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by richajak 2286 days ago
I would suggest to get another Thinkpad as other brands may not not be tweaked to Thinkpad loyal customers. For me, I always find my Thinkpad is quiet and cool during heavy workload.

As for Ryzen, I just bought their budget laptop, E485 (with Ryzen 2200u+SSD+FHD screen) last year. I was waiting patiently for Thinkpad deal to come, it was worth to wait, as my aging SL410 was still working. It has been matching my expectation so far: affordable, snappy enough, and good battery.

As for Thinkpad models, I find that their budget ones are sufficient for my startup and personal usage, as I do not use enterprise-level features, like those in T series (that I used during my corporate lives).

1 comments

Although thinkpads work fine, I attribute this due to the number of developers using them, definitely not because Lenovo is spending ANY money to make it work. This is not how it's supposed to be working. There are a few big issues that are making me reconsider them entirely.

You cannot buy a Lenovo without a Windows license. This is minor considering the price I'm usually going for, but since I don't use it at all, I consider it a microsoft tax.

Their "computrace" bios feature is still there in every new laptop.

With skylake, the last edition of the Yoga and X1 Carbon couldn't do S3 sleep by default anymore. For no other reason than to force windows use S2Idle. It requires a quite annoying work-around on linux to force S3, and only ~6 months ago we finally got a bios patch to re-enable S3...

The temperature throttling defaults are different from linux to windows, causing linux to throttle much more aggressively than needed on skylake. This is also caused by some bios issue which you can work-around with msr registers, but again... why?

I overall like the hardware. I'm quite fond of the built-in wacom pen too. I have minor quibs about the keyboard (QC issues) and screen (all TP I had in the last 5 years tend to develop bright spots in the backlight), but overall it's hard to find something similar. The dell XPS developer line is the only alternative I would be considering, and mostly due to their linux offering.