Author: Adam Fowler

Lenovo ThinkPad P50 Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

“That’s not a laptop…. that’s a laptop.”

This is the phrase that sits in my head when I think about what the Lenovo ThinkPad P50 is. If the Yoga 900 is a Ferrari, then the P50 is a Monster Truck.

I’m getting ahead of myself here, so I’ll take a deep breath and start again.

Lenovo has released two high specc’d laptops – the ThinkPad P50 and ThinkPad P70. I was lucky enough to receive a P50 to review care of Lenovo, once I wiped the drool off my mouth.

“High specc’d” doesn’t do these laptops justice either. Although they come in a wide range of configurations, here’s what I have:

  • Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5 Processor (8MB Cache, up to 3.70GHz)
  • Windows 7 Professional 64 preinstalled through downgrade rights in Windows 10 Pro
  • 15.6″ FHD (1920×1080), anti-glare, IPS
  • 16GB DDR4-2133MHz ECC SODIMM (8GBx2)
  • NVIDIA Quadro M2000M 4GB
  • 720p HD Camera with Microphone
  • Backlit Keyboard with Number Pad – English
  • 3-button TrackPoint pointing device and 3-button multi-touch touchpad
  • Integrated Fingerprint Reader
  • Hardware dTPM Enabled
  • 1TB 5400rpm HDD
  • 256GB SSD OPAL2.0
  • 170W AC Adapter – ANZ (3pin)
  • 6 Cell Li-Polymer Battery, 90Wh
  • Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260, 2×2, Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.0

Let’s go over some of these settings.

CPU – An Intel Xeon, a server CPU in a laptop! Xeons are normally reserved for servers, but Intel has now released a line for mobile workstations. You can read Intel’s announcement here.

OS – This one came with Windows 7, but a Windows 10 Pro license. It’s now running Windows 10, but good for those who need or want to run the older but reliable Windows 7, fully supported.

Screen – 15.6″ is a decent size for a laptop. The bezel around it is reasonably thin, and the actual image quality I am impressed with. There are options for a touch screen, or a higher res 3840×2160 screen – but 1920 x 1080 has less issues at the moment, especially when remote desktopping to other servers that won’t like the super high res.

RAM – 16GB came with this, but I’ll be adding in another 16GB for a total of 32GB. The laptop can go all the way up to 64GB(!!) and has 4 RAM slots, so you can put in 4 sticks of 16GB. I’ll *only* have 4 sticks of 8GB – but this amount of RAM is great for someone looking to run a bunch of virtual machines off their PC, or do some very high end artist work (images/video/3D rendering etc).

Video Card – The Intel Xeon CPU has an onboard Intel® HD Graphics P530, but beyond that, there’s also a dedicated NVIDIA Quadro card, with 4GB of RAM attached. Not designed for gaming, but will still do a decent job of it. The Quadro card gives the laptop the ability to support “four independent displays; Max resolution: 3840×2160@60Hz (DisplayPort via Mini DisplayPort cable); 3840×2160@60Hz (Thunderbolt); 3840×2160@30Hz (HDMI)” which is a big WOW!. You will need a few different cables to make this happen, but 3 extra screens at such a high res, straight off this laptop is very impressive.

Fingerprint Reader – A simple addition, but works really well. Check out my video here.

Primary Disk – Yes that’s right, just the primary for starters since you can have up to three. I *only* have two but that’s ample for what I need. The primary disk, running the OS is a 256gb SSD. There is an even faster SSD option, the 512GB SSD running over PCIe. If you want to know what that is, put on your reading glasses and check this article out – there’s a lot to learn.

Secondary Disk – Spinning disks still have their place, and I have a 1TB HDD in this. Still fast enough for most things that don’t need the crazy SSD type speeds of reading and writing. Perfect for storing things like movies, television, and virtual machines!

Weight – As I have the bigger 6 cell battery, this weighs in at 2.67kg. It’s not designed to discreetly fit into a small bag, you can’t contain a beast like this that way!

Other things like wireless, bluetooth, backlit keyboard are all standard (although you may have noticed this is big enough to have a full keypad too!).

Let’s see some more pictures!

20160311_124430P50 170w battery pack above a normal 65w Lenovo adapter – this thing needs juice!

IMG_20160306_222121Top of the P50

IMG_20160306_222222Bottom of the P50 – dock connector visible

20160311_130144

Keyboard, trackpad, fingerprint reader – all great!

IMG_20160306_222517Backlit keyboard glowing in the dark

20160311_131102Right Hand Side – 3.5mm Audio out, 2 x USB3, Mini DisplayPort

20160311_131050Left Hand Side – ExpressCard/34 slot (above), 4-in-1 reader (MMC, SD, SDHC, SDXC) (below), Smartcard reader

20160311_131111Back of laptop – USB 3 (always on), USB 3, Ethernet, USB Type-C/Thunderbolt, HDMI, Power

Thoughts – There’s a few similar laptops in this space, but not many. These are perfect for the heavy user, and personally as an IT Pro, I love it. It has enough grunt to run up a full test environment where I can muck around with different servers and software, but all be enclosed on a device that sits on my desk, and can be moved around with ease.

It seems to be very well built and incredibly responsive when mucking around on it. I forgot to mention the battery life – I’ve left it on my desk for days unplugged, and it still has over half its battery life. The claim is “6-cell Hybrid Graphics: up to 13.2 hours” which is really good!

These aren’t cheap, but you’re paying for the high end hardware. They’re very customisable on the web though, so you can pick and choose the bits you do and don’t want.

Got any questions for me about the P50? Feel free to ask below!

IMG_20160306_222322

Update 24th May 2016

As requested in the comments, here’s the RAM latency from CPU-Z after mixing Lenovo and Kingston RAM

Untitled

Turning Out Of Office Off and On via Script

Posted on by Adam Fowler

There has been a long-lacking feature in Outlook – the ability to automatically set your Out of Office message to turn on and off on a scheduled basis.

It would be great to be able to have a bounce back on anything sent outside your working hours, but it isn’t easily possible natively unless you use a vbs script inside an Outlook rule – requiring Outlook to actually be running.

I decided to come up with my own solution. This isn’t good for individuals, but is good for centralised mailboxes, say an IT Helpdesk mailbox that you want people to know when someone will look at their request or not.

Step 1 – Set the Out Of Office message you want on your mailbox manually. Outlook, OWA, however you do it, it doesn’t matter. Your message will be saved on the server.

Step 2 – Save the script below as a .ps1, and change the variables to what you want. I have two scripts, one that enables, and the other that disables Out of Office

Step 3 – Create two Scheduled Task on a server. One will be when you want the Out of Office on, and the other when you want it off. Below I’ve created one for the ‘on’ part, which triggers weekly on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7:30am. The Off would do the same, but at 5pm.

snip1

The conditions of the Scheduled Tasks would be to run the powershell script files, again matching up the on and offs. The command to use is “powershell.exe” and the arguments pointing to the location of your newly created ps1 scripts in the format ” -file “C:\scripts\admin\Out Of Office On.ps1″ ”

snip2

The task needs to be set to ‘Run whether user it logged on or not’.

The account used to run the task needs to have the correct role based permissions to connect to Exchange, and make changes to the auto reply config.

The script will also generate an email to advise that the status of Out Of Office has been changed, pulling the value afterwards so you can check that it’s toggled correctly.

If the script doesn’t run automatically, you may need to adjust your Execution Policy settings.

That’s it. You should have two scheduled tasks that run to turn Out of Office off and on against the mailbox you want.

PowerShell Script:

#TODO – Definie Mailbox name and state enabled or disabled
$mailbox = “name”
$state = “enabled”
$exchangeserver = “exchange server name”

#Connect To Exchange PowerShell Session
$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri http://$exchangeserver/Powershell -Authentication Kerberos
Import-PSSession $session
#Turn Out Of Office On
Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration $mailbox -AutoReplyState $state
$results = Get-mailboxautoreplyconfiguration $mailbox |select Autoreplystate

#Emails the current status
send-mailmessage -to “Displayname 1 <[email protected]>” -from “Displayname 2 <[email protected]>” -subject “IT Help OOO Status” -body “The OutOf Office Message is now $results” -SmtpServer smtp.yourserver.com.au

Remove-PSSession -Session $session

 

Update 15th March 2016

I’ve also realised that Softera Adaxes which I reviewed previously, can do the above quite easily. Here’s how their scheduled tasks work, but simply put you can create a scheduled task to run on weekdays, that sets the Out of Office message and turns it on today, then off today +1 day (i.e. tomorrow), and run that daily to update the date! That’s a more elegant solution, but you need to buy Adaxes or already have it. I’m still using it and recommend it, and decided to do the above this cleaner way. This isn’t a sponsored comment :)

Windows Hello with Fingerprint Reader

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I made a very quick video showing how fast it is to log onto a Windows 10 PC that has a Fingerprint reader.

The laptop in use is a Lenovo ThinkPad P50 which I will be reviewing soon!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGBp54UALk0

I log on all the time now doing this, you can actually put your finger on at startup before seeing the lock screen and it’s even quicker.

Side note – I need something better than the Samsung Galaxy S6 to make these videos on :)

JBL Charge 2 Plus

Posted on by Adam Fowler

It was time to get my first decent quality Bluetooth speaker. There is such a huge range in quality and price of these, with very little technical information easily available. Do I get a $79 speaker with pretty LCD colors on the front, or pay double for a brand name?

The price range goes from a sub $50AU point,  up to several hundred dollars! After asking for advice on Twitter and getting a bunch of different answers, I’d settled on the JBL Flip 3.

This changed when I walked into the store and saw a different JBL on special for $40 more, but $80 off the regular price. More googling and review reading in store locked in my decision to now get the JBL Charge 2 Plus – even though something inside me was slightly concerned about 2 being less than 3.

Luckily, someone had decided to video a comparison of the two units in question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmSppzPAzuQ

The reviewer chose the JBL Flip 3 due to it’s ‘loop’ cord. Not wanting to attach the speaker to my pants, I went against his recommendation and stuck with the JBL Charge 2.

20160220_071458JBL Charge 2 Plus in box

After getting my new purchase home, it was time to test it out:

20160220_071941JBL Charge 2 Plus not in box

All that was in the box was the speaker, some wrapping, and the charger cable:

20160220_071919Orange you glad there’s a charging cable?

The top of the speaker has the following easy to push buttons – power, bluetooth (for syncing), volume down, volume up, party mode and the call button:

20160220_071952Buttons with battery gauge dots in the middle

I didn’t test the party mode as it was only me, and that didn’t make for a fun party. I believe it lets you have multiple devices connected at once, and whoever plays music can take control from the last person playing music.

On the bottom reverse side, was the Micro USB in, Aux In, and USB Type-A out. You can charge other devices from this, which is handy if you want to leave a cheap tablet connected for a cool jukebox:

20160220_072024Bottom reverse of JBL Charge 2 Plus

Also cool were the side bass speakers, which visibly vibrate in excitement of the music they push out:

20160220_072009One of the side base speakers

The unit itself is quite hefty and solid feeling – putting it inside a pillow case would turn it into a very strong weapon.

Connectivity via Bluetooth was incredibly easy to do – press the Bluetooth button on the speaker, then go to your other device and scan for Bluetooth devices. Selecting ‘JBL Charge 2 Plus’ connected them together without any pins or codes required.

The sound itself that came out of the speaker was unlike cooked pasta – crisp. I was actually impressed with what I heard, exceeding my expectations of what a small speaker could do.

The speaker also functions as a speaker phone, which I also haven’t tested but assume it works. If someone really wants me to, I’ll call them and they can hear if I sound OK, then report back.

Despite not having a comparison for myself, I’d definitely recommend this speaker to someone having a look. How it compares to the JBL Flip 3 I’m not sure, but it does come with a loop.

Azure AD Connect 1.1.105.0

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Today a new version of Azure AD Connect was released – v1.1.105.0 (even though the site says 2/16/2016, but wasn’t there yesterday!)

The download link is here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=47594

If you want a reminder on what Azure AD Connect is, Microsoft have a great article here. It replaced Dirsync and AADSync

It’s worth the upgrade, full release notes are here but the big change in my opinion is:

New preview features:

  • The new default sync cycle interval is 30 minutes. Used to be 3 hours for all earlier releases. Adds support to change the scheduler behavior.

30 minutes is much nicer to wait for a change (this doesn’t include passwords) than 3 hours.

Note that this used to be controlled from a scheduled task in DirSync and AADSync, but now runs as the Microsoft Azure AD Sync service. If you want to check that your sync has now changed to 30 minutes, run the PowerShell command  “Get-ADSyncScheduler” and you should see the values of AllowedSyncCycleInterval and CurrentlyEffectivSyncCycleInterval both as 30 minutes:

azure2

If you’ve already got the connector installed, it will just install over the top using your existing settings. It just requires re-entry of your Azure AD credentials for syncing, and took me about two minutes to run.

azure1Success!

Update: 1st March 2016

Due to a bug with the time, version 1.1.110.0 has been released. Please use that instead of 1.1.105.0