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Lenovo Y40–80 gaming laptop

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Below is a review written by Mason Baxter – his first review of a product, as well as his first article!  He is a 14 year old student (at time of writing, now 15) in South Australia, interested in different technologies, games and sports. 

Introduction

I had the chance to test Lenovo’s Y40-80 gaming laptop for a few days. This is my first gaming laptop experience, so I was really excited to see how it worked with it’s dedicated graphics card. Here’s what I thought about it.

lenovo2Overhead photo comparing to size of a Surface Pro 3

Design

I loved the look of this gaming laptop at first sight. The carbon fibre look finish on the outer of this laptop not only feels great but it is appealing to the eye. This design makes the Lenovo badge stand out and give it a nice touch. When I opened the lid I saw very nice a clean look on the interior. The palm rest was made of a smooth material that was very comfortable when I typed.

Ports

For such a small and compact gaming notebook, the Y40 has lots of ports. On the left side there are a pair of USB 3.0 ports, an expandable gigabit Ethernet port, a full-sized HDMI port and a power port. On the right side there is a one USB 2.0 port, a 4 in 1 card reader, a S/PDIF jack, microphone/ headphone jack and a kensington lock. Having the full-size HDMI and Ethernet port were a welcome addition, so you don’t need additional adapter cables to connect the network or an external display, all other ports are well placed.

lenovo3Left hand side – Power, Full size Ethernet and HDMI ports, 2 x USB 3.0

lenovo4Right hand side – 4 in 1 card reader, an S/PDIF jack, microphone/ headphone jack, USB 2.0 port and Kensington lock

Keyboard and touch pad

I am currently using HP Pavilion X2 for school and I thought the keyboard was ok until I used the Y40.  The keyboard on the Y40 was very comfortable and easy to type on. After about an hour of gaming I did notice that the keyboard was getting warm in the centre region, but it didn’t get too hot. My only disappointment was that the keyboard wasn’t backlit, as it is in the Y50 (which is another Lenovo gaming laptop with higher specs).

The touch pad was great to use and quite responsive, I also found it easy to use with the windows gestures for scrolling and pinch to zoom.

Display

The Y40 only has a 1080P resolution compared with the 4K resolution on the Y50. While it would be good to have the higher resolution at least all of the games rendered perfectly at 1080p. I believe that even though there is a webcam in the top of the screen, the bezel could have been thinner to maximize the screen size.

Battery

This battery lasts on average 5 – 6 hours if you are using it for everyday activities such as browsing the web, checking for emails or finding out the latest news. But if you are looking to use this laptop for gaming you are only going to get 1 – 2 hours of it, so make sure you have a charger at handy if you’re looking to game.

Graphics / gaming

This gaming laptop is fitted with AMD Radeon R9 M275 GPU with 2GB of ram and it also comes with an onboard Intel(R) HD Graphics 5500. After realising this laptop had two GPU’s I wanted to test which was more powerful. Using 3Dmark, I gathered the results shown in the table below:

                Intel(R) HD Graphics 5500/ AMD Radeon R9 M275

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As you can see from the results, the AMD Radeon outperformed the onboard GPU on all of the tests, which would make sense as it has 2GB of dedicated RAM. When I played games like CSGO (Counter Strike Global Offence) or Garry’s mod I could run those games using the highest settings. I didn’t notice any lag at all and the game play was very smooth. I played the same games with the AMD Radeon disabled and there was a noticeable reduction in the quality of the gaming experience.

Whilst having a SSD hard drive would have been great, the SATA 2.5″, Hybrid drive: (1TB 5400 rpm + integrated 8GB NAND flash) provided a great storage capacity and good speed when gaming.

Final results

In conclusion if you are looking to for an entry level gaming laptop that is compact and well-priced, then this laptop is the one for you. The Y40 has a fantastic keyboard, long lasting battery for everyday tasks and has a solid gaming performance. However I wish that the keyboard was backlight and that the bezel was smaller to maximize the screen size. But overall I would recommend this to people looking for a nice gaming laptop at an affordable price.

Lenovo5Open view – 14”FHD screen, 1.0-megapixel, 720p HD camera, fixed focus, with dual array microphone

Thanks Mason for the review!

The Y series of gaming laptops from Lenovo are available here.

Line Breaks In Active Directory PowerShell

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Quick tip today about line breaks / carriage returns.

If you want to add multi-line values to an Active Directory field – (e.g. the notes field), it’s not plainly obvious as to how you can type this in a PowerShell command.

One way to pass through an ‘enter’ value is by using a line break. This can be achieved by using:

`r`n 

Example:

Get all the users who are in Australia (based on their Country/region field being set to Australia), and update the street address two lines of BEWARE and MONSTERS:

get-aduser -properties * -filter {country -eq “Australia”} | foreach {set-aduser $_ -streetaddress “BEWARE`r`nMONSTERS”}

There are no spaces required, it will just drop the text after `r`n to the next line.

BEWARE

If you want to update the notes field, it’s a bit tricker, as you have to use the “-replace” parameter:

-Replace @{Info=”BEWARE`r`nMONSTERS“}

Lenovo ThinkPad Stack Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

The ThinkPad Stack. It’s a new product set from Lenovo which takes a little explaining to realise what it is, but also has plenty of potential use cases.

What Is A ThinkPad Stack?
Follow me on this explanation: It’s a series of devices that can be stacked together, for use by one or more computers.  Each device can run standalone, or somewhat in tandem with each other.
Currently, there are 4 possible components to the ThinkPad Stack – each can be purchased separately, or you can buy the whole kit (currently for $389.97US).

20150821_165810ThinkPad Stack Box

The stack of devices can be placed in any order – they all have pins to connect device above and below. Connectivity through the pins (named ‘pogo’ pins) is primarily for power, but will also pass through data. On top of that, each device has magnets on top and below, so they won’t fall off and become quite stable when stacked – but also gives the option of quickly taking one device off if required.

What Are The Components That Make Up A ThinkPad Stack?

Battery Pack – a 10,000mAH battery pack is the main way of providing power to everything in the stack. It takes in power via Micro USB, and has two USB A (rectangle) ports so you can charge phones, tablets or anything else that can run off USB. It will also power the other devices in the stack.

Bluetooth Speaker – Running Bluetooth 4.0 and 2 x 2 watt speakers, along with a microphone, this speaker can be used wirelessly or wired via a standard 3.5mm audio jack. It has it’s own battery which will provide up to 8 hours of use. Paired with the dedicated Battery Back, it provides up to 48 hours of use. At a guess I’d say the Bluetooth Speaker has a 2500 mAh battery, but couldn’t find any technical details to confirm. This can also be charged seperately through Micro USB if not connected to the battery pack in stack mode.

Hard Drive – a 1 terrabyte hard disk drive (platter, not SSD) is encased within this component. This isn’t upgradable – there are no visible screws or ways to open any of the modules. It is accessable through either the USB 3 port (cable included), or via the router if you’re connected to that.

Router – A standard router that can be used in a few scenarios (bridged, gateway or Wireless ISP): Connect an ethernet cable into the back, and have a wireless access point for internet/network access or connect a 3G/4G dongle via the USB port to share internet to connected devices. The router supports both 2.4G and 5G WiFi running 802.11 a/b/g/n/a.

Managing and Configuring The ThinkPad Stack

Out of the box, most of the components just work. You can download the ThinkPad Stack Assistant software for Windows, iOS or Android. If you enable advanced mode on the router, it’s managable from the url http://lenovo-stack – otherwise check out the admin user guide. It has a bunch of details about the software, and FAQs which will help you get the devices working the way you want.

20150821_165856ThinkPad Stack Unboxed

20150821_165946Size compared to an iPhone 5S

Use Cases

The ThinkPad Stack isn’t a dock replacement, nor is it a standalone PC – those are common misconceptions (which I had too!) on what the product actually is.

Here are several scenarios I can come up with, where the ThinkPad Stack would be useful:

  • Sharing a single ethernet cable to provide network/internet access amongst one or more staff (even one who may not have an ethernet port on their laptop, and forgot the dongle).
  • Centralised storage on small scale – two or three laptops can use the same 1TB storage.
  • Presenting audio/video, and putting the Bluetooth speaker in the middle of the table so everyone can hear
  • Making a call via Skype, and using the Bluetooth speaker (with built in mic) as a portable handsfree kit
  • Emergency charging for phones/tablets

I believe this product is aimed at the mobile worker – if you’re in the same office all day, this probably isn’t for you (you could definitely still make use of it though).

Other Bits

A few extra comments and info around this unit – it comes with a nice fabric pouch to carry the stack, along with cables for the hard drive, power, speaker and a power adapter. It’s surprisingly small for what it is, but I hope they release more modules – I’d recommend a small computer as one, and a monitor extender – plug in USB 3, and you can output to two separate screens. More USB ports is always handy too. I’d like to see it as a full dock replacement, or a full standalone PC.

It’s worth mentioning that there is support for 5 units max currently, which means you can add a second power brick if you really want a lot of battery life.

Overall it’s an interesting looking piece of kit, which will suit certain people in certain situations. I feel it’s well designed and built, and using the pogo pins with magnets to make stacking incredibly easy is a nice addition.

You don’t need to use a Lenovo laptop to connect to these devices either, they’re rather generic.

Got any questions about it? Feel free to post in the comments below.

Lenovo supplied the Thinkpad Stack for this review.

Intel Compute Stick

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Thanks to Intel, I’ve been mucking about with the Intel Compute Stick. It’s a mini PC a bit bigger than a normal USB stick, with a HDMI port out and highly portable.

The stick turned up in a nice little box, around the size of a mobile phone box:

20150727_114948

Inside was the stick, a HDMI extender cable, a Micro USB cable for power and a power plug with USB port.

20150813_123506

Banana for scale of course.

Plugging it in and getting it going was easy, it’s the normal OOTB experience you’d get with any Windows PC. I used a Logitech keyboard/mouse combo with a bluetooth usb dongle to make things easy, and there was no special set up required – both devices just worked.

After setting it up and playing with it, I decided to try Windows 10 on it. I followed this guide, but my experience wasn’t the same – there was enough room to just upgrade without having to do extra storage stuff.

20150813_123530

Once Windows 10 was installed, the device was a bit laggy; so I installed the official Intel drivers for Windows 10 on the stick, and then it was running smoothly. That’s fair enough for a new operating system and a new device.

20150813_123555

I played around with a few apps, streaming media and so on, and the device ran really well.

If you have any questions, or want to know more about the device feel free to ask in the comments.

Two models available via Amazon:

Ubuntu: Intel Compute Stick Windows BOXSTCK1A32WFC

Windows 8.1 with Bing: Intel Compute Stick Linux BOXSTCK1A8LFCCR

Update 20th August 2015: I’ve written a much more detailed review at The Register

Adding Multiple Cloud Users to an Azure/Office 365 Security Group

Posted on by Adam Fowler

This one had me stumped for a while – how do you get a bunch of users in Office 365/Azure and then add them to a security group? This was met with the relevant tweets of frustration, such as:

After mucking around for a while, and getting Microsoft MVP David O’Brien to listen to my woes, I ended up working out a solution.

Part of my confusion was around this TechNet article for the command Add-MsolGroupMember which at the time of writing, I’m convinced is wrong. The example they give is to get a user and a group, then add the user to the group…. except, they’re used the get-msolgroup command to do so.

When I tried to switch this over to a user lookup with multiple user results, I received this error:

Add-MsolGroupMember : Cannot convert ‘System.Object[]’ to the type ‘System.Guid’ required by parameter
‘GroupObjectId’. Specified method is not supported.

Long story short, most Office 365 user/group commands I’ve come across don’t support multiple inputs, so you can’t feed a list of results through – it’s one at a time. Also, groups and users only seem to support using the Object ID of each object, so you can’t easily use names, email addresses etc. This means you’ll need to run commands to get those Object IDs based on the information you know.

To get around this, you’ll need to use the ‘foreach’ command – then it’ll go through each of your results one by one. I’ll go through this step by step:

1. Get your group:

$group = get-msolgroup | where {$_.Displayname -eq “All Office365 Users”}

Pretty self explanatory, we’re making the variable $group equal the object of the group name specified.

To check what users came back, you can just type $group

2. Get your users:

$users = get-msoluser | select userprincipalname,objectid | where {$_.userprincipalname -like “*domain.com*”}

Similar to the above, we’re making the variable $users all the users we want to add to the group, based on the User Principal Name containing “domain.com”. We’re also making sure we grab the object id of each of those users.

3. Adding the users to the group

$users | foreach {add-msolgroupmember -groupobjectid $group.objectid -groupmembertype “user” -GroupMemberObjectId $_.objectid}

This is showing the users we set earlier, then for each record, running the command ‘add-msolgroupmember’ based on the group we discovered in step 1, and the users from step2. Notice we call the Object ID for each of these objects, as the commands only support it as an identifier.

4. Check what users are in the group

get-msolgroupmember -groupobjectid $group.objectid

This will show you all the members of the group you’ve been working on.

With the above, you can use pretty much any search criteria for step 2, and add those users to your group.

Note that all the above is only for ‘In Cloud’ users, if they were on premesis and being synced to Azure AD/Office365, you’d run different commands against your on premise Active Directory environment.