September 29th, 2009 by Stargazer
Switchable Graphics
The topic isn’t something new – to equip a computer with two graphic cards to make it save power. The idea bases on the fact that you don’t need high end graphical performance for your daily work and so a less powerful card is implemented aside of a big one to let the system decide on your needs. But that’s pure theory.
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 1 Comment »
64 Bit?
July 24th, 2009 by Stargazer
My (new) Laptop got a 64 bit CPU doing the number crunching in it – and of course enough RAM to do it all. So it isn’t a miracle, that the OS they delivered with it, was Windows Vista 64. So I looked over the whole installation and saw something scary: most applications are running using the 32 bit emulation.
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 6 Comments »
Theory and reality
May 19th, 2009 by Stargazer
This article should show you that some things might sound beautiful although they don’t work in reality. But even here we’re learning our share…
Today we’re looking at my Lenovo Thinkpad W500, which should be already known to you from some of my previous posts – especially at the HardDrive Active Protection System (HDAPS). The system should prevent damage by switching of (parking) the disk if the system detects vibrations or shock.
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 2 Comments »
Lenovo W500 – So far so good
March 23rd, 2009 by Stargazer
Since I am able to use my Lenovo ThinkPad, it’s time to have a look at the result now. Talking about Windows, it’s just the usual ranting – no bigger problems, disregarding the common ranting that Windows is not GNU. Regarding Linux, there’s a bit more to say, but in general, nothing really disturbing – at least nothing I can’t live with.
Tags: setup, gentoo, lenovo, W500
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 1 Comment »
Lenovo W500 – Part 5
March 19th, 2009 by Stargazer
Today I decided to get the webcam working which can be found above the display, integrated into the case. Fact is, I haven’t really looked at the device, as it wasn’t listed as such. As there are no unknown devices at the PCI bus, we can narrow our search to the USB bus which looks like that:
Tags: setup, gentoo, lenovo, W500
Posted in: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Lenovo W500 – Part 4
March 18th, 2009 by Stargazer
After all, the current state of my notebook could be considered as ‘usable’ but not ‘fully working’, due to some components that still are unused or not configured. While looking at the components I stumbled over the hdaps thingy which should save your harddisk from headcrashes.
Tags: setup, gentoo, lenovo, W500
Posted in: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Lenovo W500 – Part 3
March 16th, 2009 by Stargazer
After the first installation steps were done, it was time to get Xorg running, which reminds us of one of the oddities of this notebook. Remember, we have to VGA cards here.
But it would be too simple if things are working out of the box. The ATI binary drivers forced me to rebuild the kernel a couple of times to correct some braindamaged settings only ati uses. As this was done, I was really excited to launch Xorg but ended up with a stack trace.
Tags: setup, ati, gentoo, lenovo, W500
Posted in: IT Related stuff | No Comments »