olbrecht.net journal ThinkPad X1 Carbon (34602SG) – First impressions

ThinkPad X1 Carbon (34602SG) – First impressions

2012-09-212012-09-21 Jan OlbrechtJan Olbrecht 0 Comments 15:23
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It’s been a while since I had any interesting tech that I was actually able to write about. Today, that changed with the arrival of the brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. For the international audience, I will write this and maybe a few follow-up articles in English as opposed to German.

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Specs wise, it’s pretty standard with the 3rd gen Core i5 3427U processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. The Ericsson WWAN card is included, the USB 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet adapter is not. I’ll have to check if and when I can expect delivery of that. I did not order from Lenovo directly, so I will have to go through my dealer for that. Anyway, enough has been written about the specs and parts in other places.

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Because I haven’t seen any other shots of a final system board, I included my own. As you can see, the RAM is soldered to the board. Opened up, more than half the system is taken up by its battery. Just to make clear: This was “just for fun”, there were no build issues whatsoever with my model that would have necessitated opening up the system. As far as build quality is concerned, this machine easily beats any one of the older ThinkPad models I owned or worked with. For the record: X21, T42p, T60p, T61, T400, T400s, T500, T410, T510, T420, X220, T430. Yes, I know that’s a lot but I spent quite a while in recent years supporting a fleet of ThinkPads for my last employer.

The X1 Carbon has probably the stiffest base I’ve ever experienced on a laptop. There’s less give than I have in my 11” MacBook Air (2011) which is impressive, considering the X1 has a much larger chassis that could bend. Lenovo did change the color finish on the bezel and palm rest surrounding the keyboard. It is now much closer to the soft-touch finish normally found on the display cover. Oddly enough, I prefer its texture and softness to that of the new all-glass touchpad. Now, the latter is a big improvement to the touchpads found previously on ThinkPads (even the newer ones that started to be introduced with T400s). Its somehow not quite as smooth as you would expect from a glass touchpad – something of a problem for me as I have dry skin and I noticed it had something of a sandpaper effect on my fingertips. For those who absolutely have to use a touchpad: The ones build by Apple are still the top of the crop. This being a ThinkPad however, there’s still the good-old TrackPoint and it hasn’t changed a bit.

The LCD screen is of the TN persuasion and it’s a pretty good one. Colors are vivid and the contrasts are excellent to my eyes. Other people have noted the LCD grid. The effect indeed is noticeable if you have really good vision and you’re looking at a mostly white screen (e.g. MS Word). I mostly just noticed it because I read about it and looked for it. In regular use with what I’d call an ergonomic distance between your eyes and the screen it’s much harder to see, certainly if you don’t have perfect eyesight like me. The resolution is still spot on, 1600 by 900 on a 14” screen is the sweet spot for me. It’s enough to enable some multitasking on the road while keeping the machine portable. For serious work I still recommend a 24” or larger external screen.

I can’t say I spent too much time with the stock Windows installation. It’s not as bad as other PCs I’ve seen (HP, Sony) but it’s probably not worth keeping if you are the least bit technical and know how to install Windows and drivers. It’s a long shot from the Microsoft signature builds. Anyway, I wasn’t going to have Windows 7 on this machine anyway and progressed to installing Windows 8 Professional RTM on it:

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Here’s a couple of pointers that might help you avoid some of the stumbling blocks I met:

  • If you’re going to install Windows 8 on this machine, put the setup files on a USB stick formatted with FAT32 (UEFI won’t boot the installer off NTFS).
  • Download all the drivers for the X1 Carbon from the Lenovo Beta site here except for Video and WWAN. Install these drivers first!
  • Now download the SCCM driver bundle for Windows 7 here. Also download the Intel Smart Connect drivers here. Unpack and point device manager to these folders to install drivers for all the remaining unrecognized devices.
  • Don’t install beta Intel HD graphics drivers, use the update drivers function in device manager and have Windows pull new drivers off Windows Update
  • The Windows built-in driver for the Intel 6205 WLAN card has a wrong default setting: It doesn’t have 802.11n mode enabled. If you don’t enable that in device properties, you will likely only see 54Mbit/s connections. Newer drivers from Intel aren’t available yet but should be out along with drivers for Intel Wireless Display by October 26th. Wireless antenna performance is great though, as I have come to expect from a ThinkPad. Full signal on the 5GHz band where my Mac struggles to keep a connection.
  • I didn’t manage to get the WWAN card to work using the beta driver for Windows 8, the Windows 7 driver however worked perfectly.

Some general early impressions about system performance and such:

  • It’s very quick to boot and shut down running Windows 8. Resume from stand-by is nearly instantaneous.
  • Battery runtime for me seems to be around 5 hours right now with the power profile set to balanced, the display at around half its maximum brightness, WLAN and WWAN enabled. This includes time when the system was still syncing data from my SkyDrive and Exchange mailbox in Outlook, indexing and me installing all the little tools I like to have at the ready. Given that we’re still very early as far as driver support for Windows 8 goes (and that I believe Lenovo’s Power Manager still has some extra tricks that are not yet available), I’m pretty happy with that. Recharging the battery using rapid charge takes care of remaining worries.
  • As a touch typist and die-hard ThinkPad enthusiast, the new keyboard is easy to get used to. I still miss the 7th-row key placements and keys like “pause” but it’s something you get used to pretty quickly. Key feel and responsiveness is nice and key travel is better than any other Ultrabook (or Macbook) I’ve tried before. I especially like how the keyboard on the X1 Carbon is a part of the bezel. It’s a much cleaner and nicer visual look which I found distracting on the T430.
  • You might want to keep credit cards away from the bottom left corner of the base. That’s where you find the magnet keeping the lid closed.

That’s it for my early thoughts. The X1 Carbon for me is the perfect workhorse computer right now. I don’t need computationally intensive applications on a daily basis (that’s what servers and desktops are for!) and I appreciate the portability. I’ll probably buy a second power supply and I’m seriously considering the USB 3.0 dock.

Otherwise this computer is what I always thought the Macbook Air should have been: Black, no-nonsense, non-glare, non-shiny, all serious, with a great keyboard and a little red dot right smack-dab in the middle where it belongs.

-Jan

One thought on “ThinkPad X1 Carbon (34602SG) – First impressions”

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We’ve moved to a new home and it’s been quite a project. But let’s settle for the really important stuff: The new home network. Winking smile Having bought into the building just early enough, we took the opportunity to adjust the wiring specifications just slightly from what was luckily already a pretty decent setup. There were plenty of electrical outlets, coax cable in every room and phone lines part of the plans. We only added a few electrical outlets so we would never have to run any power cables around corners (I hate cable clutter!) and then went to town on the data cabling:

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WP_20161218_17_07_55_Pro_LIAll CAT7 cables run into our storeroom. There they meet up with the coax TV cable which currently serves as our ISP line.

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First of all, you’re looking at a Rittal FlatBox DK 7507.110. The enclosure is wall-mounted with just enough space for cleaning (basically making sure our Roomba will fit with no issues).

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I’m considering replacing the current NAS with a smaller 4-bay model in the future. My needs here are relatively simple: All I need is lots of storage along with support for SMB, DLNA and Wake-On-LAN. With progress in ARM based storage devices, I’m seriously thinking about taking the plunge just to get the power needs down. Cooling hasn’t been an issue so far but the room does warm noticeably when the door is closed – as was to be expected with it having virtually no ventilation whatsoever.

So on to the wireless setup: Having the best wife in the world, I was actually gifted a Ubiquity UniFi AP AC PRO for my last birthday, right off my Amazon wish list. Only there was a problem. Several actually:

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What I ended up with was this:

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So how did I set up the Wi-Fi? I’ve been using the UBNT community forum to read up on what works and best practices. Basically the logical network I’m running is rather simple: There is no point in using fancy things like management VLANs around my LAN and while I might set them up for the home lab, everything is just a flat class C private subnet (my provider hasn’t figured out yet how to give me an IPv6 prefix – I wager it’ll take them longer to get that done then it takes Chris Büchler (of pfSense fame and now working at Ubiquity on the Routing & Switching products) to implement IPv6 on the UniFi controller and USG router.

I currently have an open guest network using the UniFi controller to act as a HotSpot gateway using vouchers (Not happy with the open nature of this network, any help in setting up HotSpot 2.0 to get encryption for guests without having to hand out WPA-keys would be appreciated).

And this is how it looks:

2016-12-18This is a view of the UniFi controller running on my home network.

Where things get tricky is the map view. This may help with planning the deployment of hotspots, you’ll see it’s always a good idea to check with reality:

 

2016-12-18 (8)This is just the plain view of locations of the access points. WP_20161217_21_23_55_Rich_LI

What I want is good signal in all rooms as well as fast speeds in all locations that are commonly used by me.

All the UniFi AP AC Pro’s are wall-mounted.

Let’s take a small detour into the ABC’s of Wi-Fi networking:

2.4 GHz is for coverage. WP_20161217_22_12_36_Pro_LI
5 GHz is for speed.

There are only 3 non-overlapping 2.4 GHz channels (1, 6, 11) at 20 MHz channel width. At best this gives you 300 MBit/s linkspeed with a two antenna setup. As 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi will penetrate further, be a good neighbor and don’t use wider channels. Also it is a good idea to turn down the power of the AP so as not to cause interference where you don’t actually need you Wi-Fi coverage anymore.

At 5 GHz, *if* you can use DFS Channels, there are up to 4 non-overlapping channels of 80 MHz bandwidth each. This gives you up to 866 MBit/s linkspeed with two antennas. It is very rare to come across a Wi-Fi client with more than two antennas. Unless you only have drywall, you can forget about getting a useful signal more than one wall away.

There are plenty of rules of thumb about this but nothing beats actually measuring it!

2016-12-18 (10)

Using the free tool Netspot, I made this coverage map of my apartment. In this screenshot I’m showing just the 2.4 GHz coverage. As you can see, the tool gives slightly different locations for the Access Points. It puts them where the signal is strongest – which depending on things like the signal bouncing off surfaces might be quite a bit off: See the bottom right AP which the measurements put right in front of the metal door to the elevator.

On 2016-12-18 (9)the 5 GHz front things look a lot colder. As expected, there is only really a fast connection in the rooms where we actually put the APs. Then again we don’t really need the speed in our guest room.

So that’s it for this project. Please tell me what you think, any suggestions where I can improve or whatever else comes to mind!

-Jan

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