Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Trippynet wrote:

guardian452 wrote: Bullshit, my thinkpad plays games and movies great.

I never said they couldn't do it, I said it's not what they're primarily designed for.

I watch movies and play games on my ThinkPad as well from time to time, and it does a surprisingly good job too. But when I stop doing that and fire up some real work such as programming on it, the extra screen height of the 16:10 screen makes a real difference over the crappy 16:9 panel in my work laptop.

Apple laptops aren't too bad, but I have gone off them somewhat lately after they started soldering everything in and sealing them together with large quantities of glue. I like to be able to meddle and tweak with my computing kit

The disconnect here is my thinkpad has a crappy (1366x768) 16:9 screen but my work-supplied MacBook has a 16:10 very nice (2560x1600) screen.

The only meddling and tweaking I've done in probably the past 5 years is add a subwoofer out to my thunderbolt display. Which is quite easy to work on, held together by magnets. My air 2010 which this thinkpad was supposed to replace was also "sealed and irrepairable" but lo! somehow I could add a larger disk and replace the battery just fine! Apple sells them for $119, 60 less than Lenovo charges for the x220 battery

armanox wrote:

commodorejohn wrote: Yeah, and throwing the entire screen off-balance because (AFAIK) neither Windows nor OSX allow you to have a corresponding bar on the other side of the screen to make the space symmetrical?

Oddly enough this used to be doable (I had it in Windows 98), but by Windows 7 the way I used to do it seems to no longer work.

Perhaps because so few people regarded left/right screen symmetry as a big deal. Might be useful on a very wide screen to have the contents of the taskbar duplicated each side (so as not to move the mouse so far), but the same might be said for top/bottom movement when we did have 4:3 or 5:4 screens (or at any time for portrait screens).
I suspect there are add-ons available providing a "panel" of buttons/notifications that one can configure to balance out a left (or right) side taskbar - the "you will do things THIS way" approach of the OS can only go so far! - if asymmetry is bugbear but not I've investigated as it doesn't bother me so much.

Being able to have the taskbar in the middle of a dual-screen display (i.e. sitting on RHS of left screen or LHS of right) would be useful sometimes.

guardian452 wrote: The disconnect here is my thinkpad has a crappy (1366x768) 16:9 screen but my work-supplied MacBook has a 16:10 very nice (2560x1600) screen.

The only meddling and tweaking I've done in probably the past 5 years is add a subwoofer out to my thunderbolt display. Which is quite easy to work on, held together by magnets. My air 2010 which this thinkpad was supposed to replace was also "sealed and irrepairable" but lo! somehow I could add a larger disk and replace the battery just fine! Apple sells them for $119, 60 less than Lenovo charges for the x220 battery

Yeah, my systems are the other way around and it's my works laptop that has the crappy 1366x768 screen and my ThinkPad which has a nicer 16:10 display (although not anywhere near the res of your Macbook).

Mod wise, I got the ThinkPad a few years ago from a former company I worked for. It had a badly worn keyboard, 2GB of RAM and a slow mechanical hard drive. Took all of 10 minutes to replace the keyboard with a new one, up the RAM to 8GB and slap a 256GB SSD into it. I also have two batteries for it, which is useful for travelling.

I can't help but feel with a Macbook that Apple deliberately designs them to be disposable. They are designed to be thrown in the bin and replaced every few years. And as someone who collects old computers, I guess I have a problem with this design mentality

I regret selling my old air even if it was long in the tooth. Just wanted something different and I sold it for exactly what the thinkpad cost me. They are anything but disposable. My work macbook is a year old and gets beat up in a garage environment every day but it still looks brand new once I clean it. I wanted an air with a nice screen and I got it with the new macbook.

They're disposable in the manner of if you want more RAM (even in the more professional Macbook Pro), you have to bin it and buy a new one. If the battery dies (which they do), you have to bin it and buy a new one. If you damage the screen, you have to bin it and buy a new one. If the headphone jack becomes loose, you have to bin it and buy a new one (used to be on a separate daughter board, now soldered direct to the motherboard). Essentially, they aren't upgradable and are very, very difficult and expensive to repair.

Of course, this is deliberate from Apple. After your MBP is 3-4 years old and has a stuffed battery, only 4GB of RAM and a flaky headphone jack, they want you to throw it in the bin and buy a new one, not replace the battery and upgrade/fix it. They're doing it to other devices too. The new Mac Mini comes in *exactly* the same chassis as the old one, but in the old one you could pop the bottom off and upgrade the RAM, but in the new one it's soldered down.

Making devices so they can't be repaired or upgraded is essentially making them disposable - especially when parts such as batteries have a very real and limited shelf life. Don't get me wrong, I fully understand this in particularly slim devices such as the Macbook Air, but it's much more unforgivable when they do it to bigger machines like the MBP and Mac Mini.

Trippynet wrote: They're disposable in the manner of if you want more RAM (even in the more professional Macbook Pro), you have to bin it and buy a new one. If the battery dies (which they do), you have to bin it and buy a new one. If you damage the screen, you have to bin it and buy a new one. If the headphone jack becomes loose, you have to bin it and buy a new one (used to be on a separate daughter board, now soldered direct to the motherboard). Essentially, they aren't upgradable and are very, very difficult and expensive to repair.

Of course, this is deliberate from Apple. After your MBP is 3-4 years old and has a stuffed battery, only 4GB of RAM and a flaky headphone jack, they want you to throw it in the bin and buy a new one, not replace the battery and upgrade/fix it. They're doing it to other devices too. The new Mac Mini comes in *exactly* the same chassis as the old one, but in the old one you could pop the bottom off and upgrade the RAM, but in the new one it's soldered down.

Making devices so they can't be repaired or upgraded is essentially making them disposable - especially when parts such as batteries have a very real and limited shelf life.

And this is why I've been advocating Thinkpad W series and Dell Precisions M series since the rMBP came out - one screw and I can replace anything in my M4500 (and the M4700 I had at my last job was the same way).

Yeah, I can replace the LCD panel on a ThinkPad, Precision or Latitude in about 10 minutes, and have the motherboard out of one in under 20 minutes. When someone heavily breaks a laptop at work, it specifically goes into a "spare parts" pile, so we can rob keyboards, chassis, screens and other such parts to fix the other laptops we have. With Apple laptops, they'd just all go in the bin. This approach of binning entire machines just because one part needs replacing is very wasteful and something I'm quite against.

That's what I like about my own ThinkPad. Took me barely 10 minutes with a screwdriver to completely revamp and revitalise it when I got it. If it was stuck with a knackered keyboard, 2GB of RAM and a clunky old HDD, I'd probably have binned and replaced it by now. Anyway, this is why I'd very much like a new "classic" ThinkPad to come along!

Current lifespan of iBook G4: 10 years. Battery replaced a couple times, RAM maxed out.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Current lifespan of iBook G4: 10 years. Battery replaced a couple times, RAM maxed out.

I always wanted a G4 Powerbook (I've got a G3 clamshell here in Lime that still works too, but I can't do much with it. And a PowerBook 504c....)

I've got a MacBook Pro 1,1 (Feb 2006) with max (2GB) RAM that I've replaced the battery in as well that's still running (though one of the fans is going to need replacing soon). When I worked as a traveling computer tech in 2009 I carried it with me everywhere, and used it as my main work computer from 2009-2012 (and then as just my personal laptop until 2014) with a couple of virtual servers hosting everything else I needed. I could still make a lot of use of that MacBook if:
A - everything wasn't so GPU intensive these days, flash and youtube kill the poor machine
B - Apple didn't drop support for that model (still running OS X 10.6, which is a blessing in some ways for that machine, since the releases have been on a downhill slope for performance and graphical attractiveness) so I have to manually compile all security patches and install them that way,
C - software supported it still - a lot of software is distributed through the App Store and no longer installs/has updates for 10.6. Also Google Chrome is about to drop support for IA-32 processors under OS X, and Firefox currently eats up way too much CPU time.
D - more RAM - I like having a Windows VM availible when I'm running a non-Windows system (such as my Precision laptop that replaced it that normally runs Linux), and 2GB of RAM does not leave me much space for even my Win2K VM to run nicely, plus common applications on the physical machine (read Web Browsers...)

Apple just doesn't make stuff any where near as good as they used to.

Firefox is going to drop i386 pretty soon also.

Fortunately, I maintain my own web browser. PowerPC forever.

I don't think I'll get ten years (and counting) out of my i7 MBA. I'm expecting five, tops.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Firefox is going to drop i386 pretty soon also.

Fortunately, I maintain my own web browser. PowerPC forever.

I don't think I'll get ten years (and counting) out of my i7 MBA. I'm expecting five, tops.

I love PPC, don't get me wrong. Actually, I'm a fan of any sort of unusual setup I can put together, which is why I loved my last job (I was in charge of the R&D lab for a Network Security company, and we tried to have everything - and I mean everything, to test different OS/Versions of the same OS (I had AIX 5-7 running, Solaris 8 - 11 (SPARC and Intel), HP-UX 11 - 11iv3 (PA-RISC and Itanium), etc, plus all kinds of networking appliances, oh it was like a playground). It's just when the G4 was still decent (I've had a G4 Quicksilver since 2006, and I've got a quad G5 here) I couldn't afford to buy an iBook/Powerbook. I bought the MBP at a ham radio festival in 2008 for $200, so I couldn't pass that up.

Ordered a pair of thinkpad X1 carbons for field use. Which is to say, I asked the IT guy for "smaller" laptops then the 16" HP walmart specials he would normally get as they are fedexed around 2 or 3 times a week. I recommended a thinkpad because I have an x220 at the house for tinkering about with slackware and for the kid to play with - but did not exactly specify any make or model.

OOohhhhhh boy, thinkpads need to die. Lenovo is, as they say in the industry, sucking-the-big-ten-inch. They are slow to sleep/wake. There is no Fn-row (instead a touch panel whos functions need to be cycled through). There is no caps-lock key. The track pad has a mind of it's own - the $79 black-friday-special chromebooks have a trackpad that works, even! And the "classic" trackpoint is buried below the level of the keys which makes it difficult to use.

The machines have a touchscreen - the screen itself is as good as my work mbp (13", 2560x1600). I would say the colo(u)rs are better than a mac except the anti-glare coating isn't nearly as good, and the brightness needs to be turned up nearly all the way to be seen even in my sunny office (the windows are tinted, but it is still a corner office). Anyways, the touchscreen... doesn't seem like they have improved at all since the unit in my old X41, especially compared to my wife's vaio touchscreen. It is as flaky as the touchpad and seems to only support rudimentary multitouch which is shoddy at best. It may be because even in 2015 they are still coming with windows 7 instead of 8 or 10 Which does a terrible job supporting any DPI setting other than the standard. So that gorgeous screen, in reality, looks ugly as sin.

Finally.. .the icing on the cake... they can't even read a fucking PDF anymore. Whatever program comes built into windows to read pdfs (I don't know what MS calls it nowadays?? Part of explorer?) Lenovo has deleted, and replaced with nitropdf. A trial version, and now after 30 days you are expected to pay for this basic functionality. I have one in phoenix and one in shafter CA and now I need to do remote maintenance just so the computer can read a fucking pdf...

And the battery lasts for only 3 hours.

I'm guessing the only icing on the cake is these things are probably half the price of a comparable macbook air.

I have one in ... shafter CA

Shafter?? Where men are men and sheep are scared?

How often do you have to get out that way?

I don't have to get out that way, thanks to the magic of teamviewer and fedex


I'm working with a fairly awesome telematics package for our vehicles, and it will eliminate the need for the fedexlaptop circus, but it isn't going to be ready until next year. And we'll still have all the old stuff to support...


Anyways, what happens in Shafter that makes it so... interesting?

guardian452 wrote: OOohhhhhh boy, thinkpads need to die. Lenovo is, as they say in the industry, sucking-the-big-ten-inch. They are slow to sleep/wake. There is no Fn-row (instead a touch panel whos functions need to be cycled through).

I can tell then that your IT guy bought last year's X1 Carbon. The touch row was an idiotic idea, and on the latest X1 Carbon, Lenovo have ditched it and put proper keys back. Although the multimedia functions are the default, which is stupid on a business machine, and you need to use the Fn key, or a Lenovo utility to get at the actual F options.

guardian452 wrote: The track pad has a mind of it's own

I hate buttonless trackpads, and Lenovo ones are no exception. Removing the buttons makes a trackpad look sleeker, but perform worse. And oddly enough on a business/work machine, I value functionality over "looking smooth".

guardian452 wrote: the screen itself is as good as my work mbp (13", 2560x1600).

Although the resolution will be lower, and the screen will feel more cramped as the MBP uses a better 16:10 screen, whereas Lenovo sticks with TV-friendly 16:9 on its laptops because it's cheaper. The Windows 7 bit doesn't surprise me, as the Thinkpads are aimed towards businesses, and businesses do not generally use Windows 8 or Windows 10 at the moment, so I can understand that one. Windows 7's DPI scaling is poor, but I guess that 5-6 years ago this was less of an issue.

guardian452 wrote: Finally.. .the icing on the cake... they can't even read a fucking PDF anymore.

Ahh, the wonders of bloatware. NitroPDF isn't actually that bad a program, we use it hear as it can create and edit PDFs pretty much as well as Adobe Acrobat Pro, but costs less than half the price. However, using a trial program as a reader is typical stupidity from Lenovo. All because it brings in a bit more cash for them.

This is my main problem with so many of the laptop manufacturers out there. Their kit isn't set up to provide the best experience for the user, it's done to maximise their profits - regardless of how much it actually spoils things for the user. No company was worse for this (IMO) than Sony. I've had to clean up a couple of crapware-infested Vaios in my time and it was a painful experience.

The era of the Thinkpad has gone and died after IBM spun it off. It goes against Lenovo's ethics to make anything comparable to an IBM product.

ClassicHasClass wrote:

I have one in ... shafter CA

Shafter?? Where men are men and sheep are scared?

How often do you have to get out that way?

Soooooo.... Guess where I am

Ha! I usually short-cut through Delano to avoid that chokepoint on the 99 between Goshen and the Kern county line, though occasionally I'll take Rt 43 down and go through Shafter that way.