With the 7-row to 6-row transition in 2012, the standard ThinkPad keyboard lost some keys - to be exact, the new layout has 5 keys less. The functions assigned to these keys were mostly legacy functions most people don´t use and are only needed for very specific tasks, like scroll-lock, system-request, break or pause. Also the menu key.
What you may not know however: These functions still exist, even though their names are not printed on the keys they are now assigned for. Therefore, they are hidden functions now.
On Ivy-Bridge, Haswell and Broadwell ThinkPads, and propably future generations with the same layout as well, these hidden functions are:
Some time ago, I wrote about my wish of a ThinkPad X350, because, at this time, there hasn’t been any ThinkPad I’d really like to replace my awesome X301 with.
This is probably one of my favorite models that was announced at CES2015. I have been waiting a long time for a ultrabook or convertible ThinkPad that came with at least 16GB of RAM. Developers that need to load a lot of programs at the same time, the ThinkPad Yoga 15 is very welcome. For example Android Studio requires at least a computer with 8GB of RAM. And then you still don’t have virtual machines of Android running in the background.
Actually there was one part of the ThinkPad lineup missing in yesterday’s announcement: The new ThinkPad Yoga. Although we did catch a glimpse of these new ThinkPad Yoga devices in the background of some hands-on videos of T450/T550, they were left out in the actual press release. It turned out that their announcement coincided with the new Lenovo Yoga release announcement.
If you have a WLAN adapter that supports U-APSD, you may have noticed you are having performance issues or latency spikes when playing games or pinging IP-addresses.
Now I confirmed these latency spikes by pinging my access point or gateway 100 times (see screenshot in red).
Now you can fix this by:
This guide will show you how to overclock your Haswell CPU using Intel Extreme Tuning Utility or also known as Intel XTU.
Note that overclocking is probably limited to 200MHz unless you use an unlocked processor.
Use undervolting and overclocking with caution. Changing the voltage to be too low can cause problems and instability.
Overvolting is very dangerous and not recommended. Note that Haswell is very sensitive to increasing voltages. This will greatly increase temperatures of the processor.
Undervolting your processor can give you very satisfying results. First of all, power consumption and temperatures will be reduced. Now in addition to that, we all know processors have a TDP cap.
The i7-4710MQ for example has a TDP cap of 47W. Now this limits our actual CPU performance. But this is more noticeable with Haswell-U processors that have a TDP cap of 15W. But as we know, undervolting reduces power, which in turn frees up a little bit of TDP headroom which might mean a slight increase of the processor multiplier or frequency in case the processor is being throttled by the TDP or firmware based TDP throttling.
Let’s get started.
Just one hour ago Lenovo announced the whole ThinkPad Ultrabook lineup for the first half of 2015. As you might have guessed, most models are mere updates of the Haswell models, as Lenovo always keeps the same design for 2 - 3 generations - but as always, not without some interesting additions. Lets take a closer look on the early 2015 ThinkPad lineup…
I recently sold my ThinkPad W530 for a second generation X1 Carbon because of problems with my back. But as I got better, I decided to buy a new W-series again.