Nowadays, when buying a new laptop, you may choose whether you like to have a SSD disk or a traditional ‘spinning disk’. There’s nothing special about it, you might say but I could observe that the HDD drives used are the cheapest crap available: 5400 RPM and a lousy small cache. A recent disk should be at 7200 […]
Tag: setup
Two years at the W500 – and now?
My W500 isn’t really an old PC, but I have to admit that I do hit some performance limits by now. So what now? A new notebook? Geez… Looking back at the upgrades already done: The internal Harddisk drive was already exchanged: A Samsung Momentus XT, which is one of those Hybrid disks (classical disk with a SSD […]
Lenovo W500 – So far so good
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 […]
Lenovo W500 – Part 5
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:
Lenovo W500 – Part 4
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.
Lenovo W500 – Part 3
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 […]