Category Archives: Computers

Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga Retrospective

When I switched to the Yoga in early 2014, NW was winding down, and I didn’t get the chance to post about it. Now that I’m finally switching away from it, I wanted to put down my thoughts.

Really, all I wanted in 2013 was a thinner and lighter convertible tablet: the ThinkPad tablet line had evolved from the lovely X200 Tablet to the horrendous X220 Tablet and X230 Tablet, and it looked like that was the end of it!

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Samsung Notebook 9 and ATIV Book 9

The last time I wrote about switching laptops, I was still trying to replace my ThinkPad X220 Tablet. Round one had been the X230 Tablet, which hadn’t provided any sort of benefit for the additional cost. Round two had been the Helix, which had been just too much of a gimmick. In early 2014, around the time Nonsense Wars stopped, I had finally been able to replace the X220 Tablet with the ThinkPad Yoga, which, despite the novel “fold-over” form-factor, was thinner, lighter, faster, and most importantly had a 1080p screen.

The problem I’ve had with convertible tablets is that the digitizer experience has only been getting worse, and in my opinion this has been a trend since the TC4200. These days, even if you get a “real” digitizer (as opposed to some touchscreen crap) it seems like it’s just an afterthought. With the Yoga the pen was tiny, it wasn’t that accurate, the surface had poor feedback, and there were the infamous “black holes“. Mine didn’t black hole too badly, and I was only using the tablet to color so it wasn’t that bad, but still…

Eventually I bought a Cintiq! And these days I really don’t do enough digital drawing to justify either my Cintiq or a convertible tablet, so I decided that my next laptop could be of the traditional form factor. I hadn’t really been looking though: I’m really big on passive cooling and light laptops, and I knew that there were still very few, if any machines on the market that checked both boxes without excessive compromise (I’m talking about you, new MacBook (Air), with your one crappy port).

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Pro Kwality Case

More than five years ago, when I retired my desktop Motoko, I thought I was done with desktops for good. Reasons for eliminating desktops from the “fleet” had ranged from size to dust to depreciation, but boy have times have changed. In early 2014 I replaced my T430 with the DC53427HYE, and that addressed all the previously mentioned concerns about desktops. In fact I even upgraded that to a better version of the same thing in 2015.

In late 2015 I started playing World of Warships, and ultimately became enamored with playing with all the settings turned up at 1080p. WoWS is not a particularly demanding game at 1080p, but I still needed to borrow my brother’s desktop with the Q6700 and HD6850 to max it out; my ThinkPad Yoga with the i5 u4300 can barely handle the *lowest* settings at 1080p. I was/am also in the process of playing Tales of Zestiria on the C2Q desktop. So, in the late summer of 2016 (now) after borrowing it for far too long, I finally decided to look at rolling my own.

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Fanless Computing: Intel NUC DC53427HYE and Akasa Newton V

I’ve been waiting for this for a really long time, at least since I dabbled with my fanless E6400 so many years ago.

About a year and a half ago, I got my T430 with the intent of using it as a desktop replacement. The idea was that the laptop draws less power, makes less noise, and takes up less space than even an SFF conventional desktop. It also has a built-in UPS (the battery), and you can obviously use it as a laptop in a pinch. This is all fine and dandy, and the T430 has been great so far, but it’s still a stopgap between that SFF conventional desktop and a machine that makes no noise and takes up even less space than a 14″ laptop and dock. Such a machine wasn’t really a practical option when I bought the T430… but it is now!

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Lenovo ThinkVision LT1423p Thoughts

Last year there were three products that I wanted or wanted to try, and they were all delayed and more expensive than advertised. The first was the Helix. The second, which I have not mentioned, but may write about in the future, is an update to the Corsair K60 with new switches and backlighting. The third, which has been delayed by far the longest, is the one I’m talking about today, the Lenovo ThinkVision LT1423p.

I’ve been complaining for a while now that there are basically no good convertible tablets out there anymore, and as of now I’m going to stick with that. Everything comes in a gimmicky form factor with the wrong digitizer in an overweight or under powered package (I’m not really one to care about compute power, but I don’t want an Atom even in my secondary notebook). As such I’ve been looking to go back to using a “conventional” tablet along with an awesome ultraportable, but with a tablet more like a Cintiq than an Intuos. I was very close to shelling out and buying a Cintiq, but then, maybe early last year, I heard about the LT1423p.

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