Useful Consumer Review

I had to buy a new laptop.  I thought Lenovos were out of the question since they had eliminated the physical mouse buttons to become all modern and stuff.  But this year they’ve rolled back that horrible decision without announcing anything.  Perhaps it was too embarrassing? Anyway: Physical buttons!  That work!  Yay!

Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 third generation 2015 here we go!

I ordered it from their website, which was quite nice.  They even had a choice of what keyboard layout to use, so I finally got a US keyboard layout on my laptop again.  Using divergent layouts drives me nuts.

And after a month they finally shipped it, so I got it just in time for Easter.  The shipping route was kinda … odd … though:

So… from China to South Korea to Kazahkstan to Poland to Germany to Norway…

Is this a new sharing policy amongst all the secret services in the world?  Just to ensure that the Chinese, American, Russian and British secret services all get to install spyware into Windows?  Not to mention the pre-installed Lenovo spyware.

So the question is?  Should I let it boot to Windows before wiping the disk and installing Linux?

So I don’ t know whether Windows works on this laptop, but Ubuntu works perfectly.

Behold!

Basically, most everything just worked.  Except the return of the physical mouse buttons, which is supposed to be fixed in Linux 4.0.  In the mean time, you have to say

sudo rmmod psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps

to get the buttons to work.

It’s about 1.3kg, so it’s not the lightest laptop in the world, but it feels nice.  I like it, but I’ve only used it a couple of days…

The PCIe SSD is nice, though.  It gets sustained read/write speeds of 1.6GB/s.  That’s giga and that’s bytes.  Or as a macfanboi review site said about the upcoming Macbook:

Tests performed with the Blackmagic benchmark tool revealed read/write speeds of more than 1,300MBps/1,400MBps, respectively. […] The 2014 model used a PCIe 2.0 x2 card and the 2015 model uses a PCIe 3.0 x4 (four I/O lanes) card. Twice the lanes, twice the speed. While Apple uses a proprietary flash card made by Samsung, Intel, Micron and SanDisk are all working on similar technology, so it’s likely to soon wind up in high-end PCs.

Yeah…  likely… soon…  proprietary…  similar…

Anyway, I just noticed that it has an unusually whimsical thing (for Lenovo) going on the lid:

A red little glowing light in the logo!

Aww.