[GTALUG] great boxing week ultrabook deal

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 06, 2016 at 06:18:00PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Almost all laptops don't work right.  Some involve more adventures
> than others.

Thinkpads generally just work.

> 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.

I believe as of 4.2 or 4.3 kernel, they should be OK.  I did an install
on a Core i7-6700k a couple of weeks ago, and had no issues.

> | 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.

No the Tx30 was fine, the Tx40 was the problem.  The Tx50 fixes it
(and the W541, since the W550 isn't out yet, but people wanted a fix
for the 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?

Actually I believe there is a 3 cell battery internally (permanent)
and then an external swappable battery.  Now maybe that internal batter is
in fact where they used to have the optical drive (which I just noticed
does in fact appear to have gone away).

> - 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.

mSATA is obsolete.  M.2 it might have.  As far as I can tell it has an M.2
2242 slot (so 42mm max length) which is limiting, since most cards are 2280
(80 mm length).  It appears to be SATA only, so no NVMe or PCIe cards.

> - I really don't like 1366x768 displays

I thought the minimum was 1920x1080 on the T450, but I didn't check.

> - 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.

Only the Txx0p models I believe.

-- 
Len Sorensen