Thinkpads Forum

from http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo- ... ption.html : it seems that someone in China got his hands on files of graphics driver rebuilt by Lenovo for their X220, and along with the lines mentioning HD (1366*768) TN- and IPS-screens, there are also lines mentioning HD+ (1600*900) TN- and IPS-screens!
X220 is the laptop of my dream since their announce (IPS screen out-of-the-box, yummy), but after this news it became even more attractive.
Want: X220 with IPS 1600*900 screen and hybrid storage.
However, it is going to cost arm and leg in Russia, so my employer won't purchase it for me.
There are already rumours appearing on X220 pricing in Russia:

$2 250 - i7-2620M (2.7GHz, 4MB L3, 1333MHz FSB) USB 3.0, IPS 160GB SSD 12.5" Premium HD (1366x768) IPS
$1 500 - i5-2520M (2.5GHz, 3MB L3, 1333MHz FSB) IPS 320GB / 7200rpm 12.5" Premium HD (1366x768) IPS
$1 350 - i5-2410M (2.3GHz, 3MB L3, 1333MHz FSB) 320GB / 5400rpm 12.5" HD (1366x768)

It is expensive as hell. Compare this with $700 for X200s with Core 2 Solo CPU in Russia in 2009 fall! I guess IPS HD+ and a hybrid storage could make it over $3000.

I will buy this! BUT, only after it has been discontinued and its price has dropped below $400. So, we are talking 5 or 6 years from now LOL!

Holy crap if this is true, huge props to Lenovo 1600x900 would be PERFECT.

pianowizard wrote:I will buy this! BUT, only after it has been discontinued and its price has dropped below $400. So, we are talking 5 or 6 years from now LOL!

And these are the same people who demanded lenovo to return FlexView and high-res screens in their thinkpads?

1600x900 IPS would make this my dream laptop.

penartur wrote:And these are the same people who demanded lenovo to return FlexView and high-res screens in their thinkpads?

You are half correct. I have always demanded high-end TN panels, not IPS, because the former are lighter, cheaper, and use slightly less power. I am not one of those who have been saying "I would pay $500 extra to buy a Thinkpad with IPS".

BTW, according to some sources, upgrade from TN HD to IPS HD on X220 is only $37.50.

penartur wrote:BTW, according to some sources, upgrade from TN HD to IPS HD on X220 is only $37.50.

That's really hard to believe, unless, this is an upgrade from a high-end TN panel to IPS.

1600x900 IPS for $37.50 sounds too goo to be true.

Published reviews of X220 have been sent X220's with 1366x768 IPS LCD.

> However, it is going to cost arm and leg in Russia, so my employer won't purchase it for me.

In Soviet Russia *you* purchase laptop for your employer.

Sorry couldn't resist.

sanjuro wrote:1600x900 IPS for $37.50 sounds too goo to be true.

Hold your horses, penartur was talking about the price of an upgrade from TN to IPS, both 1366x768.

ghersh wrote:> However, it is going to cost arm and leg in Russia, so my employer won't purchase it for me.

In Soviet Russia *you* purchase laptop for your employer.

Sorry couldn't resist.

My previous employer purchased laptops when it was necessary. SW developers all used desktops, i've purchased X200 for a personal use (after using many other laptops), and suddenly discovered that it is a great workstation as well (what i cannot say about other laptops i've used before that), so i just switched from company-issued desktop to my personal laptop.
My current employer policy is rather weird; they don't care about warranty length because they write off everything after a year; and any developer can say "hmm, my 1 year old laptop can't run Crysis 2 and i want to play Crysis 2 while at home, so i found a great laptop model which allows me to play Crysis 2 while retaining its usability as a workstation and it is priced reasonably, so purchase it". I was thinking of asking my employer to purchase X220, but $3000 passes all bounds. And if we will add the dock and 9-cell battery...

penartur wrote:My previous employer purchased laptops when it was necessary. SW developers all used desktops, i've purchased X200 for a personal use (after using many other laptops), and suddenly discovered that it is a great workstation as well (what i cannot say about other laptops i've used before that), so i just switched from company-issued desktop to my personal laptop.
My current employer policy is rather weird; they don't care about warranty length because they write off everything after a year; and any developer can say "hmm, my 1 year old laptop can't run Crysis 2 and i want to play Crysis 2 while at home, so i found a great laptop model which allows me to play Crysis 2 while retaining its usability as a workstation and it is priced reasonably, so purchase it". I was thinking of asking my employer to purchase X220, but $3000 passes all bounds. And if we will add the dock and 9-cell battery...

Maybe you could cover part of the cost from your pocket and ask the employer to cover the rest?

yak wrote:Maybe you could cover part of the cost from your pocket and ask the employer to cover the rest?

I don't know whether there is such thing in Germany but here in Russia there are some accounting/legal reasons why this could not be done. Shortly speaking, Russian company should purchase its property from some another Russian company (unless it is engaged in foreign-economic activity) and send the payment from their account to seller's account so no cash is seen. Also, there are only a few legal ways to turn money on company account into cash (one of these being paying off salary) and all are imposed with taxes. Also, there is nearly no way for a company to turn cash into money on company account, unless the company sells goods for private customers (and our company does not).
So, basically, there is no way for my company to purchase laptop in USA (although i can purchase laptop in USA with my own money), there is no way for my company to purchase laptop which is partially financed by my own money, and there is no way for my company to just give me cash so i can add my own money to it and purchase a laptop.
Either i should purchase laptop in USA on my own money or they could purchase some base configuration in Russia and then i should do all the upgrades i want for my own money.

Lenovo confirmed that X220 will be available with 1600x900 IPS display?
Can't find it anywhere. Only speculations.

Let's reel it on back folks...

This entire thing is speculation, based on a single line in an INF file. The same INF file, it's worth pointing out, also references a WXGA+ IPS/FFS display -- so obviously it doesn't *just* reference panels that have shipped/will ship.

th1 wrote:Lenovo confirmed that X220 will be available with 1600x900 IPS display?

no one at lenovo confirmed it.   in fact, i doubt anyone there even knows it exists.

I love how a random rumor suddenly becomes a sooner-or-later thing
FYI, I saw in one of the old monitor inf file that there's a calibration for a 1440x900 IPS screen, and we all know how that went.

AvalonXIII wrote: FYI, I saw in one of the old monitor inf file that there's a calibration for a 1440x900 IPS screen, and we all know how that went.

ThinkRob wrote: This entire thing is speculation, based on a single line in an INF file. The same INF file, it's worth pointing out, also references a WXGA+ IPS/FFS display -- so obviously it doesn't *just* reference panels that have shipped/will ship.

< looks at title of thread >

...

Sigh. We can dream...

ThinkRob wrote:Sigh. We can dream...

But now, with ultra-sucky VS 2010 even vertical layout won't help: http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/6004/pen ... f1b43_orig
I want that 1600*900 so greatly...

auto-hide your taskbar and use a smaller font size in your application.

erik wrote:auto-hide your taskbar and use a smaller font size in your application.

Also, that screenshot wasn't anywhere near 1280x800. The image was, but the viewable area definitely wasn't...

Hide the horizontal scrollbars, consolidate the toolbars and press Shift+Alt+Enter.

erik wrote:auto-hide your taskbar and use a smaller font size in your application.

I was just kidding (and VS 2010 is really bad), here is how i develop my own projects, when i'm not tied to VS 2010 we recently switched to: http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4513/pen ... 77179_orig
However, 1600*900 would really be useful.

ThinkRob wrote:Also, that screenshot wasn't anywhere near 1280x800. The image was, but the viewable area definitely wasn't...

That's exactly my point! VS 2010 makes me think that it is not WXGA but rather HVGA or something. It seems that now, after the transition to 2010, i'll be only productive at the office, where my X200s sits in the dock with a closed screen and i'm working with 23" FullHD PVA display.
And this is not only Microsoft fault but Lenovo fault as well, because nowadays software tends to consume as much space for all these toolbars as possible, leaving less or no space for the main window on a screen with such low resolution.

Vempele wrote:Hide the horizontal scrollbars, consolidate the toolbars and press Shift+Alt+Enter.

Thank you, ShiftAltEnter seems to help... wait, oh shi-- http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/6005/pen ... 7e9e2_orig

Guess I'm spoiled having a UI and OS that lets me customize every aspect of it to suit my needs...

Also, penartur: stop trusting user input like that. Users are evil, so do bounds checks and validate *all* your input data.

ThinkRob wrote:Guess I'm spoiled having a UI and OS that lets me customize every aspect of it to suit my needs...

Also, penartur: stop trusting user input like that. Users are evil, so do bounds checks and validate *all* your input data.

Where do you see any "trust"?
This is not an enterprise project, so if some user will enter some evil data, they will just get some InputFormatExceptions from int.Parse of course, if it would be an enterprise project, i would throw some nice localized exception telling the user that he/she is evil.

here's a thought...   buy an external display.

the X220 might be 1366x768 native but it does have on-board displayport capable of driving up to 2560x1600 on an external display.   you could do like many people and use the internal display when traveling and an external display at home and work.

penartur wrote: Where do you see any "trust"?
This is not an enterprise project, so if some user will enter some evil data, they will just get some InputFormatExceptions from int.Parse of course, if it would be an enterprise project, i would throw some nice localized exception telling the user that he/she is evil.

Well I don't know exactly what you're doing, but I was thinking more along the lines of bounds checking those ints.

Point taken though: where the app is going to be deployed certainly matters.

erik wrote:here's a thought...   buy an external display.

the X220 might be 1366x768 native but it does have on-board displayport capable of driving up to 2560x1600 on an external display.   you could do like many people and use the internal display when traveling and an external display at home and work.

As i have said before, at office my X200s sits in the dock paired with 23" FullHD PVA display. However, i want to be able to do my work on the go.

Well I don't know exactly what you're doing, but I was thinking more along the lines of bounds checking those ints.

As far as i can see, there is no way for malicious input to do some harm there (well, now i can see one possible option when a malicious person sends start=1 and length=4000000000, so that foreach will run until memory limits are exceeded and application is restarted). First of all, this is a technical feature which is available only to administrator (as you can see in the check on context.account.user.name); then, if some non-integer string was put in "start" or "length", there will be an InputFormatException; and if id is sort of wrong, refresher(id) will throw a NotFoundInDBException, which is later ignored on the line that didn't fit in the screen The only problem i can see with this code is that it throws rather obscure InputFormatException instead of giving some detailed localized error message to user; but again, this is not an enterprise application.
Anyway, this is a purely technical page, designed for admin to refresh some objects in registry after changing them manually in DB to avoid application restart (which causes full registry clean, and, as a result, slowliness for some time while objects are initially loaded from DB).

I'm one of those who really need at least 900 vertical pixels. May be some of you would be interested to know why (and why there's no workaround). Of course it goes without saying that I want to do my work while I'm not at home, so the fact that I can connect high-res external display is not relevant.

Now, I generate lots of LaTeX files, then convert them to postscript and view them with ghostview/ghostscript, the only postscript viewer that works well for me. (I tried a few others, and they are no go). Now, it is important for me to see the complete page on display, so I can evaluate the layout on that page. If the whole page does not fit on the display, I have to scroll up and down, but of course that does not give you the right feel how the whole page looks like, at a glance.

I used to have Toshiba with 1024 vertical pixels, that accommodated a single postscript page. everything was very nice, and then, after many years the integrated graphic adapter in my Toshiba died. At this point I have laptop with HD display (that's 768 vertical pixels), I have less than 2/3 of the whole page on the display.

I'm running Vista.

Now, ghostview is a bit nasty application. It ignores the fact that I have a hidden toolbar and just does not want to be dragged all way down. So even with a hidden toolbar, I can't quite stretch it to the max. I cannot slightly decrease the font, say, like we can do it with acrobat (but that guy only handles pdf files). ghostview has very coarse granularity: normal font, then tiny so I see the whole page, but I just can't see what's there, and very large.

The only workaround it allows is to enter the "standalone" mode when everything else is blanked out, the whole background becomes black, and then a single page on a screen appears. Then I can finally see that whole page. But then, to fix things I have to exist that mode, go back to editor, edit the text, regenerate postscript file, redisplay it, then reenter that special mode again. A real pain in the neck. Making LaTeX etc is a time-consuming process. I need an efficient work flow.

How do I know that 900 pixels will be adequate? About a year ago I wondered into a local Microcenter and they had refurbished x301. I had a flash with ghostview (you can run it from flash without installing) and a few postscript files. I plugged flush drive in, started ghostview, displayed a file. This is what I saw: it chewed up the top and bottom blank borders but the portion of the page with actual text was all there. So essentially it was something I could live with. Well, I didn't want to get that X301, because I knew intel was coming out with better processors/faster integrated graphics, didn't feel like paying over a thousand bucks for what's about to become obsolete.

So the bottom line is that I"m looking for a little machine, ideally under 3.5 lb,with 900 vertical pixels. seems like t420s is a bit too large for me. Don't know however if x220 would be OK or the fonts would be too small. In case of X301 it was legible, it was OK, not great but OK. But the same resolution on x220 will have smaller fonts (since the whole screen is smaller). Ideally I would like to have 13 inch display with HD+. I guess as a last resort I'll get MacBook Air and run windows on it. But I'm still gonna wait a bit if there's anything from Lenovo shows up.