![]() ![]() Several Google searches away and I’ve discovered that it was a known problem with Thinkpad (not only P53). A blank screen with fans maxed out and no reaction to any button or to power cable unplugging. One day the machine after a Windows update really got stuck during the reboot. I guess that poor machine had only the best intentions and was telling me to stop torturing it and by failing to work gave me some well-deserved leisure time. Also, after those shutdowns sometimes even booting up was a real struggle. ![]() Of course, it doesn’t help to have a good experience that it turned out that the laptop arrived with a faulty motherboard that caused all kinds of troubles among which the most painful was random shutdowns. Yeah, sure, then just run the system fix scripts and you can continue working. However, updating Windows is a thing that can be postponed only that long and when you do an update with a setup that can be seen as being a little bit exotic you might get a broken system that fails to boot up. But hey, I could disable the Nvidia GPU, then enable it, and everything would be working ok-ish again. ![]() However, Windows setup had its own problems: for some reason (to me it was not a surprise) Windows 10 could not properly handle the sleep-wake-up cycle (its a laptop after all). It was just an OEM install with all the drivers, updates, etc. It’s worth to mention that I’ve set up a Windows box after more than 10 years of not touching Windows. All because several drivers were missing (sigh). The hope was lost: I had to boot up Windows, setup WSL, and accommodate my development environment there. In a very short time, I’ve discovered that at that time it was impossible to silence the laptop to a satisfiable level: Linux just had no drivers that could silence all(!) the fans 2. When I got the laptop the first thing I’ve done was that I’ve installed Ubuntu since it is officially supported 1. And one additional requirement: I want to work with a Linux machine. Therefore, I want the laptop to be performant when needed (in this case I don’t mind it to be loud) and be as silent as possible when that can be achieved. I have some doubts that Lenovo has done the best possible job with the fans but I leave that on their conscience.Īlthough I run a lot of intensive tasks on a laptop, not all of my tasks are that demanding. By anything here I mean things like regular web browsing (looking at you JIRA), or a simple conference call (looking at you Google Meet and Zoom). I simply have to leave the room and close the door until the task is finished.Īnything that is CPU intensive makes the chip hot which spins the fans. ![]() Just imagine how loud the fans get when executing computationally intensive tasks. The laptop(!) can be so power-hungry that the charger needs to provide up to 230W(!). To plough through those tasks a year ago (in early 2020) I’ve got a top spec’ed Lenovo Thinkpad P53 laptop: Part To get my daily work done I spin many fat JVMs like Elasticsearch, Kafka, GraalVM native-image tool, docker-compose clusters, virtual machines, etc. In this post, I’ll share my setup that makes the laptop to be silent most of the time and performant when needed. However, it is just a machine and there must be several control knobs that can make the experience better. Lenovo Thinkpad P53 is a powerful laptop but a regular Linux install is just too loud for me. ![]()
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