hardware

After almost a year since it was announced, the Dell XPS 13 ultrabook is finally available with Ubuntu in the Netherlands. Including VAT, it would cost € 1330. On my job at an ICT service desk I’ve had the opportunity to use both the XPS 13 and the comparable Samsung NP900X3C. The A05NL version of the Samsung starts at € 1000 at the moment. Both are very nice laptops indeed.

But how does that compare to other laptops, in particular my Acer TravelMate TimeLine 8371 which still serves me nicely? In the end of 2009 I paid € 532 for the Acer, minus € 70 for the Windows Vista Business license refund and plus the € 187 for the Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD it set me back € 649 total. Obviously there is a large difference in price, but what’s the justification for the much higher cost of of the Dell and Samsung?

Notebookcheck reviewed both the Acer, the Dell and the Samsung, albeit in slightly different configurations than I’ve seen. The key differences for me are that the Dell and Samsung have much higher resolutions: 1920 by 1080 pixels and 1600 by 900 pixels respectively. The Acer has 1366 by 768 pixels, and all three have a 13.3 inch monitor. The lower resolution of the Acer is by no means annoying to me, but I’d appreciate more. Another key difference is the weight: 1.73, 1.4 and 1.19 kilo for the Acer, Dell and Samsung respectively. If you take a laptop with you on holiday in a backpack filled with clothes like me, the difference in weight is notable. Both the Dell and the Samsung also have more durable enclosures than the Acer.

The Dell and Samsung have much faster CPU’s, more RAM, larger SSD’s. The only downside is that the Dell has no ethernet port at all and the Samsung requires an adapter, because both laptops are too thin for a full port. The Dell has DisplayPort and the Samsung has a VGA connector requiring an adapter which is not included. The Acer does have a normal VGA connector and only the Samsung and the Acer have a card reader.

I think I like the Samsung most. Even though the limited connectivity is a downside – Samsung should include a DisplayPort connector too and include adapters for VGA and HDMI – I don’t think it’s a big problem. However, the Samsung shoves Windows 8 down my throat, and I’m not so eager to go through all the trouble to get a refund for the Windows license. Choices, choices! For now I think I’ll keep using my Acer until it’s spent, by that time there will be better hardware in the form of Intel’s “Shark Bay” platform.

I also wouldn’t mind less powerful CPU’s so the price could be lowered. All I want is a laptop which is portable, with a monitor size between 11 and 13.3 inch, a keyboard (no tablets for me), a long battery life and a low price. That might happen in the form of Intel’s “Bay Trail” platform for its Atom architecture. Of course, some competition from AMD would be much appreciated.

Recently my brother was looking to buy a new laptop. He moved out of my parent’s house recently and wanted to replace his PC with a laptop to use both privately and for his job. He wanted a 15 inch laptop because his work involved some traveling, so a larger desktop replacement was not desirable. But he didn’t want a smaller laptop either because he wanted a large screen. The only game he plays is League of Legends, which can be handled adequately by the integrated graphics chip in recent processors.

Considerations

Nowadays you can get 15 inch laptops for little more than € 300, but if you buy cheaply, you pay dearly. Most of those cheap laptops have relatively low display resolutions (with 1366 by 768 pixels being most common) and because they’re meant for consumers they almost always have glossy displays. Build quality often isn’t good either.

That’s why it’s smart to buy more expensive laptops which are more sturdy, often the models intended for business customers. These also have matte displays, which don’t turn into a mirror if there’s a lot of sunlight. But most importantly, if you’re willing to pay a premium, you can get a high-resolution display of 1600 by 900 pixels or even more. Quite a difference in screen real estate.

The choice for the L530

A few weeks ago, one of the cheapest 15 inch laptops available in the Netherlands with a 1600 by 900 pixels display resolution was the Lenovo ThinkPad L530 for € 752. Even though this is “budget” in terms of ThinkPads and this model has an ordinary plastic case, the reputation these laptops have for good build quality still stands. And it has a matte screen. As an added bonus it also came with Windows 7 instead of the disaster that is Windows 8. My brother was discouraged by the high price compared to the usual low-end consumer notebooks, but I managed to convince him.

I won’t review the laptop in detail because that has already been done by NotebookCheck. Like they say, you shouldn’t expect it to be as sturdy as the premium ThinkPads with its plastic case, but it’s certainly a good deal for € 752. After buying and unboxing the L530 however, we were surprised to find out that the touchpad had a problem: the mouse cursor moved like a person stuck in quicksand.

When my brother read the review on NotebookCheck again, he noticed they had also experienced a “major problem with the touchpad’s responsiveness”. They assumed this problem was restricted to their test laptop. Curiously, I couldn’t find anyone else experiencing the same problem on the Internet. It was time to contact Lenovo and get them to fix the laptop.

Lenovo technical support

The first impression wasn’t so positive. We had to sign a form to give them permission to re-install Windows 7 if necessary and some other trivial matters, but this form had many Dutch grammar and spelling errors. I still remember my ordeal with Acer’s helpdesk, but expected Lenovo to do better. Apart from the form though, Lenovo did its job properly: when the laptop was returned the touchpad worked fine.

Only the reparation report raises some eyebrows. It claims they replaced the display and the “kbd (keyboard?) bezel”. I have no idea what those have to do with the touchpad.

As you can read on the Wikipedia article of the Nokia N9 now, the smartphone won’t be released in the major markets, probably including the Netherlands. Apparently Nokia, being Microsoft’s slave now, thought it necessary to self destruct the capital and effort invested in the development of the N9 and kill off this product which competes with it’s future Windows Phone smartphones. Even when the N9 was floored already after the announcement that Nokia would discontinue the development of MeeGo in favour of concentrating on Windows Phone, that evil bastard Elop couldn’t resist giving it a last fatal kick to head. I’ll never buy anything from Nokia again and I hope that pathetic company with it’s Windows Phone products gets overwhelmed anyway by the competition consisting of iPhones and Android-based smartphones.

Or even better, other manufacturers could pick up MeeGo, which is entirely possible because MeeGo itself is not dead, only the N9 is which was the only smartphone using it so far. But I’m not seriously disappointed, because mobile Internet has become expensive anyway I prefer to wait until the pricing becomes more reasonable before I buy a new smartphone. Until then I’ll continue using my dumb phone.

In June Nokia announced the Nokia N9 smartphone which is the first smartphone to run on the MeeGo operating system. As it looks like right now, this will become my first smartphone when it will be released. I’ve been looking at Android smartphones for some time, and while I think Android is a good operating system, I think MeeGo has some important advantages over Android. Both operating systems are based on the Linux kernel, but I feel Android has been modified too much while MeeGo delivers the features of a complete Linux distribution. The user interface and hardware look very impressive as they are demonstrated on the website of the N9.

Unfortunately some software shipped with it is closed source. In that regard Android has the advantage in the form of custom open source firmware created by the community, for example in the form of CyanogenMod. For me the presence of some closed source software is not a serious problem as the developer community can do the same for the N9 as the CyanogenMod developers did for Android, creating open source replacements for the closed source software. I understand this makes some people sceptical for who this is important though.

A more important problem is that it’s not only the first, but also the last smartphone running MeeGo we’ll see from Nokia. Nokia, now with that evil ex-Microsoft employee Stephen Elop as it’s CEO, decided to switch to Windows Mobile for all future smartphones. It’s an absolutely shameful decision to throw away the work done on MeeGo, as has been written elsewhere already. This could make you see the N9 as stillborn in a certain way, but I think that if it’s a good product we have to show Nokia the great error in it’s ways by massively buying this smartphone.

However with the telecom providers in the Netherlands increasing prices for mobile Internet I have my doubts about switching to a smartphone. Right now know I use a dumb phone with a SIM-only plan for € 5 a month, getting a smartphone and an appropriate plan for it would be very costly in comparison. And even though the N9’s battery life should be adequate, it’s still a far cry from my dumb phone which can last nearly two weeks on a charge.

Encouraged by a comment on my previous post about my Acer TravelMate TimeLine notebook, I have benchmarked my Intel X25-M 80 GB Postville solid state drive using IOzone. My results are as follows:

Iozone: Performance Test of File I/O
        Version $Revision: 3.308 $
        Compiled for 64 bit mode.
        Build: linux

O_DIRECT feature enabled
Auto Mode
File size set to 262144 KB
Record Size 4 KB
Record Size 64 KB
Record Size 512 KB
Command line used: iozone -I -a -s 256M -r 4k -r 64k -r 512K -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
Output is in Kbytes/sec
Time Resolution = 0.000001 seconds.
Processor cache size set to 1024 Kbytes.
Processor cache line size set to 32 bytes.
File stride size set to 17 * record size.
                                                  random  random
    KB  reclen   write rewrite    read    reread    read   write
262144       4   38211   42784    46048    45918    8684   37782
262144      64   69923   77192   115359   113808   91553   74527
262144     512   77909   60055   220997   221988  204858   77677

Through Google I found comparable benchmarks. This one was posted on the Ubuntu Forums. It should be noted that this is a 160 GB X25-M, the poster mentions that his one is a ‘G2’ which means that it’s a second generation one with the Postville code name like mine. Probably the greater amount of storage would have some benefit for performance, but I’m not sure. These numbers are taken from the benchmark without TRIM. If I understand correctly it doesn’t matter if you use an X25-M with the latest firmware which supports TRIM (like I do), because there is no support for it in Linux/Ubuntu yet and it looks like it won’t be in the next Ubuntu release either. With Google or in that topic you can find an explanation on how you could use a recent version of hdparm and some kind of trick to use TRIM, so that’s how that poster probably got his follow-up benchmarks with TRIM. I didn’t bother because I think I’d rather wait until the support for TRIM is mature enough for it to work out of the box. The poster used an HP Elitebook 8530p with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 CPU and 4GB DDR2-800 RAM.

                                                  random  random
    KB  reclen   write rewrite    read    reread    read   write
262144       4   55854   61601    77975    77408   18740   37199
262144      64  102575   87223   200613   201029  141870   70205
262144     512  110951   93840   244588   242498  233184   95013

I found a second post with benchmarks on another forum, but unfortunately no more than that. In the specific post I just linked it’s not mentioned, but in an earlier post in the same topic the poster gives the model number of his SSD, INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GC, which means he has the same model I have. He posted his benchmarks at 5 December mentioning that it they were made with the most recent firmware. If I recall correctly, that’s still the latest firmware at this moment. So he’s using the same firmware as I am, the first firmware to include support for TRIM. Not sure what system was exactly used for the benchmark, but the poster mentions it’s a notebook. I’ve asked him and I’m waiting for a response.

                                                  random  random
    KB  reclen   write rewrite    read    reread    read   write
262144       4   39360   46785    53897    51421   11412   39529
262144      64   71098   54363   130520   129911   98805   74485
262144     512   81657   78925   207837   210842  218651   81242

So which conclusions can be drawn from this? No definitive. I should also take into account I’m using the EXT4 filesystem on my X25-M in combination with an alpha version of Kubuntu 10.04, which uses the 2.6.32 kernel. Benchmarks done by Phoronix show that with this and other recent kernels EXT4 suffers from performance regressions. The numbers presented by the benchmarks done by the poster  on the Ubuntu Forums leave my X25-M in the dust, but comparing to the last benchmarks doesn’t give such a dramatic difference. The greatest difference can be found in the benchmark with the 4KB blocks (first row). If anyone has a better interpretation of these benchmarks and the context to offer, please comment.

Edit 12 February 2010: the following results were achieved with the ext3 file system, using the noatime option. Contrary to my expectations it’s not better, but sucks more.

                                                  random  random
    KB  reclen   write rewrite    read    reread    read   write
262144       4   45452   42928    43576    43587    9120   40782
262144      64   59020   73224   109954   108622   90028   74706
262144     512   81555   82546   172479   171934  174380   82114

As I wrote in my previous post, I’d write about why I bought this notebook and my experiences with it so far. I’ll also write about the choice of a Linux distribution for the notebook, and about battery life, in two future posts.

Let me start with my criteria. I have already written about my old notebook in the past, and after that I wrote what my requirements were for a new notebook. I wanted a portable notebook which is thin and light, with 13,3 inch as maximum screen size. I wanted long battery life, more than three hours. Performance was less important, I didn’t intend to use it for gaming or anything else which is resource intensive. I also wanted Intel hardware because Intel supports Linux very well. The material choice for the notebook should be modest and sober, a lot of notebooks aimed at consumers pretend to be expensive mirrors because they use ugly shiny plastic in abundance and have glossy displays. The materials used for those notebooks are often easily damaged or scratched as I experienced firsthand with my Fujitsu-Siemens notebook. That was a piece of expensive junk, so I wanted to avoid that for my next notebook. And I didn’t want to spend much money.

Until recently there wasn’t anything on the market which could meet these criteria. There has always been a class of notebooks which could meet them partially, like the X-series Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks for example, but  these were far too expensive, much more than € 1000. When the Intel Atom processor was introduced it was cheap and consumed little energy, but it was mostly restricted to netbooks not larger  than 10 inch. VIA’s Nano processor, meant to compete with the Atom, didn’t show up much in interesting notebooks. So far ARM’s plans to enter the netbook market haven’t been realized either. It finally got interesting for me when Intel decided to introduce the Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) platform, aimed at notebooks which are thin and light with a relatively long battery life and a low price, positioned between netbooks and normal notebooks. Despite the negativity in the last link I provided, fact is that Intel now provides an alternative for those who don’t need the performance and don’t want to pay the high price for the high end ultraportables. AMD launched the Athlon Neo processor to compete, but laptops utilizing those processors fell dramatically short on battery life for me.

The Acer TravelMate Timeline 8371 met all my requirements. According to the specifications it weighs 1,65 kilograms, delivers over eight hours of battery life and it has a 13,3 inch monitor with LED-backlight and a 1366 x 768 resolution. It doesn’t have an optical drive, which is an advantage for me, I don’t need one. I got the 353G32N model, which is the most basic, it uses the SU3500 processor. It’s a single core processor, but that’s fine with me, a dual core processor would consume more energy and I wouldn’t need the extra performance. It comes with 3 GB RAM and a 320 GB hard disk drive. It cost € 531,50 which is great value and only slightly more expensive than most netbooks, if you substract the € 70 you can get with a Windows refund it’s even less.

The TravelMate Timeline 8371 is a business version of the consumer-oriented Acer Timeline 3810T notebook. The consumer version is already unassuming in it’s usage of materials, unlike other consumer notebooks, but the TravelMate version is a real business notebook, and it’s also cheaper than the cheapest consumer-oriented Timeline which sells for € 622,68 at the cheapest. I like the materials and sober black look of the 8371, but I haven’t used it enough to say anything about how durable the materials are. The dimensions of the notebook are exactly right for my backpack, which has a compartment with thicker ‘edges’ offering more protection, probably meant to transport more delicate stuff like notebooks. This compartment has a very small zipper opening and I was worried that my notebook wouldn’t fit through the opening, but fortunately it does.

I don’t have much to say about the touchpad and keyboard, they’re fine. I’m reasonably fast with the touchpad, but it’s still not as convenient as using a mouse. That’s why I intend to learn how to use more keyboard key combinations to issue commands instead of using the touchpad. I’m less positive about the monitor, the vertical viewing angle is very shallow. That might not be obvious at first, but if you don’t look at it exactly straight, colors will be different. I noticed because I use a Dell 2007WFP 20 inch monitor on my desktop PC, which uses an IPS panel. IPS has excellent viewing angles, so the difference in color of the background on my weblog for example quickly caught my eye. If you’re not to picky you won’t notice though. A more serious complaint is that the monitor’s backlighting seems to be flickering sometimes, sometimes I observe the lighting intensity change when it’s displaying a static image. Most of the time I can’t hear the fan when the notebook is in operation, it’s very quiet. But when you start working while the battery is charging, the fan inexplicably starts turning very fast even though the CPU isn’t being stressed. I upgraded the BIOS (I had to use these instructions on Linux) from version 1.13 to the most recent 1.18 to see if it changed anything, but it didn’t. Same goes for suspend which doesn’t work with 1.13 or 1.18 yet. But maybe that should be fixed in the Linux kernel or somewhere else in the software stack?

One of the first things I did after receiving the notebook was replacing the hard disk drive (HDD) with a solid-state drive (SSD), the 80 GB Intel X25-M. The second generation, the ‘Postville’ to be exact, which is an improved version of the first generation. It carries a hefty price tag for 80 GB, € 187. But it is an SSD, which means that it is dead silent, consumes less energy, is more reliable and has a longer life expectancy, but most of all, that it’s fast. The X25-M is the fastest SSD you can get, so it definitely makes a HDD bite the dust. At the moment, a beta version of Kubuntu 9.10 which is not updated to the final release is installed on my 8371, from the moment the splash screen appears after GRUB to the moment KDM appears takes no longer than 2 seconds. My desktop which is equipped with a decent HDD (a Western Digital WD6400AAKS 640 GB for those who’d like to know) and the latest Ubuntu 9.10 takes 15 seconds to do this. I don’t do much data-intensive work with my notebook so the advantage isn’t great, certainly compared to the price, but it’s one of those little things like an extremely fast startup which makes the difference. It would certainly be more useful to replace the HDD in my game PC with an SSD, but then the relatively small amount of storage space would be a problem. Nevertheless, it’s certainly worth it’s money in my notebook.

The process of removing the HDD from the 8371 and replacing it with the SSD was easy, you just turn the notebook upside down and open the hatch on the lower right side. Take out the HDD, attach the SSD to the same mounting mechanism as the HDD, and you’re done. I didn’t go so smooth for me, I wanted to verify if the SSD worked first so I didn’t put the hatch cover back in it’s place before I checked. To my dismay it wasn’t detected by the notebook, and neither was the HDD if I put it back in. I started to panic and put it in and out many times, to no avail. I decided to ask in a forum topic of fellow Timeline owners if they had any problems with replacing the HDD, I was answered that it could not go wrong with a description of the procedure to follow. I had already followed the described procedure, with the exception of closing the hatch with the cover. Apparently the hatch cover was necessary to fix the HDD or SSD in it’s position. Once that was done everything worked fine.

I’ve included a few photo’s which aren’t very good due to my dSLR. Some reviews can be read here and here. Here is the page on Ubuntu’s wiki dedicated to the Acer Timeline series. There are also a few bug reports, one concerning the internal microphone which doesn’t work (never tried to use it myself) which is bug #445614 and bug #429456 concerning the failure to suspend.