Laptop question

[nath]

I'm extremely tempted too. Tom go buy it tomorrow and let us know how it is, plus take some proper pictures of it (promo shots are useless for judging it). Let us tight bastards know if it's worth buying

 

[Tom]

Will do, busy day tomorrow but I should have time If I do get it and don't have time, I'll just upload them using the thing itself once I'm overseas

 

[Yaka]

spent past hour thinking on that lappy, its a much better speck than my main pc
atm. 3.4ghz p4, 2gb mem a shitty old at fanless card.

if its got a dvi port that could do 2560 x 1600 then idd defo buy it, but i gess 1600x1200 or 1920x1200 would do.

 

[Tom]

Right, I bought it. Also got a netgear wireless router. Questions about that later.

Pics (click image)



Now on the wireless router, what sort of encryption should I use? Right now its just on the default one, whatever that was.

 

[nath]

WPA2-PSK (Pre-Shared Key). Just set it to that, punch in a password and then set your laptop up with the same password. It's theoretically unbreakable at the moment (as far as I'm aware). Also make sure you change the administrator password for your netgear router too.

 

[Yaka]

wots it like for gaming mate,? specificaly tf2/portal and if you have it etqw

 

[nath]

How're you finding it? Good?

Also, was there an included free 1gb ram offer from Lenovo or is that no more?

 

[Tom]

Defcon, Darwinia, and Audiosurf all run perfectly on it. I haven't tried much else, been busy setting it up. I'll try TF2 on it tonight.

I installed Ubuntu on a separate partition and that works flawlessly - and orders of magnitude faster than Vista.

I have put VLC on it, that works great. I removed all the crapola that Lenovo put on it.

The only thing I can't do is get my 2 computers to talk to each other, they can ping one-another but I can't get the network stuff to work. Desktop PC is XP SP3, lappy is Vista. Oh well.

I forgot about the 1GB offer, maybe I'll email them about that. Battery life so far is proving to be about 3 hours or so. The keyboard is really nice. The case doesn't creak or anything. The slots on the side are all in the right places, and the dvd burner is nice and quiet.

The power supply socket is a huge 20V thing, I haven't seen one before. It doesn't come with a lead to connect to an aircraft power outlet.

An annoying thing is the fan, it tends to be either on or off and doesn't really increase in speed slowly. There are no options in the BIOS to change that.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it For £350 you can't really complain.

 

[nath]

Did you partition the drives yourself or does it come partitioned as standard? Also is it Ubuntu that takes control of the bootup or is it the MS boot manager?

 

[Tom]

I just went into disk management and shrank the partition to 100Gb.

Then I downloaded the Ubuntu desktop .iso, burnt it to a disc, rebooted the laptop. It comes up with an install menu, and lets you select where you want to install it. There is an option 'guided - use largest contiguous space' so I selected that and it installed Ubuntu to the remainder of the drive.

Its all here:

How to dual-boot Vista with Linux (Vista installed first)

 

[nath]

Nice, could be a good excuse to get my teeth in to Linux. Are the laptop devices working OK with Ubuntu? Wireless etc.

 

[Tom]

Yeah dead easy, less hassle than Vista tbh. Just select the encryption method, put the password in, and it connects. It comes with Firefox and loads of other stuff, including gimp editor

 

[Yaka]

Nice, could be a good excuse to get my teeth in to Linux. Are the laptop devices working OK with Ubuntu? Wireless etc.

suprised you have not tried tux when a half arse f00 like me self can get used to it, both ubuntu and fedora core work with preety much any lappy and both have the best support forums.

 

[nath]

Oh I've tried it, I used it a bit at uni and for a while had a partition with it on my old pc but I never really got in to it bigtime. If I had a laptop with it though I might find myself using it a bit more.

That said, in my line of work (freelance home IT support) it's unlikely to ever really be useful, but it could be interesting to find out more about it anyway.

 

[Tom]

HL2 runs very well on it Not jerky at all, but not totally smooth - certainly easily playable though.

 

[Yaka]

god im tempted, since mini yaka spawned last week ive been looking for a okaish lappy for tf2 use. sould be ok to replace me desktop till i finaly get round to building my pc up over the coming months

 

[Tom]

Well I haven't tried TF2 on it but I don't think it will be great in anything other than low settings.

 

[nath]

Tom, did you find any info about the free 1gb memory offer from Lenovo?

 

[Kryten]

Lovely machines aren't they. I've never been a fan of all the laptops that are made to look like something from space (ala Acer, Dell inspiron/XPS, HP), and the IBM's just look like they're made to get down and dirty with business, no faffing about; and they're nice sturdy machines. I'm happy lugging one around with me on a day to day basis and expect to get it home free of marks, cracks or pressure points on the screen, commonplace with a lot of other laptops.

Once I get bored with XP (which is currently only installed to play the odd racing game with my Vista-unsupported steering wheel) I'll probably get ubuntu back on it. It's great for playing with if you're not entirely "up" with all the techy linux gizmos but at the same time gives you all the scope to do as little or as much as you want either through the GUI or CLI.

If Ubuntu isn't quite your cup of tea for whatever reason, the new Fedora release is apparently just as easy on the eye and the non-gurus. Downloading it myself later to try in a VM.

Either way, glad you're happy with that; it'll be a good machine to recommend to other prospective buyers.

 

[nath]

Just ordered one with an additional 2gbs of ram. Weeeeeee exciting

 

[Tom]

Tom, did you find any info about the free 1gb memory offer from Lenovo?

nah mate, I'm in N.Ireland working on the Northwest 200 Got up this morning at 0415, and only got in my hotel room about 20 minutes ago

I'm browsing the internet using the bluetooth connection to my mobile phone. The hotel doesn't have network stuff.

I might get me one of those 'Three' mobile widgets, if they do a payg version.

The lid of the laptop is already scratched, it doesn't take much. Oh well, it was going to happen anyway.

 

[Ch3tan]

You are all wankers. I get paid on Friday and am now very likely to spend some on one of these. Gits.

 

[Insane]

nah mate, I'm in N.Ireland working on the Northwest 200

burn ya ****

There are a few people here who have the recent Lenovo N200 range, I have the 0769 BLK model which has one of those low end C2D processors badged as Pentium Dual Core's and I can't fault the machine for what I use it for

 

[nath]

Mine arrived today, it's a little chunky but I guess given the price I can't complain. Otherwise seems like a pretty nice laptop, chucked in an extra 2gb Corsair module for £30 and it seems to be performing pretty well. I still don't like Vista at all, just don't see the point in it XP is still top notch. Anyhoo, clients shall be using Vista so I gotta get myself up to speed on it I guess :S

Gunna try out some games shortly, though I understand there are much better drivers out there for the Nvidia than the ones that come bundled with it. Be interested to see how it behaves. More on this later

 

[nath]

Ok quick question. On this laptop everything's running fine and dandy, but there's this weird issue where the hard-drive is almost constantly active. I'm running almost nothing and I just can't work out what the hell is causing the activity. I've got MSN Messenger and AVG running. AVG I've confirmed isn't doing anything - no scan or updates. MSN obviously has nothing to do at all.

I've done a manual check for windows updates to make sure it's not busy doing that and everything is up to date. Also, I've got 3gb's of RAM so I really shouldn't have much swapfile activity.

It usually takes about 15minutes of Vista being loaded before the thing calms down and the hard drive appears to be under normal usage. Anyone know what the hell this is? Tom are you getting this on yours?

TIA


edit: As I was posting this the HDD calmed down to normal activity (had been about 10-15 mins since I booted) but then a few moments after I posted it started going mental again. Also - task manager is showing nothing with high CPU usage - is there anything I can use to find out what's accessing the hard drive so much?

 

[Kryten]

Yes, being a new/fresh installation of Vista, it's constantly paging and indexing your drive, something XP didn't do.
Give it some good usage and you'll notice it'll drop off once it's indexed all the major parts of it, with of course the bonus of the near instant searches and easiesr use of the startbar command/search.

 

[nath]

with of course the bonus of the near instant searches and easiesr use of the startbar command/search.

Bah. Things that I'm never really going to use. Ach well - it's good to know what it's doing, and I'm using it a reasonable amount so hopefully I'll see it calm down soon. Ta for the info Kryt.

 

[Ch3tan]

Can you not simply turn off the indexing feature like you can in XP?

 

[Tom]

Ok quick question. On this laptop everything's running fine and dandy, but there's this weird issue where the hard-drive is almost constantly active. I'm running almost nothing and I just can't work out what the hell is causing the activity. I've got MSN Messenger and AVG running. AVG I've confirmed isn't doing anything - no scan or updates. MSN obviously has nothing to do at all.

I've done a manual check for windows updates to make sure it's not busy doing that and everything is up to date. Also, I've got 3gb's of RAM so I really shouldn't have much swapfile activity.

It usually takes about 15minutes of Vista being loaded before the thing calms down and the hard drive appears to be under normal usage. Anyone know what the hell this is? Tom are you getting this on yours?

TIA


edit: As I was posting this the HDD calmed down to normal activity (had been about 10-15 mins since I booted) but then a few moments after I posted it started going mental again. Also - task manager is showing nothing with high CPU usage - is there anything I can use to find out what's accessing the hard drive so much?

Its just Vista shuffling through your HD indexing everything.

Shove Ubuntu on it nath, as a dual boot. It's really quite good. There is a minor issue with sound not working but it takes about 5 minutes to fix, just a single line into a text file fixes it.

 

[nath]

Its just Vista shuffling through your HD indexing everything.

Shove Ubuntu on it nath, as a dual boot. It's really quite good. There is a minor issue with sound not working but it takes about 5 minutes to fix, just a single line into a text file fixes it.

I'll definitely be popping Ubuntu on it eventually, but one of the main reasons for getting this laptop was to get to grips with Vista so I'll be using that primarily.