Laptop Megathread: Your laptop doesn't have Haswell? More like Hasbeen~

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Laptop Megathread: Your laptop doesn't have Haswell? More like Hasbeen~

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

Switched.on posted:

Couple things to add after having mine for a couple of days:

-The trackpad is poo poo, but I use a mouse. Just a heads up for people who will use it, though.
-Even after calibration, the screen seems a little washed out.

I've been playing a bunch of Planetside 2, Max Payne 3, and WoW so far. It seems to run great, and I haven't seen my GPU temps go above 73c yet. It's running the FFXIV benchmark very well, which is one of the games I intend to play a lot on it. Build quality isn't anything to write home about, but I don't think it feels cheap at all. All in all, I'm not disappointed for what I paid. I was mostly worried about the heat, but that seems well within my acceptable boundaries.

What's the battery life like under light load? The reviews I've seen either bitch about how they can't threebox Skyrim clients for more than half an hour, or crow about how long the battery lasts if you disconnect the monitor and spin down the hard drive :sigh:

. Obviously if there's no outlet nearby I'll just watch a movie or plonk around on Nethack or ZSNES, but if I can plug the thing in it would be nice to play recent titles at more than two seconds per frame.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2013 16:03

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 02:43

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

Bob Morales posted:

A lot of older machines can't play web video for poo poo. Examples are the lower clocked ULV Core Solo and Core Duo chips. The codecs and everything have to be perfect. Another example is my girlfriends white MacBook. I can hear that thing spin the fans up from the other side of the house when she's watching a video on the latest Spirulina supplements while dropping frames.

My brother is about to retire his Acer Timeline from 2008 because it can't play 720p skat3r vids. The integrated graphics in a lot of the Core 2 machines are garbage. They'll play low-res YouTube but when you get into other sides and HD stuff they're going to choke and sputter.

I insisted the Inspiron 6400 I bought in 2006 come with a Radeon X1400 for exactly this reason (well, that and Half-Life 2). The fact that I can "play" some newer titles at 2 seconds per frame is a pleasant side-effect of choosing a machine that can play a video in a browser or locally-stored AVI file without stuttering.

Sadly this machine and its poor battery are getting on in years and can't go more than 90 minutes between recharges. An SSD might offer some marginal help, but is it reasonable to guess that nobody's making new batteries for these things anymore so a "new" battery would most likely just be a three-year-old Li-ion battery that's new to me and wouldn't make a meaningful difference?

If I were to replace this ~~thing~~ old laptop, would the mere presence of a beefy video card, even one being bored out of its tree with VGA Lemmings, make that much of a difference on battery life? Being able to plug it in and play a current game at reasonable "hey man I'm on a laptop give me a break" quality settings would be extremely nice, but most of the time I'd be unplugged, watching a video or fumbling around on nethack or emulated DOS things. I'm waiting for a T540s, aren't I?

e: now with less moron

flakeloaf fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Aug 8, 2013

# ¿ Aug 8, 2013 15:06

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

Sorry, that was ambiguous: I'm looking to either buy a battery for this older machine in the hopes that it can last for more than an hour and a half, or replace the whole machine with something that can do the job. Is the power consumption of one graphics adapter vs. another at idle really worth worrying about?

# ¿ Aug 8, 2013 15:17

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

QuarkJets posted:

Checking today's techbargains laptop listings, I found this:
Lenovo IdeaPad Y510p

Great deal but I'm afraid to order it from the Canadian site because bilingual keyboards are terrible.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2013 15:11

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

DoesNotCompute posted:

Oh yeah and since you're canadian it'll have the insufferable bilingual keyboard that almost made me send mine back.

So what you're saying is that any laptop I buy will carry a premium for the shipping fee from my friend's house in the states to here, plus the bribe for that guy and a possible customs charge? Splendid.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2013 15:00

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

DoesNotCompute posted:

Nope. There's nowhere to specify this and multiple forums online are showing that even if you call to order you can't get it. Hell, Lenovo wouldn't send me a sleeve from their accessory store because it wasn't available to Canadian shipping.

Yup. It's too miserable for manufacturers to send two SKUs over the same border to adhere to a law that only applies to a quarter of the client base, so they just ship the unusable bilingual garbage and make the more numerous anglophone clients suffer with someone else's [il]legal requirements. A lot of vendors claim those keyboards simply aren't available.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2013 15:36

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

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.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2013 18:01

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

Just got an email from Lenovo saying my order had been pushed back a second time due to overwhelming demand... except the ship date still says 10/29? :iiam:

# ¿ Oct 21, 2013 17:20

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

Posting from a shiny new T430. The enhanced screen is most definitely worth the upgrade, the keyboard feels great, the speakers sound really good and the build quality is markedly better than my old Dell. But the touchpad has this irritating habit of not working intermittently. Is this a Lenovo thing, a touchpad thing or a me just being unlucky with build quality thing?

# ¿ Nov 6, 2013 01:35

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

dissss posted:

Do you mean T440? (The T430 has perhaps the worst speakers I've ever heard)

As for the touchpad there are some settings I'm control panel to fiddle with - I think by default it gives priority to the track point and keyboard as well as applying some really aggressive palm check.

Nope, it's definitely a 430. Maybe I'm just used to my old tinny speakers.

Shutting off the gestures and cranking the palm detection has certainly helped but it will still occasionally conk out and force me to use the nipple mouse, which isn't exactly an awful experience either.

But gently caress the function key being where control oughta be.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2013 01:52

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

Important safety tip for Lenovo owners running Win8: Create a recovery disc before you try cloning your stock drive onto a new SSD, so if you accidentally make the drive unbootable you don't have to buy a brand new Windows retail CD key so you can download a loving installer for an OS you already have a license for.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2013 21:11

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

QuarkJets posted:

Or just download an OEM Windows install disc. Seeing as how you own the software, it should be legal to use bit torrent for this purpose. I don't think that a recovery disc would actually get you where you want to go (a clean Windows installation on a new SSD)

The fun part is finding one that is English, not a slipstreamed Ae3S0EMSZZ version and available on a protocol that my ISP doesn't throttle (e.g., not bittorrent). I know, bitch bitch bitch, right?

I ended up saying 'gently caress it' and buying a retail license right from MS's online store because I'd already spent seven hours on this garbage and that's more than enough to threaten the safety of furniture and woodland creatures. Install 8.1, activate, change the CD key to the OEM one on my machine, done. So now I have a retail key collecting dust and I do not care. At some point I'll probably install it on the desktop but right now I could not be happier to see the back end of the Win8 installer and its stupid website. gently caress you, Ballmer.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2013 23:15

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 02:43

flakeloaf: Feb 26, 2003; Still better than android clock

Despite the misery I had with my own OS I still recommend an SSD most enthusiastically. From beep to usable in thirteen seconds is just insane.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2013 18:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Laptop Megathread: Your laptop doesn't have Haswell? More like Hasbeen~