laptop

[interstice]

After nearly a year now, my laptop has been discontinued and replaced with a widescreen model (rumored also to be generally more flimsy). I have the highest-end ultraportable Thinkpad which will ever have been made, with a 4:3 screen.

Neat. I don't like widescreens (for computing) in general but beyond that, using widescreen for small displays (12.1") specifically is just a bad idea period. Especially for business/enterprise oriented laptops like the X-series, where presumably a majority people are doing at least some important word processing or coding!

However, it's moot to protest; as I understand it, they changed over because the LCD manufacturers themselves are dropping their 4:3 lines like hotcakes. (sigh) Who watches movies on a 12.1" LCD anyway?

Here's one thing some of you might not have thought of: 8.5*(4/3)=11.3 which makes a rotated 4/3 display almost perfect for viewing letter-sized documents; to fit height-wise, we need to shrink the horizontal aspect to 97%; this is almost ideal because it introduces an implicit margin even for documents which don't have one. (Not having a margin is actually nauseating to me, since my eyes wind up auto-focusing on the wall behind the monitor. Sucks.)

On the other hand, 8.5*(16/9)=15.1, so we need to take the horizontal down to 73% width. Weak.

Now if you're using the more "civilised" A4 paper (notably the default even in many American LaTeX distributions), the story's about the same. 210mm*(4/3)=280mm which is a bit shy of 297mm, but not much! We just need to go down to 94% of height (and maybe a little more for a margin), no biggie. You can see where this is going: 210mm*(16/9)=373mm!!! That's 20% of the vertical, useless.

Now I suppose if you have a large enough monitor the extra vertical space could help for annotations, but I'd really rather have those on the sides anyway, as a simulacrum of marginalia.

Comments

[hfwolfe.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to ask you. I was looking at the lenovo outlet, and really thinking about getting an x61/x61s. Which do you have, and does it get as hot as the reviews say?

[random-walker.livejournal.com]

I have an x61s. As I understand it's an epsilon more power efficient than the x61, but even with a new battery this amounts to 30 minutes extra runtime and maybe 1-2 degrees cooler. I'd save the $100 or so and drop the "s".

It does get pretty toasty if you let it. The cores have essentially two modes, 800Mhz and 1600Mhz which are scheduled more or less intelligently by the OS (the setting "adaptive" means that when Real Work comes in, however brief, it kicks up to 1600Mhz until it's done). The speeds are coupled, so each core is always at the same speed as the other.

Now, running at 1600Mhz for a few minutes will take the internals up to around 145F on a good firm surface; 155 or 160 on an insulator (blanket or clothed body). Supposedly, this is within spec but it still makes me nervous. I generally clamp it down to 800Mhz which is trivial in linux, and almost trivial in Windows. This keeps it around 125 or 130 if it's working, and 115 or so idle.

If you're really persistent you can "undervolt" the motherboard through software, to squeeze out a few degrees without destabilizing your cpu too much. I managed to do it, but the next kernel update blew it all away, so meh.

Note that Flash is a bastard - it will peg your processor even if it doesn't need it, so most of the time I downclock it's for that. Serious numerical work I offload somewhere else.

So it's kind of a shame that I'm afraid to "really use" my laptop, but on the other hand with a desktop to ssh/vnc into, it's no big deal. (Even though the desktop is slightly SLOWER than my thinkpad at 1600Mhz.)

[random-walker.livejournal.com]

I should say that with two cores, running at 800Mhz is more than adequate for typical use. I've never had windows or gnome "stutter" on my for lack of cpu; running out of memory is a bigger problem, but that's because my perl scripts for data-crunching are shitty hacks.

[hfwolfe.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review.

Nice to know undervolting is a feasible option. If you turn off virtuality, shouldn't the flash virtual machine run as a normal process without unilateral hardware access?

I guess, in the end you seem pretty happy with it. I think I'll get one.

BTW. I think the wider screen helps text writing at a fixed unit weight. most people want to see a a few lines above and below, not the document in full page format, so wider is categorically better. If you're doing figure placement that matters, but no one does that for very long.

[random-walker.livejournal.com]

Flash is running as a normal process. This has nothing to do with privileged access; any badly-written program with a dumb loop instead of threads and event handlers would do the same thing.

I was referring to using a second rotated flat-panel monitor for reading papers, which I've found to be a good setup.

[hfwolfe.livejournal.com]

I read that really carelessly, sorry. I thought you meant that Flash overrode your 800MHz peg and set it up to 1600MHz. An Flash doesn't have a VM anyway, and I mean virtualization, not virtuality.

Pay me no mind. I sure don't