get washes out, thankfully there's a nice bit of software on there for adjusting audio settings like an equalizer so I have it sounding decent when it's not going through a pair of powered speakers. Battery life was just a touch over 90 minutes for me playing Skyrim, and about 10 hours doing some web development stuff in work although Wifi and Bluetooth were off and brightness was down to about 50%. Very impressed with that, though, it really packs a punch for such a small unit. Performance is great all around. I have the 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD model, so Windows 8 boots up in about 10 seconds and I still get a nice chunk of space to store files. 8GB of RAM is fine for now, although there was an issue with the Killer network drivers that come pre-installed where it would tank my RAM after about an hour playing an online game or downloading torrents. Turned out to be a horrifying memory leak, but a removal and update to the latest drivers fixed it and even when playing games it never goes about 50%. It's one of the i7 Haswell ships too, so even when i've got a ton of stuff open doing it never drags, and games run smooth as butter. It plays a graphically modded Skyrim on Ultra, 1920x1080 and never drops below about 40fps so I am stoked with that. Overall, it was more than worth the $1300 I paid. It's small enough to be a work laptop and carry it around without problems, and when plugged into an external monitor it's a great gaming platform too.
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Nov 12, 2013 17:36
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Forums Terrorist posted:He's possibly taking into account all the time spent getting drivers in order, reinstalling applications, etc. Also, I pulled the trigger on a T430 as a birthday gift to myself. How expensive/hard is it to install an Ultrabay drive, and what fits? It seems like I might be able to get a 2TB slow drive in there for non-I/O bound things like movies and such. Ultrabay drive caddies are pretty cheap (30$? maybe) and are braindead simple to use. The optical drive ejects with a simple latch on the bottom of the laptop, just like the battery. Any 2.5" hard drive will fit in the ultrabay itself, 9.5mm or 7mm. You just drop the drive in the caddy, slide it in, and windows will pick it up just as if you plugged a USB stick in. That's all there is to it. cyxx posted:So I picked up one of the Haswell refreshed xps 15s. It doesn't have a DVD drive on it and I want to get (ideally) a fresh win8 install on the 2.5 ssd I plan on jamming in there. Is there a way to do it other than picking up an external DVD? Or can I clone it or somehow find an oem win8 installer on a flash drive? Microsoft themselves has a tool that creates USB installers from windows ISO images. You download the tool + windows image, plug in a drive, then run the tool and it will format the drive and extract the installer to it. Installing from a USB3 drive to an SSD will take barely 5 minutes. I haven't touched a dvd in forever, and it's great. Gwaihir fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 17:55
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botany posted:So apparently netbooks aren't a thing anymore. What would be a similar laptop? Cheap, light, doesn't need to do anything fancy, I basically just use it for presentations and stuff anyway. LaTeX is about the only thing I need it to run. Suggestions? Yoga 11s
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Nov 12, 2013 18:16
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So how good are the HD4000 graphics? I don't need anything too brilliant, but it'd be nice to be able to play Morrowind or Euro Truck Simulator in my downtime.
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Nov 12, 2013 18:35
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botany posted:So apparently netbooks aren't a thing anymore. What would be a similar laptop? Cheap, light, doesn't need to do anything fancy, I basically just use it for presentations and stuff anyway. LaTeX is about the only thing I need it to run. Suggestions? The ASUS 1015E-DS01 and 1015E-DS03 are spiritual successors to netbooks -- with a Celeron 837 and 1366x768 instead of an Atom and 1024x600. If you're using it for presentations it'd be preferable to the Transformer Book T100 because it has a normal HDMI port and VGA port instead of just a micro-HDMI.
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Nov 12, 2013 18:47
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Praseodymi posted:So how good are the HD4000 graphics? I don't need anything too brilliant, but it'd be nice to be able to play Morrowind or Euro Truck Simulator in my downtime. I played morrowind with about 4gb worth of add ons on my hd4000 no problem. It will also play Skyrim on low
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Nov 12, 2013 19:01
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Hmmmm. Got about £800 to spend. If I want more than 4 hours of battery for general use am I limited to a 13.3" screen? That seems to be the problem with most of the 15.5" ones I've seen. I'm aiming for hopefully 1920x1080 but I'm willing to go lower, and if possible with a backlit keyboard, and I've only found the Acer Aspire s7 so far that fits all of those criteria, and it's at the absolute maximum of what I'm willing to pay. EDIT: Add the Asus UX32A. I think, maybe some of them have those features? EDIT2: Right, someone help me decide, is the i7 yoga 13 worth the extra £100 over the i7 U330T? Praseodymi fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 20:40
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T440s and p are now available in the Lenovo UK store. They appear to have different versions than the American store - you can get a T440s with the GT 730M graphics card.
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Nov 12, 2013 23:34
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My x230 came in today. Super fine laptop, light even with a 9cell battery, and just a dream to use. The keyboard is so spacious!
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Nov 13, 2013 00:16
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botany posted:So apparently netbooks aren't a thing anymore. What would be a similar laptop? Cheap, light, doesn't need to do anything fancy, I basically just use it for presentations and stuff anyway. LaTeX is about the only thing I need it to run. Suggestions? Chromebooks are trying to take that market, if you can find online processors for the stuff you need it to do.
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Nov 13, 2013 00:35
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Ah, sorry to barge into the thread with questions, but I finally am in a position to retire my laptop (a Toshiba Satellite L300 that has been astoundingly resilient) for something more up-to-date. I have a cap of £500 to spend, though if I can spend less than that, it'd be great. I'd be using it for basic Photoshop InDesign and a lil Sony Vegas, but I'd also really like to play Guild Wars 2 comfortably on low settings. I don't think I'll run anything more graphics intensive than that (Maybe the new WoW, but that has no known system requirements yet). I'd assume that MMOs would be designed to run okay on lower-end machines, right?
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Nov 13, 2013 00:54
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Does the T440s have all the super durable titanium millispec whatsits space rating as the normal T440?
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Nov 13, 2013 01:23
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P.N.T.M. posted:My x230 came in today. Super fine laptop, light even with a 9cell battery, and just a dream to use. The keyboard is so spacious! I have an X230 from work and it really is fantastic. I would highly recommend it to anybody who doesn't need a great, big screen.
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Nov 13, 2013 01:45
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89 posted:she's open to the idea of a laptop without a touchscreen and thinks a stylus would be more functional for her needs You know there's no such thing as a stylus without a touchscreen, right? Putting a stylus in there is putting the price up again on top of the touchscreen. I assume also that you're looking for something that converts to flat tablet mode.
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Nov 13, 2013 01:50
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My x230 has been to three countries in the last year and bounced around in the back of a jeep around an entire island nation (100 miles offroad) for two weeks, it's basically a 12.5" T400 in terms of durability, with a much faster processor. And yeah, a full size keyboard. That slice battery (extra 12 hrs battery) for $100 is no slouch either.
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Nov 13, 2013 01:59
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Actual pictures of a T440p spotted: http://imgur.com/a/oNdw1
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Nov 13, 2013 03:55
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botany posted:So apparently netbooks aren't a thing anymore. What would be a similar laptop? Cheap, light, doesn't need to do anything fancy, I basically just use it for presentations and stuff anyway. LaTeX is about the only thing I need it to run. Suggestions? Chromebook with Ubuntu installed on it
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Nov 13, 2013 04:04
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