Adventures in New Laptopia, Pt 2: Electronic wiles

Ancient History

Before I got my first laptop, I’d always used desktops for my own purposes (obviously). The only laptops I’d used were terrible Vista-era Acers that my family needed me to troubleshoot all the time (usually because of some Acer “value added” software that replaced perfectly functional Windows defaults). But then I got an HP Paviliion dv6-2210 in 2010, and it was nice, and I could bring it to class and have my natural computing environment with me outside the house. It was wonderful, and I loved that laptop, with its homegrown UI cobbled together with Rainmeter and Emerge Desktop… Plus, I could carry it in my backpack when I moved between houses, much unlike a desktop computer. It was pretty important to me.

And then my new laptop, a Lenovo X230t, arrived. I haven’t intentionally used my old laptop since the new one arrived. As soon as I turned it on, I was entranced by its electronic wiles. Oh, HP Pavilion dv6-2210, I did love you - until something that’s better in every way arrived.

Favourite Features

I immediately unpacked it, stuck the battery in, and set it down on the kitchen table. When I started up the X230t, the first thing I noticed (or, didn’t notice) was how quiet it is when it runs. The fans make a very slight whirr, but it’s only noticeable in a quiet room. My old laptop was left alone in my bedroom down the hall, and it was making enough noise when idle that I could still hear it.

The next thing I didn’t notice was how amazing the screen is. Since the screen can tilt fully from 0 to 180 degrees, and rotate clockwise from 6:00 to 12:00, it needs to have amazing viewing angles. Now, I didn’t know what it meant until I read this blog post by Jeff Atwood, but the X230t has an IPS display. Here’s the difference: when I was playing D&D the other week and our DM wanted to show us an image on his laptop, he had to tilt and rotate the entire machine so that everyone around the table could see. At the wrong angle, the screen was just a gray blob. With my laptop’s screen, everyone could see everything at once. It wasn’t until that event that I realized how awesome this screen is.

Moreover, somehow the quality of the screen has kept the low resolution (same old 1368x768 as my old laptop) from feeling cramped. I used a wide-screen, 21" monitor at work over the summer and I hated going back to the tiny screen of my HP laptop. I went to Emerge Desktop in order to get a completely minimal UI - no chrome at all, just 16x16 icons for my quick launch, currently running programs, and notification area. Oddly enough, on the X230t I’m still using the “big” taskbar that I used to think was massive and ugly - at the same screen resolution! Actually, one big reason not to forego Explorer as my shell - there’s a default Lenovo widget that displays battery power in terms of time remaining, and that’s awesome.

The battery life is fantastic - I got a 9 cell battery by default and a “slice battery” that doubles my total battery life. It’s a plug-and-play thing that attaches to the bottom of the laptop, rather than an alternative to the regular battery. In other words, I don’t need to shut down and swap batteries if the regular battery is running dry. It can be charged separately from the main battery. While it doesn’t add any new ports or anything, that’s okay, because it would probably provide less battery life if it did. Or add more bulk. The moral of the story is, I can get through an entire day without needing a power outlet, and this is amazing freedom for someone who never had more than five hours (at best) from a full charge.

Input Options

Speaking of which, I was worried about going back to typing on a laptop keyboard, but it’s been fine so far. Granted, I’m doing more written (vs typed) assignments this year because of the classes I’m taking, but still. Typing on the keyboard for lectures hasn’t made my hands hurt, but programming for a few hours on it does make me sore. The keyboard does have backlighting, but I’m a touch typist so it’s literally useless.

The trackpad has a nice texture to it, and - glorious day - there are three mouse buttons between it and the spacebar. The third is initially configured as a scroll wheel, but can be turned into a middle-click, and that’s my favourite thing ever. The trackpad does support a variety of gestures, but I can’t remember to use them. Doesn’t help that they’re less reliable than keyboard shortcuts (I couldn’t get the three and four finger gestures to work). But maybe I’ll get into it some day.

It has that signature ThinkPad red thing in the center of the keyboard, but I can’t get used to it. It also has a touchscreen, and I’m going to talk about that in a separate post.

Miscellany

The Bluetooth on the X230t actually works, so I can finally look at Bluetooth headsets as an option over wired headphones. Yay, future. It does lack an SD card reader (my HP laptop had one, it was useful occasionally) and a CD drive, but the only time either of those gave me grief was when I wanted to put some files on the SD card of my new 3DS XL (I’ll write about that at some point too). It’s got a really weird Print Screen key in the middle of the right-hand ctrl and alt keys, which is incredibly annoying when I try to hit ctrl+v and accidentally take a screenshot instead (overwriting the previous clipboard entry).

Apparently, there used to be a keyboard shortcut for changing the scroll wheel function into a middle mouse button, but according to someone at Lenovo some changes had to be made for Windows 8. That forum topic is actually pretty interesting - there’s a variety of posts from people as to how the X230t compares to the previous model, the X220t, which highlights a few interesting things about it. Plus, someone who actually works at Lenovo came in to comment, which impressed me.

Other than that, I’m not sure what else to say about the hardware. I opted for a better wi-fi module instead of a webcam, because I only ever used the webcam in my HP laptop twice. USB webcams are much better because they can be angled separately from the screen. It doesn’t have an HDMI port, so I need an adapter that changes DisplayPort to HDMI. It has an always-on USB port that’s still powered when the laptop is asleep, so I can charge my phone from it whenever I want. The processor is a Core i5, of the Ivy Bridge variety, which turns out to be better than the i7 in my old laptop - and the built-in GPU is better than the independent GPU in the old laptop, too (at least according to the Windows Experience Index, and I’m too lazy to run real benchmarks).

So all in all, I have fallen head over touchscreen for this laptop. No regrets on the purchase. I’ll probably write a third post about the touchscreen and various other pre-installed software-esque stuff, but no guarantees. Have lots of other stuff I should have written about long ago…