sale today on ThnkPad T490 and tiny ThinkCentre PCs
Lenovo list prices always seem high to me. But unpredictably they have significant discounts. Sometimes the resulting prices seem reasonable. ThinkPads are generally the standard best bet for UNIX. Starting at noon today, Lenovo has a modestly spec'ed T490 for $1000. I think that that's a good price. Bad news: it appears that T490 notebooks have one soldered-in 8GiB RAM and one RAM socket. Here's the current line-up. Scroll right ("NEXT" button on page) to see the model I'm talking about. <https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-series/T490/p/22TP2TT4900> There are other potentially interesting items on sale today "Black Friday in July". If you like tiny PCs, look at the ThinkCentre M75 Tiny or the ThinkCentre M90n ("n" stands for "nano").
On 2020-07-10 09:40 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
Bad news: it appears that T490 notebooks have one soldered-in 8GiB RAM and one RAM socket.
How much memory can be added? 8 GB is likely not enough these days. My E520 has 8 GB and I find it's getting tight when running a W10 virtual machine. A few years ago, it ran fine, but both Linux and Windows have grown. I'm running openSUSE Leap 15.2.
If you join up with rakuten.ca, and get to Lenovo through the Rakuten site, you will get 8% cash back on any purchase today. Ditto for Dell.ca purchases. There are raging debates about Dell and Lenovo AMD-based notebooks on redflagdeals.com these days. If you are hunting for a notebook, consider looking at those discussions. There is also an RFD thread about the ThinkCentre M90n.
On 2020-07-10 10:19 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
There are raging debates about Dell and Lenovo AMD-based notebooks on redflagdeals.com these days. If you are hunting for a notebook, consider looking at those discussions.
According to what I've read elsewhere, Lenovo is working to make the entire ThinkPad line Linux friendly. I don't know what the situation is with Dell, though, IIRC, they have had some Linux models in the past.
| From: James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | According to what I've read elsewhere, Lenovo is working to make the entire | ThinkPad line Linux friendly. I don't know what the situation is with Dell, | though, IIRC, they have had some Linux models in the past. That's good. Generally, the ThinkPad line has always been Linux-friendly, but only semi-officially. Most notebooks are fine for Linux, but not by design. So they can make bad choices. My recent experience: - tablets sometimes cannot sleep (eg. Dell Venue 11 pro) - older tablets or netbooks built out of an Atom SoC can be oddly wired together (eg. Asus T100ta). - fingerprint readers may be proprietary (I've never investigated) - NVidia GPUs are the usual horror show. On my Dell XPS 15, it was particularly annoying. But solved. Dell once shipped a netbook with Linux that didn't work out well. There was a binary-only driver for the GPU and so the kernel could never be updated. So shipping with Linux was no guarantee in this case. The fundamental problem was that Intel licensed PowerVR IP, but not the right to release specs. So there was no future that GPU under Linux. So it wasn't exactly Dell's or Intel's fault, but it really was. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#PowerVR_GPU_based> When you look at this list, it is amazingly short.
| From: James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | How much memory can be added? 8 GB is likely not enough these days. My E520 | has 8 GB and I find it's getting tight when running a W10 virtual machine. A | few years ago, it ran fine, but both Linux and Windows have grown. I'm | running openSUSE Leap 15.2. A good amount would be a second 8G stick since that would allow dual channel operation (I think -- do check). I bet you could add a 16G stick, leaving you with 24G total. I think that there are even 32G sticks now. This might be explained in the PSREF entry for this model.
On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 10:23:08AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
A good amount would be a second 8G stick since that would allow dual channel operation (I think -- do check).
I bet you could add a 16G stick, leaving you with 24G total. I think that there are even 32G sticks now.
This might be explained in the PSREF entry for this model.
Well according to crucial.com the maximum memory is 48GB, so 16GB onboard and 32GB stick. I guess Lenovo is clearing out the T490s given the T14 is the current model. I have no idea why they only offer AMD Ryzen in 14" T series, and intel only for the 15". -- Len Sorensen
Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
I guess Lenovo is clearing out the T490s given the T14 is the current model. I have no idea why they only offer AMD Ryzen in 14" T series, and intel only for the 15".
It could be that they positioned two models "diagonally" from each other for people who want a specific CPU brand or exact screen size, so they could satisfy four possible choices with only two models. But much more likely they're already cleaned out of whatever other models they had. -- Anthony de Boer
On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 06:25:35PM -0400, Anthony de Boer via talk wrote:
It could be that they positioned two models "diagonally" from each other for people who want a specific CPU brand or exact screen size, so they could satisfy four possible choices with only two models. But much more likely they're already cleaned out of whatever other models they had.
Well the T15 is intel only, and the T14 is amd or intel. Seems inconsistent. Same with the previous generation. T490 and T590 intel and T495 AMD, but no T595. -- Len Sorensen
Is it me or can anyone else scroll right? https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-series/T490/p/22TP2... 8G soldered RAM is a bit too lean for me. On Fri, 10 Jul 2020 at 09:40, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Lenovo list prices always seem high to me. But unpredictably they have significant discounts. Sometimes the resulting prices seem reasonable.
ThinkPads are generally the standard best bet for UNIX.
Starting at noon today, Lenovo has a modestly spec'ed T490 for $1000. I think that that's a good price.
Bad news: it appears that T490 notebooks have one soldered-in 8GiB RAM and one RAM socket.
Here's the current line-up. Scroll right ("NEXT" button on page) to see the model I'm talking about.
< https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-series/T490/p/22TP2...
There are other potentially interesting items on sale today "Black Friday in July". If you like tiny PCs, look at the ThinkCentre M75 Tiny or the ThinkCentre M90n ("n" stands for "nano"). --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 09:40:54AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
There are other potentially interesting items on sale today "Black Friday in July". If you like tiny PCs, look at the ThinkCentre M75 Tiny or the ThinkCentre M90n ("n" stands for "nano").
This is interesting. ThinkCentre M90n for - $559 -- 8GB ram, 512GB PCIe SSD, i5-8265U - $805 -- 16GB ram, 512GB PCIe SSD, i7-8665U -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>
participants (6)
-
Anthony de Boer -
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Don Tai -
James Knott -
lsorense＠csclub.uwaterloo.ca -
William Park