Author: Adam Fowler

Lenovo Yoga 900 Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

A new 13.3″ laptop from Lenovo arrived for me, so I thought I’d put it through it’s paces and see how it compared. Don’t confuse this with the Yoga 900S which is due out soon

The laptop arrived in a simple plain white but stylish looking box:

IMG_20160208_140632

Inside, was a silver Lenovo Yoga 900. It could have been gold, or orange like my older Yoga Pro 2 which I’m a huge fan of, but the silver is still very nice. The Yoga 900 follows on from the Yoga Pro 3, which I reviewed and compared to the Yoga Pro 2. The Yoga 900 is more of a refresh to the Yoga Pro 3, providing an i series Intel CPU rather than the M – (more power!) at the cost of a little more weight and thickness. Regardless of this, it’s still a really thin and light laptop, which I’d prefer to have the extra power of an i5 or i7 CPU in anyway.

It’s still a very slick looking consumer laptop, just like it’s predecessors. This has already ended up being my primary laptop to use at home on the couch!

20160215_171014Lenovo Yoga 900

Let’s have a look at the various hardware aspects:

Keyboard/Trackpad: Nothing much has changed with the keyboard, and that’s a good thing. One of the first settings I change in the BIOS is to toggle the top row of keys to be function keys primarily (F1-F12) as I tend to use these more than the other options such as screen brightness or volume. Personally, this style of keyboard I find very quick to type on – the keys aren’t very clicky, but are spaced out enough and still give enough tactile feedback to make typing smooth and fast for my style. Keyboard is backlit and has the normal high/low/off options.

The trackpad doesn’t have dedicated buttons, but is still nice enough to use. As you can tell from the picture below, my greasy mitts quickly left a mark on the trackpad, but that can be easily wiped off. Looking at someone with a more professional review and getting paid to do it, they had similar marks so I don’t feel as bad :) This is the case for most laptops these days anyway.

20160215_170838Keyboard and Trackpad

Screen: This is a very glossy screen. It was hard to take a picture of it on a good angle due to the reflection, but that was only while taking the photo. It wasn’t actually as bad while using it. The screen resolution is a very high 3200×1800, very clear, crisp and bright. My picture doesn’t really do it justice! Touch screen too, so if you flip the lid into tablet mode, you can easily navigate around or read an ebook.

20160215_170950Yoga 900 Screen

20160215_170756Yes, I do like what I see!

Ports: On the right side, there’s power, the setup/bios button, orientation lock, audio out and a USB 3 port:

20160215_171109Yoga 900 right side ports

On the left side, we have a power cable (same as Yoga 3) which doubles as a USB 2 port, a USB 3 port, a USB Type-C port and a SD Card slot:

20160215_171052Yoga 900 left side ports

It was at this stage I was wondering what happened to video out. This was the first laptop I’d had with the USB Type-C, so my suspicions were that this new port was the answer – and it is. USB Type-C is forming to be the new de facto standard USB port. Apple Macs already have it, Windows Lumia 950/950XL phones do too, along with a bunch of other new devices. It pushes though audio and video as well as data (I know, audio and video ARE a type of data) which means this single port can do a lot. Even better, a cable or device plugged into this port will work either way around, so no longer will you need to hope you’ve got that USB stick the right way around. To top it off, it’s twice as fast as USB 3 at 10Gbps.

Other Hardware: Of course there’s the watch style hinge, which still works as solidly as it did on the Yoga Pro 3, it’s hard not to notice it:

20160215_171033

Yoga Pro 900 hinge

There’s also two JBL speakers on the base of the unit which provide some rather decent stereo sound, which end up behind the top of the screen when in tablet mode:

20160215_171150Yoga 900 speaker

As I mentioned before, this is still a very light and thin laptop at 324W x 225H x 14.9D mm – much thinner than the new SurfaceBook Pro as a comparison:

20160215_171237SurfaceBook vs Yoga 900

All the tech specs are available from Lenovo, but the model I have contains:

  • Intel® Core™ 6th Gen i5-6200U Processor (also available in i7)
  • 13.3″ QHD+ (3200×1800) Display
  • Intel HD Graphics 520 processor
  • 8GB, PC3-12800 1600MHz LPDDR3 (16GB exists, but not available in AU yet)
  • 256GB SSD (512GB option)
  • Li-polymer, 4-cell (66Wh – Up to 9 hours) battery

Quite decent specs! It is only $200AU more for the i7 which you should consider if you need the extra grunt, or want a bit more longevity out of the laptop.

Usage: I set up the laptop with my Microsoft account, and tried a little Hearthstone with both the touchpad and touch. Worked perfectly. Battery life seemed to be really good, as I had been carrying it around in my bag for a week before getting the chance to play, and it was at around half charge – and lasted about 3 hours. Hearthstone pushes the laptop a fair bit, so I wasn’t expecting to get that close to 4.5 hours.

From what I’d want from a regular use laptop (that’s not a gaming laptop, or crazy high specc’d with the matching size and weight), the Yoga 900 ticks all the boxes – but just make sure you invest in something like a USB Type-C to HDMI type connector if you need to do video out, so you can plug into everything else you have.

Should You Buy It? On this one, I’m going to say most likely “yes”. I’d suggest this over the Yoga Pro 3 due to the newer and better CPU. It’s at quite a reasonable price considering the US$ for Australians at $2199, and in the US it’s currently $1099. The screen doesn’t detatch, but to me this is unnecessary if you can fold it over into tablet mode and still have a powerful, light and thin device to use compared to the SurfaceBook. The upcoming Yoga 900S is going to be less powerful with the Core M cpu, so I’d only pick that if you had very basic requirements and really wanted a ridiculously thin laptop. Also Intel’s 7th gen CPU isn’t due until late 2016, and even then it’ll take a while to turn up in different devices – so you’re future proofed for a while.

Got any questions or comments? Ask and I’ll do my best to answer!

WOL And Reboot Over Multiple Subnets With SCCM

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Running a Wake On LAN can be tricky if you’ve got lots of subnets to worry about. A magic packet will only work in the local subnet unless you happen to have complete access to your entire network and make some router changes.

There’s also ‘Wake Up Proxy‘ which was added to Configuration Manager that can potentially work too as it’s peer to peer and clients try to wake each other up, but won’t work in a lot of scenarios such as 802.1X.

In light of these, I wrote a script that was a mashed up version of a few things I could find and accomplish the task of sending WOL packets to each subnet I cared about.

What this script does:

  • Pulls computers and in turn, MAC addresses from a pre-created SCCM collection.
  • Checks each computer to see if it’s online
  • If online, it will trigger a reboot countdown of 5 minutes, with a warning prompt
  • If offline, it will send a WOL magic packet to the computer

This is valuable to me for software installs that require no user logged onto a computer. It will leave all computers at the login screen, ready for software installs.

This only works in a single subnet though, so the next trick is to set this up on a server in each subnet as a scheduled task. Each server is configured to check the SCCM collection of computers that exist in that subnet. Then, a master task is created that calls the task on each of the other servers:

WOL

This master task triggers all the WOL scripts, on a schedule or on demand as you wish. You need to use an account that has access on all servers required of course to be able to remotely trigger the scheduled tasks.

I’ll also note that Adam Bertram wrote a different WOL script that will find each subnet and use any PC it can find to send WOL commands to other computers which is worth checking out. It doesn’t incorporate the forced reboot, but should be modifiable to achieve that result.

The script uses the free wol.exe program from Gammadnye and is expecting to run from C:\Scripts\ but you can change that to whatever you like without breaking anything.

Download the script here (rename to .ps1)

 

Start-Transcript -path C:\Scripts\Log\wolreboot.txt
$SiteCode = ‘SCCM Site Code goes here’
$CollectionName = ‘Target collection name goes here’
#Retrieve SCCM collection by name
$Collection = GWMI -ComputerName $siteServer -NameSpace “ROOT\SMS\site_$SiteCode” -Class SMS_Collection | where {$_.Name -eq “$CollectionName”}
#Retrieve members of collection
$SMSMembers = GWMI -ComputerName $SiteServer -Namespace “ROOT\SMS\site_$SiteCode” -Query “SELECT * FROM SMS_FullCollectionMembership WHERE CollectionID=’$($Collection.CollectionID)’ order by name” | select Name

ForEach ($SMSMember in $SMSMembers){
If (test-connection $SMSMember.Name -Count 1 -quiet)
{
write-host $SMSMember.Name “Online”
$name = $smsmember.name
Start-Process Shutdown “-r -t 300 -m \\$name -c `”Initiating scheduled maintenance reboot. You have 5mins to save your before your PC will reboot`”” -NoNewWindow -Wait
}
Else
{
$a = (GWMI -ComputerName $siteServer -Class SMS_R_SYSTEM -Namespace root\sms\site_$SiteCode | where {$_.Name -eq $SMSMember.Name}).MACAddresses
$a = $a -replace ‘:’,”
foreach ($mac in $a){
C:\Scripts\\wol.exe $mac
write-host $SMSMember.name “WOL packet sent” $mac
write-host `r`n}
}
}
Stop-Transcript

Exit

Update 9th August 2016

A few changes to the script – it’ll now log via transcript, but more importantly will support SCCM client objects with multiple MAC addresses, and broadcast each found MAC address.

An Impressive Scam

Posted on by Adam Fowler

A while ago, I received a strange letter in the mail from Malaysia. I wasn’t expecting anything, so curiously opened the envelope.

Inside was a travel brochure. Made sense as it appeared to have Asian tourist destinations, and be of reasonable quality.

Front cover of brochure

Back cover of brochure

It looked legitimate. A company physical address, email address and a website (which worked at the time, now no longer exists).

Looking a bit further into the brochure, it even mentioned Australia, but also some complementary scratch cards:

Inside brochure

The final pages mentions the prizes in the competition, look at all those cool prizes!

Possible Prizes

Also in the envelope, were the two scratches mentioned above. Here’s the back of one of them:

WP_20160203_09_13_37_Rich_LI

And here’s the front after I’d scratched them:

Ingeniously, I’d apparently had 1 losing ticket, and 1 ticket that had won second prize rather than first.

All in all, it was a pretty legitimate looking scam that I have to award points for effort :)

KB3102429 Re-issued, still breaking things

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Things are getting a bit silly in the Microsoft patch world.

KB3102429 was originally released on November 17, 2015. It’s a very unexciting update for most people as it will “Update that supports Azerbaijani Manat and Georgian Lari currency symbols in Windows”. I’d be passing on that – but a lot of people have automatic approvals on any Windows Update relevant to their system. This is partly done because Microsoft used to be great at patching and testing; there was rarely an issue that made it’s way to the world. In the last year or so, that has definitely not rung true.

I’ve written about a few of these recently such as KB3114409 Causes Outlook 2010 to run in Safe Mode and Outlook Patch KB2956128 Breaks Profile Changing (and KB3054881) along with the apparent mismanagement of how these updates are handled from Microsoft. KB3102429 seems to be of a similar story.

When KB3102429 first came out, there were some weird problems that arose. The most common one was with Crystal Reports exporting to PDFs as well as some other programs, and other things broke too if you start digging around on Google with the KB3102429 search.

Stranger still, is that Microsoft have now re-relesaed the same KB on the 19th January 2016 with the generic expalantion of ‘Install this update to resolve issues in Windows.’ – something I’d hope all patches do :)

This now means that WSUS is aware of two patches with the same name – even more confusion!

kb3102429

I have had reports of weird Outlook visualisation problems on random computers, which has taken multiple reboots to clear. This was the only patch that was applied to the PC before the issue occured.

Without knowing what this patch does beyond the original November desription, and appearing to have no security impact – I’d suggest uninstalling. If you have any information to share on this, please do!

 

Intel Skylake CPU Bug

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Back in Mid December 2015, it was reported on Intel Communities that a group had potentially found a bug on Intel’s 6th generation CPU, codenamed Skylake. It was discovered by running certain Prime95 tests, which is a program that stress tests the CPU. When the bug is triggered, which happens sometime during the test (can be quick, can take a long time) the PC will freeze completely.

This sounds very worrying from the outset, as over the years Intel have been caught with a few different CPU bugs; back in 1994 was the first Pentium CPU’s FPU bug (I had one of these CPUs!) which caused a CPU recall, and for me personally, one racing game I couldn’t play. There was also the 1998 Pentium F00F bug, which was rather widespread.

Since the 90’s though, Major Intel CPU bugs have been very quiet. That was until 2014, when a TSX bug was discovered on Haswell and Broadwell CPUs. As it was a hard-coded bug, Intel just disabled the TSX functionality altogether – which was better than the alternative of leaving the bug in place.

There are hundreds of smaller bugs found in Intel CPUS (and AMD for that matter) but they’re usually minor, fixable or only under rare conditions. I couldn’t find a list of these bugs, just random references scattered over the internet – so if anyone can, please share!

Now, the Skylake Bug (no official name, so I’ll call it that) has been found, but doesn’t seem to be causing too much dramas. There’s no reports of problems in day to day usage, but even better is that Intel has worked out what causes the bug, and is liaising with motherboard manufacturers to push out BIOS updates to fix it. At this stage, I can’t find out if it’s disabling the feature, working around it or actually applying code and fixing it.

The first known motherboard manufacturuer to release a patch (in Beta currently) is MSI who have released the patch for two of their newer motherboards. We should see a lot more BIOS updates coming soon from all manufacturers, but the BIOS is probbaly the least patched component of a PC due to the risk and manual work required (i.e. it won’t happen by Windows Updates unless you have a Microsoft piece of hardware).

The last public comment I could find from Intel on providing more communication on this issue was that ‘by the end of this month’ (i.e. January 2016) a specification update will be communicated, ‘which will include information on this issue’.

As a side note, I thought I’d try to replicate this bug on my Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 260 but could not reproduce after waiting a few hours. I’d already applied a BIOS update after receiving the hardware, but it’s unlikely that already contained the fix.