Laptop time?

[LunarMist]

So for work purposes the laptops are 6th version of the X1 YoGI. According to the Lendovo site they have version 8 already.
I don't know what Surfaces they have, but for starters they have a special power supply jack and only two USB ports. The X1 is like a little smaller brick than the old ones (smaller Bezel), but still quite heavy.

 

[LunarMist]

What is normal for battery drain? My personal laptop (assembled in June 2023) loses more than I like. It's down roughly 10% in less than a week. I need to test more accurately, but is that normal and what can be done?

I don't have use for the laptop at home because it has no Ethernets. Is there any way to turn on such a laptop remotely (5 feet away)?

 

[Mercutio]

I think I can get 6 hours off a charge on my X1E if I keep the screen turned down. I don't ever really let it sit idle in a bag though.

 

[sedrosken]

The problem with letting a laptop sleep in a bag is that Microsoft forces some newer sleep standards than plain ol' S3, meaning the WiFi hardware will wake up every so often, connect, and update some things. If you've ever noticed your laptop was rather hot and used a ton of battery while it was asleep when you pulled it out of your bag, this is why. I think what happens, being charitable, is that someone might close the laptop while they're on AC, putting it into the higher-tech sleep mode which doesn't matter since it's on AC, and then unplug it -- the laptop never gets the memo that it's supposed to shunt into S3 from there to save battery, because I've never noticed this behavior when I outright just close it while on battery.

I'm on Linux and I'm on an old MBP with 85% of the design capacity remaining, so my figures are likely worthless to you, but I manage around 6h on battery depending on what I'm doing. I haven't measured battery leakage while in sleep as I expect that'd take too long and I'm too impatient. Suffice to say it does what I need it to do.

 

[LunarMist]

I think I can get 6 hours off a charge on my X1E if I keep the screen turned down. I don't ever really let it sit idle in a bag though.

The YoGI doesn't seem to have very good battery life even though it is from Q2 2022, not that I care too much for work. I have a 10Ah battery in my office bag if it needs an extra boost.

I practically never use my personal laptop on battery. Part of the reason is the stupid display issue.
I wish the battery could be removed completely, but it probably would act up. Before the Fujitsu left the North America, they had ordering options for a smaller battery but it would throttle down unless plugged in.

 

[LunarMist]

The problem with letting a laptop sleep in a bag is that Microsoft forces some newer sleep standards than plain ol' S3, meaning the WiFi hardware will wake up every so often, connect, and update some things. If you've ever noticed your laptop was rather hot and used a ton of battery while it was asleep when you pulled it out of your bag, this is why. I think what happens, being charitable, is that someone might close the laptop while they're on AC, putting it into the higher-tech sleep mode which doesn't matter since it's on AC, and then unplug it -- the laptop never gets the memo that it's supposed to shunt into S3 from there to save battery, because I've never noticed this behavior when I outright just close it while on battery.

I sometimes leave my work laptop on after an morning TEAMS meeting at home and it sure is warm when I open the sleeve in the offices, but otherwise it took forever to boot. The newer (version 6) one is usable after about 1.5 minutes so I may just power down.

I'm trying to figure out how to use my new personal 1360P at home, rather than just a few times per year. I'm not seeing any way to turn it on without opening. I'd like to squirrel it away under a desk or somewhere that doesn't consume real estate on top of a desk or table.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm trying to figure out how to use my new personal 1360P at home, rather than just a few times per year. I'm not seeing any way to turn it on without opening.

I think this is pretty obvious but can't you just go in to power options and set "Do nothing when lid is closed and system is plugged in" under your power profile? You'd just have to open it to turn it on the first time.

My stack of back to school laptops this year are Lenovo Ideapad 1 R3 7320U 8GB 250GB models. They're around $320 apiece and I only hate them a little, and almost all the hate is just due to the fact that they have a condensed number pad. Numpads don't belong on notebooks. Typing off-center from the screen messes up my typing accuracy pretty substantially. Other than that, they aren't bad. They're light but well constructed and have a nice touchpad and bright screen, and if the R3 is a touch slower than the i3 version on a per-core basis, the Ryzen is 4c/8t and lowers the price on the system by about $50 compared to Intel. The hardware is the absolute floor of what I'd expect from a new notebook, but at least we're finally in the place where I can always expect 8GB RAM and 250GB SSD in my $300-ish product. FINALLY.

The back to school laptop deal is something weird one of my customers asks me to do, but it does mean I spend more time trying to find the best product I can from the mass of vomit-grade consumer laptops.

 

[LunarMist]

Children have small fingers and unformed brains; I'm sure they can easily adapt to anything on a cheap laptop. Around here the public school kids are supposedly on the Google laptops of Chrome.

 

[Santilli]

With chips that now require huge coolers, how do you cool a laptop, and what do you look at?
MY CF-53v4 got flooded on, so the 16 gig is gone. I have a v1 that still has 8 gig, but it's noticeably slower then the 16GB was.
For 500 dollars I can maybe find a used CF 53 v4, with 16 gig.
Desktop uses 16-20 gigs of memory during normal useage.
Keyboard on the CF-54 are unacceptable.
Figure just wait, and the prices will come down more...

 

[Santilli]

5k for a "semi-rugged" laptop???, that gets water damaged and destroyed?
Not for me...
Wait only till Panasonics drop like crazy in price, for 55's...

 

[LunarMist]

What are you doing that really requires more than 16GB in a laptop and needs to be rugged? Mostly those are sold for LE, construction, some military, etc. A modern laptop with 16GB will run circles around an ancient laptop with more RAM. You can get a nice Pelican case and various water resistant covers for a lot less money.

You can get a rugged DELL starting for much less cost.

Dell Rugged Laptop Computers & 2-in-1 PCs | Dell USA

Work anywhere with 5-G capable Rugged laptops and tablets, built and tested for ultimate productivity in the field.

www.dell.com

They also have accidental damage support.

 

[Santilli]

Waterproof keyboard
General, spill resistance
well balanced general package
with ram, and SSD
Like larger screens, getting old
don't need a touch screen
Like high quality keyboards that require effort
Watch movies, limited games

 

[Santilli]

What are you doing that really requires more than 16GB in a laptop and needs to be rugged? Mostly those are sold for LE, construction, some military, etc. A modern laptop with 16GB will run circles around an ancient laptop with more RAM. You can get a nice Pelican case and various water resistant covers for a lot less money.

You can get a rugged DELL starting for much less cost.

Dell Rugged Laptop Computers & 2-in-1 PCs | Dell USA

Work anywhere with 5-G capable Rugged laptops and tablets, built and tested for ultimate productivity in the field.

www.dell.com

They also have accidental damage support.

My comment was since the Mark 3 had 16 gigs, and was noticeably faster then the 8 gig, Mark 1 that is left.

 

[LunarMist]

If you want a rugged laptop that works under all sorts of environmental conditions then you buy a DELL Lattitude Rugged, Getac or similar. They are bulky, heavy, and built to MIL STDs to withstand impacts and the elements. If you are just worried about spilling a cup of coffee on the keyboard then it's more efficient to get a general laptop for far less money and pay for the accidental damage policy. There are also some ruggedized tablets that might be better for field use.

 

[Mercutio]

IIRC the Toughbooks pass one more MIL-SPEC standard than Thinkpad T series do at a cost of reasonably contemporary hardware, but they're Greg's brand and it's his money.

I messed with an Acer Predator gaming laptop a little bit ago. Gaming laptops are an absolute scam. Four months old and it the underside felt like white hot magma. No way it lasts out it's warranty.

 

[LunarMist]

Do you put the Toughbooks below the Getac, but above DELL Rugged?

 

[sedrosken]

I loved my CF-28, and forever curse that I attempted to swap the keyboard and botched the job. It was slow as hell, but I've never had a machine that felt more solid.

 

[Mercutio]

Do you put the Toughbooks below the Getac, but above DELL Rugged?

I've never messed with a Getac system at all. dd with his background at a construction company probably has more of a feel for rugged devices than I do.

 

[Santilli]

I've never messed with a Getac system at all. dd with his background at a construction company probably has more of a feel for rugged devices than I do.

I visited DD's 'construction' place. Huge, very high end, luxury building. DD WAS the IT department, and it was incredible!
Didn't see any laptops, at all, but I was there to pick up my old build, that was still working...
The CF-53 has a better keyboard, and feels more solid then the 54.
55 is WAY too much money, right now, for my uses.
Never had a 28, but the fully rugged are bullet proof.
I could see trying a used FR....

 

[ddrueding]

At the company Santilli visited I did play with a lot of the rugged laptops, but we decided to skip them entirely in favor of the cheapest $350 Dell laptops. No matter how rugged, they are just as likely to get lost and more likely to get stolen. Better for our uses to have a cabinet full of replacements that were already imaged for the field operators, combined with installing hard mounts in their vehicles. By the time I left I'd managed to negotiate a deal with our cell carrier that they would provide last-gen tablets with rugged cases for $100 each as part of our contract.

 

[Mercutio]

I have both an AMD Thinkpad P14s (Ryzen 7 8845) and Intel (Core Ultra 165H) for the weekend. They both came from Amazon and I bought one of each just because. For having the same name, they're NOT the same computer. The AMD version is a little bit lighter and has a smaller screen, while the Intel version has a low-end nVidia Lovelace GPU above and beyond the Xe cores in the Intel CPU.

I've barely had these things for two hours and I can already tell that the Intel version is substantially warmer if the GPU is doing anything, but they both have OLED 4k-ish panels so neither one will be what you'd call easy on battery life. But I just fired up Microsoft Mahjong to make the nVidia graphics go and turn this thing into a space heater.

The Intel one was delivered with 16GB RAM and 250GB SSD while the AMD version has 64GB RAM and a 2TB SSD, so one is bare bones and the other is kitted out. For all that, I paid quite a bit more to get the Intel model. I guess people value the almost 4050-grade GPU THAT highly.

Since I'm barely doing anything with them beyond initial user setup, I'm not terribly worried about the RAM difference, although I will be upgrading the more expensive Intel system to 64GB before it gets deployed. I can't tell the difference between them just running basic installation tasks.

Between the two, I'd probably take the AMD version. It seems to be holding up better on battery and it's lighter. They both feel really solid and have great screens, but it's summertime and I can hear the Intel system's fans scream from nothing more than the crappiest of Windows 11 built-in games and that's not leaving me a good impression.

 

[Mercutio]

Something I have just realized is that there really aren't contemporary, budget Intel notebooks any more. There are some Celeron-grade options, but it's almost impossible to find a sub-$500 laptop with a current Core-series CPU in it. Even the modest Core 5 120U mostly lives in $500+ models. I have plenty of mobile Ryzen systems at hand and even a SnapDragon X but the newest Intel laptop I have since I handed off that P14s is a 12th gen i7. Usually there's at least a low-cost Acer-something-or-other with a better CPU than its price would suggest but not right now. I know a lot of this is tariff related, but it still surprises me. Intel mobile products should be unavoidable. Mobile was the one space where Intel has always been dominant.

 

[ddrueding]

I think the OEMs saw the Intel performance numbers before we did and realized this generation was a hard pass. On the desktop Intel could just adjust pricing find value, but on mobile power consumption matters.

 

[Mercutio]

As a counterpoint, the fact that millions of mainstream notebooks (not Chromeboos) with deeply crappy Celerons still get sold for more thab $250 suggests that to some degree OEMs are insensitive to actual performance.

I saw a HP something or other Windows PC with an N100 and 128GB of EMMC but also somehow 32GB RAM last week. The person who brought it to me couldn't understand why their new computer with a solid state drive was so slow even with all that RAM. He paid over $400 for it. I begged him to just take it back.

Up thread a bit, I mention the Lenovo Ideapad 1 with a Ryzen 3 7320U, 8GB RAM and 250GB SSD. The price on those swings all over the place and I've bought them new for as little as $280 and as much as $370, but I almost never find anything that represents a better low-end value. They don't have the best touchpads and their RAM can't be upgraded, but they have IPS screens, solid build quality and at least acceptable performance per dollar. Lenovo hasn't refreshed that product line with anything better in a couple years and even new-stock models I buy are out of their manufacturer warranty now. I keep buying them and recommending them to others because nothing seems to be better on the low end.

 

[sedrosken]

I wouldn't buy anything meant for someone to actually use with less than 16GB of RAM in $currentYear. Really I don't even like 16 for Windows anymore -- they run uncomfortably close to the line with a few Chrome tabs open now. Throw Outlook and Teams or Zoom into that mix, along with a few Acrobat instances and maybe some spreadsheets open in Excel and it gets stupid very quickly.

I guess for a single-tasking email reader and content consumption machine, 8GB can be negotiated, but I still wouldn't.

I'd wager that the eMMC was holding that N100 back more than the CPU itself, though it could also be the CPU if they gave it a stupidly low power limit. Those actually perform pretty cromulently with enough juice. I'd say 32GB of RAM is probably excessive for such a low end machine, but I've had a couple N100 boxes with REAL SSDs perform perfectly fine.

 

[Mercutio]

8GB is absolutely acceptable for a low-spec client device, even with a half dozen browser tabs and Excel. Don't ask me about Outlook or Teams because those are things I don't have to deal with, but even with Gmail absolutely eating 1GB RAM all by itself, I spend enough time on 10+ year old clients to say 8GB is fine when cost is a consideration.

I don't know if anyone else knows this, but Outlook has actually disappeared from default Office installs. It's still possible to put it back, but your MS365 admin or IT person has to rebuild the payload XML file to do so. Microsoft wants people to use the somehow-even-shitter-than-normal ad supported Outlook that's been shipping with Windows since 2023 instead of the also-shitty-but-barely-less-so version that I've hated since Office 97.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, they've dropped the "new" branding from their beta baby and rebranded plain Outlook as "(classic)". I have quite a few users who are concerned about it disappearing entirely. I have a couple folks who like it, but most have no end of issues with it. Moreso than old Outlook, which they're used to navigating around at this point.

In the offices we're in, Merc, Outlook, Teams, and Zoom are all inescapable facts of life. I've seen fresh 16GB systems sitting at 80% RAM usage on some of these peoples' workloads, and the disk activity figures to suggest they're slamming the page file too. Granted, if cost is a concern, they likely didn't call us to begin with, as our non-contract work ticket pricing makes >=$1000 for a new machine outright reasonable.

 

[Mercutio]

That is a configuration I'd like to see. Are the enforced GPOs/Intune Policies absolutely absurd somehow? Shit tons of compliance auditing? I don't ever have to deal with Teams and I've been pissed at Outlook since before you were born but I'm looking at a pretty normal client system in active use and I can see 40-odd Chrome processes, eM client, Excel, their Sales System and Act running and they're using 5.6GB RAM on an 11th gen Intel desktop.

 

[sedrosken]

Nothing too out of the ordinary policies wise. We do run a security stack -- including ThreatLocker, which did the Kaby-R i7 in my work laptop no favors speed-wise, but doesn't seem to do badly on for RAM, hovering around 50 megs -- and for some workstations a BCDR agent pulling backups, but that shouldn't be running in the middle of a workday anyway, those are configured to go off overnight where they're going at all.

In turn I'm interested to know if your figures are from an 8GB machine -- Windows has been documented to behave VERY differently regarding paging and such when given lesser and lesser amounts of memory. It could be that my observation saw Windows being particularly relaxed and the disk I/O was unrelated. I didn't really go digging as to what precisely was tying everything up, as the system seemed to be responsive.

 

[Mercutio]

If I remember right, that site uses 10th gen i3 NUCs with 8GB RAM. Very modest systems but entirely capable of doing day to day work. They're on a domain but with very minimal management.

Next time I remote in to a site with newer clients I'll check what their desktops are doing but my general impression is that 8GB is probably fine for most users in scenarios I support.

 

[Mercutio]

Insurance agency. Systems are Beelink SER5s (Ryzen 5800/16GB). All they use are Chrome (or Edge, for one guy) and NitroPDF. They don't even have MS Office.

Average RAM in use on clients, at least among the systems I checked, was just under 7GB.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, throw a copy of Outlook with a giant, uncleaned-for-years mailbox and a few instances of gen-u-ine Adobe-brand Acrobat and maybe a few spreadsheets in Real™ Micro-Soft® Excel©©®©™ and those figures can get pretty nuts, especially if literally anything is running in the background based on Electron. Like I've said, 16 is enough still, I just don't love selling new machines with that amount that will be expected to keep up five years from now -- it's machines with 8GB I wouldn't sell, period. Not without an upgrade.

Then again, as I've also said, if they're quibbling over the extra hundred bucks it takes to kit out a machine for an appropriate amount of RAM as a one-time expense at time of purchase, they're really not going to like our per-hour ticketing price or our monthly managed services either. We don't even really make money on the computers. We make margin, but it doesn't even cover the cost of my time for setup. It covers materials and maybe my drive to deliver and plug them in. I do data migration and setup anyway, at no extra cost, but we are actually actively losing money on that, technically speaking.

RAM is there to be used but if they're slamming the page file they're going to be pissed at us when it doesn't feel responsive.