[GTALUG] great boxing week ultrabook deal

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>

| Let me get this straight, Hugh.  You spent $1300 on laptops which don't
| work right.

Almost all laptops don't work right.  Some involve more adventures
than others.

The UX305C is working fine for us except for the "airplane mode" light
being constantly on.

Probably the function key functions don't work -- we haven't tried.

Most of the adventures for the UX305C seem to involve the Skylake
processor.  Skylake is the future of Intel processors (for a couple of
years) so we'll all have to get used to it.

| Well, I'm looking at ThinkPad T450 at CanadaComputers for $800.

That looks to be a good choice (but I haven't looked carefully).

- the trackpoint mouse buttons look to be reasonable after the Tx30
  generation screw-up.

- an i5-4300u is fine (a couple of generations back from Skylake, but
  with reasonable power consumption compared with the generation before)

- no optical drive and two batteries so this is a chassis with which I
  have no experience.  Is the second battery where an optical drive
  would go?

- I hope that it is easy to upgrade the HDD and RAM.
  Does it have a slot for mSATA SSD? (like T530 etc.)
  SSD makes a big performance difference.

- I really don't like 1366x768 displays

- The GPU is Intel's HD 4400.  Newer generations are more powerful.  Many
  T-series notebooks have nVidia GPUs added (at some expense in battery
  life).  For me the Intel GPU would be fine but some folks want more.