Ask HN: Is this new ThinkPad E14 worth it to bother with warranty?
So I bought a new ThinkPad E14 Gen2 for 560 euros in the Baltic market. It has 15.2 GB of usable RAM instead of 16GB stated and 930GB SSD instead of 1Tb stated by the vendor mdata.lt. No wonder they were reluctant for me to check the SSD storage upon delivery. Hope that they go bankrupt and hang their useless selves in theirs useless offices.
It also has a backlit keyboard, aluminum casing on top and probably PC + ABS casing on the bottom, AMD 3 4300U 4 core CPU, Windows10 pre-installed, 2 year warranty.
I can buy a refurbished T480 for ~500 euros with the same SSD and RAM + 2 year warranty for the Thinkpad and 6 month warranty for the battery from another vendor. Or a new L14 G1 with 8gb RAM, 256 GB SSD, AMD Ryzen 5 6 core and backlit keyboard for ~670 euros (no soldered RAM).
Should I bother to send this E14 for incorrect specs (the discrepancy in which basically may not matter much for me for now)?
(
21 comments
| on HN
)
Because the OS shows you drive capacity in power of two units, while the drive manufacturers advertise drive capacity in power of ten units. And the small difference in size between the two units adds up as the size of the drive grows.
A power of ten 1T size drive is about 930GB of space when measured using power of two units. Hard drive manufacturers have been using power of ten units for advertising capacity for about 25 years now.
https://superuser.com/questions/915238/what-is-this-recovery...
All GPU's need memory to store the frame-buffer. For video cards, the memory is on the card, so no system RAM needs to be reserved. For integrated GPU's, part of system memory is reserved for the GPU (as it would otherwise have no frame-buffer).
As for the SSD it comes down to the units used by HDD and SSD manufacturers vs the ones used by operating systems, which is indeed misleading and bordering on fraud imho. But, again, your laptop certainly do contain a 1TB drive and you will find the same discrepancy in reported capacity even if you buy a 1TB nvme drive and install it yourself.
Your reaction to this is off-base, and wishing ill on anyone for a rash misconception is a bad habit to get into. Roll with it, if you need more storage then upgrade to a 1920gb (2tb in Big Box stores) SSD instead.
I am worried a bit that even under rather small load like opening folders and checking sound/video palyback, the vent grid on the bottom of this new E14 (which doesn't have a vent grid in the side) gets rather warm, so I need to constantly use the external cooling pad.
P.S. Ok, my reaction to this is 95% off-base and a bad habit to get into, but the implicit on-site idiotic circus that led me to buying from this vendor may overweigh by the remaining 5%, so a deeper awareness can also benefit to everyone.
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/why-laptop-parts-soldered-instead-...
Enjoy your new laptop. Thinkpads are awesome.