53 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
53 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: New laptop
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date: 2013-08-10 10:45:20
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tags: [linux, hardware]
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category: hardware
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---
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Hey, remember my [search for the new laptop](/posts/2013/01/15/laptop-would-love-to-buy/) ?
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It's finally over ! I found that Clevo, Taiwanese custom laptop
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manufacturer, has recently added 13'3 FullHD laptop base to their
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offerings - W230ST. And to my surprise - there is a [Polish importer](http://www.bluemobility.pl/) which allows pretty neat specs
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calibration for you. Game on you say ? Indeed.
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## What I like about it:
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- Haswell-based, so all the new tech is here, same as in the newest
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MacBooks
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- up to 16GB RAM, I have 8GB installed for now and it works pretty good
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- 2x mPCIx mSATA capable slots
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- nice copper cooling inside
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- FullHD matte display
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- 4x USB
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- HDMI
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- typing on its keyboard, just clicks with me
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- survived [OHM2013](https://ohm2013.org/site/) camp - not scared of
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humidity and hot air
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## What I do not like so much:
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- Haswell-based, so Linux support is not that great yet, everything
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seems to be working okay, however power consumption is off the
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limits. 60Wh battery lasts for ~2h tops.
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- while the outer side of the case is of nice rubberrized plastic, the
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inside is cheap-looking grey one. There was no option to change it
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unfortunately, while I see that [other](http://www.xoticpc.com/)
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importers/assemblers around the world have such mods avaiable.
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- the looks of the keyboard, purely visual stuff like the font used to
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print the characters, the layout is okay
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## Running Linux on it:
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Everything seems to be working by default on
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most of the distros. I've tested Gentoo, Arch, Fedora and Crunchbang.
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The only thing that needed some tweaking was that by default I was
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unable to control backlight brightness at all. Adding `acpi_backlight=vendor` to the kernel boot parameters, as suggested
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on [Arch wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_Graphics#Backlight_not_fully_adjusting.2C_or_adjusting_at_all_after_resume.),
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solved the problem. I haven't delved deeply into Optimus yet, so I don't
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know whether the graphics cards switching works correctly or not. The
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one thing I've noticed is that, after waking from deep sleep, so after
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leaving the lid closed for a long time, not for few minutes, there are
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some visual artifacts on screen. Also, as mentioned before, power
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consumption worries me a bit. Will keep you posted !
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