Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

The X240 is a nice machine. The bit i like most about it is it uses a standard size 2.5" SSD for its drive so nice and easy to drop in a bigger one and if memory serves it uses standard dimms. Have an X230 at home as my personal laptop if i need one.

If you need any of the Utility tools in the future let me know can happily get the bios utilities and such over to you

 

Cheers for the offer, I might take you up on that

Yeah it's a neat little machine, far thinner than I expected. I was a bit unsure about the 1366*768 screen, but I use a 12" laptop at work with a 1080P screen and it's not exactly the easiest screen to use when running at full resolution - not even with scaling. Turns out it's absolutely fine, 1366*768 "feels right" for the screen size. Besides, I also picked up a pro docking station, so it'll be easy to connect to an external monitor when I need to.

I need to check which brand/model of SSD is in there, and whether or not it has the WWAN card, but so far it doesn't look like I'll need to do any upgrades at all. It's already got 8GB RAM which is apparently the limit for this model. Nice little laptop, and a damn good price at £225. Although I might want an extended battery at some point...

 

Where did you get your X240 from, Byron? An ebay job? That's a lot of laptop for the price.

I really like the X230 and X240, but I've always been put off slightly by the 768p screen, although as you say it's actually quite a suitable res for the screen size. Still, I'd quite like a 1080p X240, if only because the 1080p screens are IPS and the 768p aren't (iirc, may be getting my models mixed up here).

 

Aye, eBay. This looks like exactly the same model from the same seller: Edit: bloody mobile, search for item number 152673420133. I don't know if there is such a thing as a 1080p x240 - I certainly couldn't find one - but I'm pretty sure there are IPS models at 1366*768. I don't think mine is IPS, it didn't specify the screen type in the listing.

Tbh I'm happy enough with the screen even if it turns out to be a TN panel. I'll be using an external screen for anything more intensive, and I have an iPad to watch media on - this laptop won't be a media creation/consumption device.

 

I think that the X240 was the first X-series to offer 1080p, because it definitely wasn't available on the X230. I also recall that you could definitely get a 768p IPS panel for the X230, so presumably it's available for the X240 too, but these are pretty rare and rather expensive too. I'm fairly sure that you can just drop in a 1080p panel on the X240, although as ever these things are fraught with complications as you have to get the correct FRU (and there are a few different ones out there).

 

Byron, mind if I ask a quick question or two about that laptop?

I see that it comes with Win 10 - how does that play with the various hardware in the laptop? Does everything work ok, or have you had to muck about with drivers and so on? And is there a recovery partition or other recovery media?

Cheers in advance!

 

So they (finally - after a wobble at the suppliers and suchlike) shipped, albeit not in the clear I wanted.
Regardless, some feedback after a few days of use, as promised:

As an indication as to what my base of reference is: I LOVED the Bose IE2s i had years ago.
I appreciated the Sennheizer CX300 II's for what they were: better than crap, not amazing.
Other than that, I spend some time in home studios with various reference monitors (PreSonous Eris 5's, KRK Rokkit 6's, etc)

I was never a fan of sound isolation, since I like to hear what's going on around me, but colour me a convert. The "peace and quiet" makes me recognise a good bit of detail I didn't notice before.

Tonally:
They seem a bit "flatter" than the other in-ears I had, but that's obviously somewhat hard to judge without empirical measurements. Less bass boost, but good articulation. The bass is not bad, but I can see this being annoying to some people that prefer their music more "club" than me. Articulation > Volume when it comes to my preferred genres.
This does make some music less "fun" to listen, but it's really not a showstopper.
The mid range on these is great.

Build:
Seems tops. A 1.6m chord may be a bit long for most people, but for my purposes that's fine. Once these become proper stage IEM's, the chord will be needed. It's a FAT piece of cable as well.

Comfort:
GREAT. Foam tips are a winner to me (over rubber). The over-ear wearing and somewhat different insertion takes some getting used to, and the cable loop over the ears is not so amazing when wearing glasses. But the second you strap the entire cable tight behind you back (or just get used to it), I tend to forget that I am wearing them.
They also sit quite firmly (but comfortably), which makes me happy, since things can get quite movement-intensive on stages.

for the money, I cannot think of anything better.
That said - I have seen some bargains online on the bigger brother of these, the 315 (they use armature drivers, not Dynamics anymore) for not-much-more, and they may well be worth considering.

 

I've seen 1080P screens for the X240 available on eBay, but I don't really have any interest in trying to install one TBH. Like I said the 768p screen does just fine on the laptop - anything larger and I think I'd struggle to see things, even with scaling on. My 15" laptop has a 1080P screen and I have to have scaling turned on for that panel otherwise everything is too small.

Ask away . Pretty much everything seemed to work out of the box to be honest, including custom hardware like the fingerprint reader. I installed Lenovo System Update from the Lenovo support website and that installed a bunch of Win10 drivers for the machine. May not be 100% necessary, but I did it anyway. I'm having trouble updating the firmware for the Pro docking station I bought, but I'm probably doing something wrong there.

I can't see any recovery partitions, but the seller attached a "Windows 10 for Refurbished PCs" COA on the bottom of the machine which has a serial key; Windows was already pre-installed, so I just needed to go through the initial user account setup and key activation. It's only Win10 Home though so I'll be upgrading it to Win10 Pro as soon as - I'll probably re-install when I do that. Presumably the Win10 Home key it shipped with is now tied to this hardware and my Microsoft account, so if I ever activate this machine again it should automatically detect my hardware and apply the right activation key. At least that's how I think activation works anyway, I'm used to installing from scratch with a fresh key...

 

Cheers for the reply, much appreciated. Is your docking station one of the ones where the laptop "clips in" or is it the USB3.0 port replicator style? I was having a scan through ebay earlier but the proper docks are expensive

 

It's a "clip-in" Pro dock, and it had a 65W power adaptor bundled with it: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-Th...W-Power-Supply-Type-40A1-04W3948/272779409148. You can't really see it in this pic, but three of the USB ports are USB3, three of them are USB2, and one of the USB2 ports - far left in this photo - is the "always on charging" port.



If you want dual monitors then with this dock you're restricted to 1x DVI/DP and 1x VGA. The Ultra dock allows you to use multiple digital outputs, though you're obviously restricted to the max res the HD4400 iGPU can handle - I can't remember what that is off-hand, but it's below 4K and I'm not sure about the limits when you're using multiple displays.

 

My first pi!

 

Be good to hear how it goes actually, after a while being on the road. I have a whole drawer of adapters collected over the years, an all in one world/usb one would be handy.
I currently have a mixture of eu, aus/nz, world, eu with usb and so on, the usb power always seems to be lame on the ones I have and, at this rate, soon most of my hand luggage weight will be used up on plugs and adapters.

 

Are the batteries replaceable G?

Well, daft question I guess.. They're all replaceable but some are soldered...

 

Pah, to heck with realism !

Most of the Ecig battery carriers I have or have used take loose batteries. 18650s, like. However, one of the cheaper models I bought was all sealed up with a USB micro port. Turns out it uses a 18650 but it's soldered. If I ever kill it I will definitely solder in a new battery. Much cheaper than the £30 it cost !

 

Ah, cheers for that. I'd seen that most of the docks had mutually exclusive DP & DVI outputs, which is a bit of a pain. £90 doesn't seem too expensive if you're getting a power adaptor included, I guess.

 

So I went on a bit of a spree today.

An Anker power bank (and a case for it, but you don't need a pic of that)



A multi-port USB wall wart



Some decent braided Lightning charging cables - what? Anker products are pretty good, ok?



Cable management clips



I want to sell my Audio Technica BPHS1 headset, so I got some replacement Brainwavz pads because hygiene (I already have spare wind shields for the microphone)



Gas-lift monitor stand



Fiio E10K Olympus USB DAC/headphone amp



AKG Y50BT bluetooth headphones

Yeah, it's not a bad price, and it's damn handy.

 

I share the love of Anker stuff. It's really very good. And that packaging too!

 

Gameboy advance USB charger cable for my SP, best 85p spent.