Will I ever Buy a Laptop Again?

Will I ever buy a laptop again?  This is a significant question, PC's themselves are going the way of becoming locked down, indeed UEFI was the first step on that road, requiring secure keys and other literal dongles is becoming quite common for the home PC Builder; or even small assembly shops.

Laptops are an even more confused space, building your own is sadly incredibly rare, but even rarer is being able to buy a laptop and it being upgradable.

Now, I accept laptops have soldered on components, they are an all in one solution for most vendors.  So it was four years ago when I specced up and bought my current laptop I had three requirements from it:

1. Upgradable Memory

2. Upgradable Drives/Storage

3. Changeable Battery

At that time I settled on the Lenovo E480, with an 8th Generation Intel Core i5 inside.

For point 1 I was able to buy it with 4GB of RAM (a single stick of DDR4) installed, saving me over £110 on buying an upgrade to 8GB direct.  I simply received it, opened it and installed a 16GB kit (pair of 8GB sticks) for £83; so I saved and had more memory.

For point 2, I was again able to get deliver with a single 500gb mechanical hard drive, and for merely £65 I was able to get a really nice M.2 nVME SSD and install that the moment it arrived.  I am still able to replace the standard 2.5" SSD SATA drive if I want.  And I was also able to install a 1TB MicroSD card for more cold storage of large files when on the move and disconnected from my file server.

For point 3, being a Lenovo is a huge boon, there are a lot of resellers of their components and the battery is no exception, plus it's a battery just installed with a sticky pad and a single 4 pin connector, very simple to open the chassis and swap it out.  After four years mine is due a change, it has gone from around 9 hours on a full charge to only 4.

The machine is simple to work on, it's got lots of external ports, it can drive all the devices I want, the wfi, bluetooth and just quality of the Lenovo build is very nice.

So, what could possibly replace it?

I am coming up blank, I've been looking and looking, I do not want to support Apple, as much as I like the look of their hardware the total lack of any repair or upgrade paths in the M1/M2 space annoys me, their GPU is custom too, and I want to be working in open source wherever possible (read Linux).

Asus are similarly offering lots of options but so very many of them are locked down, there are RAM upgrades for some, but that's about all.  And crucially battery replacement is sketchy, it's hard to even find out what battery a unit offering has.

Very similar results in my search with Toshiba, Acer, Dell (including Alienware) and a custom builder here in the UK.

I did look briefly at modular options, such as the ones touted recently by Linus Sebastian, but getting them here in the UK is a massive pain in the rear.

So simply put will I ever buy a laptop again?  I don't know.

If I can find something meeting my three previous requirements and include adding an external GPU via USB-C to it, that maybe a selling point, but I'm really not willing to give up on the first three requirements I had.  They are the very definition of a laptop to me, you live with a locked down CPU and GPU, but at least you can expand the utility of the unit in other ways.  Except, vendors want to ship thinner, sealed, easy [for them] to support units with a limited [est 2 year] shelf life; after which you are cast to the winds.

As I understand it my Lenovo now being 4 years old, an 8th Gen Intel, makes it positively geriatric.

Want to read more about my quest for a laptop in 2018, why not read this one http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.com/2018/12/deep-thought-about-new-laptop.html

Or even my laptop purchase from 2012, http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.com/2012/01/custom-laptop-for-virtual-deeds.html

Monitor Stuck in Interlaced Mode?

Sorry for the very long delay between posts, I am just incredibly busy... But, here's a problem I've just had to solve and I thought worth coming to these pages for... Ever had a screen stuck in interlaced mode?

So my monitor is an Asus MX27AQ, really nice screen, but I was part of Alpha testing of a game at the weekend and it had set the game into what appeared to be 1920x1080@60hz interlaced mode.  I have NO idea why the game did this, but it was all testing and work in progress, they had a report and I closed the game.

But, it left my screen stuck in a strange way, it wasn't interlaced it had gone back to progressive, but it was at 59hz not 60, no matter what I did with drivers or windows display settings it was stuck at a lower refresh rate, selecting 60hz just resulted in no change and the "Do you wish to keep these changes"... Nothing was happening, either accepting them or reverting them.

And the horizontal pixel clock seemed to be off, now I could not change this setting, either in the screen controls, windows display controls nor by removing and reinstalling the display driver nor graphics card driver, even removing all the settings seemed to leave the screen still in this situation... I reset it, re-powered it, disconnected reconnected... I did everything physical and software related.

Absolutely frustrated I then delved a bit deeper, and inside the nVidia display settings I found "Create Custom Resolution", you can get to it on your own nVidia card via their menu...

The key thing for me was to create an invalid resolution, so I just changed progressive to interlaced...

And hit that "Test" button at the bottom.

The screen went on the fritz immediately, but only for 15 seconds as I didn't accept the changes and the screen righted itself.

Properly righted itself, all the settings came back, the pixel clock skew was gone and I could see 60hz and select it for the display again.

I think this was a case of the screen itself holding onto some setting maybe on its own firmware... I'm totally guessing... and in kicking it again via the nVidia driver I cleared the bad settings out.

But, the did persist, over power cycles, over reboots, over removing and replacing the drivers and even taking the screen to another PC (in my case a laptop) I even changed from a Display Port cable to an HDMI cable.  The only thing to sort it out was the bad custom resolution and letting the display return to "normal".

Deep Thought about a new Laptop

Its the day after THE day we wait for all year, yes today is Boxing Day and so yesterday was Christmas Day and I've had a fab day, thank you for asking!  Lots of food, a little drink, a fair amount of chocolate, a home made cheese cake to die for and about an hour in the freezing air enjoying the hot tub with all the bubbles on... Hands down has to rate as one of the Best Christmas Days for me ever... and I hope yours were all as good.

Now, I know you're all asking, why have I been so quite on the old blog and YouTube Channel?  Well, you know moving house completely threw things off, but also, in case you missed this news, I'm changing jobs.

Yes, after 14 years I'm leaving where I've been and I'm going to be doing something else.  Quite what I can't tell you very much about, probably for a fair while.  But what I can tell you is, I start the new role on the 2nd January, the team I have been assigned to is brand new and we travel to the US in mid-January to cement the bootstrapping of the new project.

And, this trip brings me to your sage pages.  You have all likely seen my post about my once great and mighty custom built Laptop and you may have also spotted my frustrations (admittedly eight years down the line) getting a replacement battery.

But it's Boxing day there are sales, there's a trip abroad breaching the surface waters, I am frustrated with the older machine (which I still love and am using right now)... Time for a new Laptop.

My requirements are a solid machine for programming, a good screen, RAM upgrade possible and definitely both SATA and M.2 SSD internally stored, I like lots of storage and I like to be able to replace it.  A replaceable battery, preferably as a pack is preferable and all of this as a known brand, so the battery would be on the market a fair while.

This means, GPU is not a concern really, it would be nice, but it's not a major concern, I've been down the gaming laptop whirlpool before it only ends in miserably depleted batteries and headaches replacing them.

The storage requirement I have also precludes eMMC or anything else which is fixed or soldered.

My first thought is for a quality machine, from a name, like Lenovo, Acer, Asus or Dell.

My very first laptop, way back in time was an IBM Thinkpad 360 a 486 SX 25Mhz, rocking 4MB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive running DOS6.22 and Windows 3.1.

I loved that machine, but lent it my brother when he started his business - and he had it stolen during a burglary never to be replaced... Grrr... But I loved the sturdy build on that machine, the keyboard was adorable, if I recall correctly it was a tiny form factor, like a 10" screen that did 640x480.  It travelled brilliantly in North Africa in the late 90's with work, and handled the Turbo Pascal and Turbo C programming I threw at it.  But due to the seeming prohibitive pricing and the changing of the keyboard I've never returned to the Thinkpad range, that thinking may change.

My second laptop is a veritable work horse Dell Inspiron 6400.  I say "is" because we still have this machine, it was purchased when I worked for "The Lordz Gaming Studio" as my workstation and a gaming machine... At the time, when on mains power, it ran beautifully (though I have a tale to tell when it was on battery)... And today we still have it, it's had more RAM and several larger hard drives over time, but we still use it daily as the general house laptop running Lubuntu (the wife still hasn't realized she was covertly switched to Linux about two years ago).

My third machine I've already covered on these pages in 2012.

Wanting to get a brand name, I started where I left off and went to look at the Dell site, which  immediately splits Laptops by "Work" or "Home"... Clicking Work, foooooorget it, they immediately class you as requiring a Core i7 and price me out of the market, it's actually quite shoddy, in work I would say you need to pick the number of real cores to hyper threads, rather than limit the model number and so I know many of the Core i5 4 core 8 thread processors are being denied to me.  I therefore beat a hasty retreat to "Home".

The next thing I noticed is that all the Dell units seem to ship with 8GB of RAM.  Not unexpected 2019 is hurtling towards us at a rate of knots, but still it made me think about upgrade pathways, so set about finding tear down videos and images of inside these machines and was struck by how hard it is to pin down what you're going to be buying against what is on the screen, you can't tell, there's a skewing of the model number to contents within throughout their range, there's identifying model numbers which bear little to no relationship to the contents of the machine and worst of all many of the teardowns listed themselves as applicable to multiple models in the same lineage.  Telling me what?  Well, nothing firm, just that there's options beyond options but many of them look sort of fixes at birth for the boards within.  I saw one out of four units come up as having two RAM slots, many others had only one.  There was also no help trying to ask their online chat, they didn't know, they could only read what was listed with the product "it has 8GB of RAM"... yes, but can I put another one in?

However, I persevered and even started from a £679 machine to spec it up, however, I immediately saw that this whole line only had SSD storage a M.2 2280 no SATA storage option.  Another tear down video later and I confirmed this machine had only the M.2 slot, no internal SATA.  Which put it out of the running.  But it had given me an idea of a base processor I was going to aim for elsewhere, I was edging towards the Intel Core i5-8250U (6MB cache, up to 3.4Ghz).

This processor ticks many of my boxes, it seems to keep the base chasis of a machine at a low price, it has four real cores with hyper threading and a decent boost frequency.  Base frequency is lacking, but TDP is very desirable and it's battery life I'm concerned with.  And the units in built GPU (an Intel UHD 620) supports upto 4096x2304, and 4K maybe somewhere I go (I already have a 2K monitor as my daily driver).  It also supports up to 32GB of DDR4.

Similar processor counts, with slightly more cache, in the i7 range push prices up between £120 and £200, I could seriously live with this machine for 5 years and put that extra money into extra RAM and storage to add to a lower priced machine... So, the i5 is winning out and I'll carry on to other sites.

Now the Boxing day sales have kicked off, so I'm looking at the major high-street names and online retailers.  Like Amazon, AO, Ebuyer and CurrysPCWorld.

Whilst on Amazon and AO I saw a series of Acer and Lenovo units which were very low prices, like £150-£180.  The Lenovo IdeaPad 120 and HP Stream spring back into my mind, nice little units, too low-power for my linking and they're storage seems to be exclusively eMMC and tiny so not of use to me, but nice looking units, especially the Lenovo kit.

The only machine from this pass which really came to hand was the HP Pavillion kit, I saw a few others, but the Pavillion got really close.  It's a brand name, the hard drive is a 2.5" SATA and can be changed.  The RAM can also likely be upgrades with standard SODIMM modules.  However, hard data is hard to get and the price is still just shy of £700.  There's also no clear data on whether it can take both an SSD in M.2 form AND the SATA drive, there's a series of HP support images they themselves provide, but they're generic and clearly not specific to the unit I was looking at.  A minor annoyance is the charger also seems to be a custom pin type to HP, rather than a generic/universal USB/C type.

Without that firm information, with the higher price, I can't justify the risk of just not knowing, I need to know, so the HP now falls to the way-side.

A lot of web pages and a fair few Intel Ark comparisons later and I'm heading to the Lenovo site.

Now the Lenovo site immediately wants you to go down a series channel, so you're looking at the E, the T, the L and X and Yoga lines, there's options all over the place.  My immediate realization was the market (or maybe "experience" is a better description) experience of the Lenovo units, I was easily and quickly able to start see tear downs and information.

I started on the X and T series, quickly finding them drool worthy, but massively too expensive.  The E series came into view, I wanted to keep to 14" screen and so the E4XX series.  I'm an Intel bod, so E480.

So, a starting price of £431.99 today, with the Boxing Day 10% off.

The 2-3 week shipping missive has be worried, it may arrive as I'm on a jet half-way across the Atlantic and if we are in that situation, the machine has to be worth the wait.  But if I can pick an off the shelf version "Ready-To-Ship", I'm happy to get it sooner and upgrade it with parts myself.

The immediate problem in the "Ready-To-Ship" types are the processors and screens, they all seem to be Core i3 and the screens are 1366x768 (hello, I have 2012 on the phone for you Lenovo).  They're therefore straight out.

However, I can immediately see the memory customization options...

I can see 4+4 and 4+8, which is screaming that there are probably two memory slots and a quick google about tells me there are.  This means the 4GB (cheapest) configuration needs checking for a price to upgrade to a total of 8GB or 12GB by adding an additional 4 or 8 stick myself.

If we buy the 12GB configuration straight from Lenovo, then it'll cost an additional £111... Can we get a single 8GB stick cheaper?.... Why yes, a Crucial 8GB stick of the exact same spec RAM is only £49.99, less than half price.  Worth the risk of popping a brand new machine's case open?  Certainly.

But if I got the machine at 4GB spec, that's how I would fly with it, I'd order the additional 8GB, but park opening the machine until after my travel... Still, worth knowing.

What about storage? Well, the motherboard takes an M.2 SSD 2820 and a 2.5" SATA and we can elect to ship with one or the other... 

Playing the same game as with the RAM, we can see a cost of £85 for a 128GB M.2... Can I beat that?.... Yes, a WD Blue M.2 at 250GB is only £44.48.  That's twice the space for half the cost.  Lenovo, that is a pretty badly inflated price there.

We have to have the SATA mechanical drive, so our only question is RPM or the amount of space?  And, I think for now 500GB at 7200RPM would be fine and we can upgrade later (like a 2TB 2.5" SATA is only like £70).

The E480 is looking pretty darn good to far, we can get it in the i5, we can up the screen to HD and it has an HDMI out.  It's a USB-C type standard charger, we are all pretty much there.

It can't all be roses and light, what's the catch?  The battery.

Yeah, we're right back to where I came in on this whole problem of a new machine, changing the battery.  The battery on this is an internal unit, you can get to it, you can change it, but not easily and not on the road.

So, research time, can I find the exact battery type and can you buy them after market?

Yes, I can and Yes you can.  So we're onto a bit of a winner here.

Linux will have to come later, we're probably going with the lowest RAM and disk, to up the CPU and screen, lets price up where we might stand at the end of this glorious research...

That's not a bad price point, lets say we have the RAM (£49.99) and 250GB SSD (44.48) after market, we add £94.47 to that base price.  Giving us £607.99.

That's more machine, with head-room on the RAM expansion and storage for future proofing, 

You know what, I may reach out to Lenovo, see what they can do to assist this project?... If only to improve that shipping time.

Asus P6X58D-E Failed

I've checked my machine out now, and I've come to the conclusion that all the peripherals in this machine work fine else where its down to the Motherboard.

The machine will boot, one time in one hundred, so the CPU is working it lets me boot into a live Linux CD and even boot Vista, if it boots, and its during these other ninety nine attempts to boot that the problems come along.

The problem is this, turn the power on, hit the power button (on the motherboard or on the case) and the PSU will spring to life the CPU Cooler and the Graphics card fan, all these fans spin at maximum speed, and that's it...

No BIOS, no POST, nothing... Even with a speaker attached, nothing, no beeps, nothing.

Now, this usually indicates a dead PSU, but I've tried the it in another of my machines, and its fine!

Even if I remove all the RAM, which is meant to give long beeps in sequence, the motherboard doesn't squeek, nothing, it just sits there and blank black max fan time.

The problem I have now is I need to get service on it, this thing cost me £143 on December 2010.  That's two years one month.  It gets from Asus a 3 years warranty, so I should be covered, Asus however have told me to get hold of the retailer, the retailer have yet to reply - I bet they want me to use their 60p a second help line and sit on hold for an hour.

The rub though is, even if they do try to help, or I get an RMA... my CPU is a socket 1366, its not going to just randomly fit another motherboard and 1366 boards are getting very rare on the market (for reasons which I've had no interest in, but am now trying to fathom out).  I have literally just sent missives to the retailer for assistance, I can at least prove my warranty started on the 11th November 2010, and hence is within the mandated 3 years by Asus.

And there's another problem, Asus state a 3 year warranty, but they say to contact the retailer about it?

I'll let you know how I get along.

Galant Ikea Desk

The other battle I'm fighting is about my desk, I lowered my desk last night, but one of the legs felt dead loose, you can unscrew the legs and they let you telescope them in and out, well one of them just feels all floppy and will not tighten back up.

I'm a little worried about this, but tomorrow sometime I hope to get all the crap off of the desk and to put all the legs right and level.

Custom Laptop For Virtual Deeds

Happy New Year folks.  I'm having a real sort out of my computer equipment, I've just finished clearing up my desk, setting new power bars onto the wall, and clearing out a load of mess from under my work area.

Part of this effort is because it was getting to be a real mess under there, part of it is because I needed to clean the machines, as they've got a years worth of skin flake dust in them.  But it is mainly because I'm going to be getting a new laptop, and this laptop is going to be a beast with an i7 processor capable of VT-d (direct device IO for virtual machines).

So, I needed to sort out my real machines which could become virtual boxes.  I may come back with some pictures of the beast of a laptop I'm going to buy later, but its a race between a completely custom machine from PCSpecialist:

Or an off the shelf machine from Dell...

I would of course love it to be a sexy thing like the new Asus Zenbook

But as I'm a mortal man with a wife to support, I can't justify over a grand for the machine.

In fact its interesting the Dell Prices, I'm going to end up specifying a really low spec DELL and then buying the parts for it from other places, their XPS 15 machine, putting 8GB of ram into it costs over £200... buying an 8GB (2x4GB) Samsung brand SODIMMs from Amazon is only £35.  So how do Dell justify the hike?  They don't....

My major stumbling block is not the cost of the machine though, its trying to ensure all the parts I buy are going to work under the Linux environment I put on, I want to base the machine on Ubuntu or even vSphere and then host virtual machines on it to do my work (hence the need for VT-d).

But Dell don't supply, or easily make available, a way to get the refund on the Microsoft License, which I don't want.  Microsoft say its up to the reseller of Windows to refund you, Dell say "not us".

Interestingly, Canonical (the maintainers and supporters of Ubuntu) taut Ubuntu Dell partnerships on their site.  When you go ask DELL however, they say "not us".