A poll for laptop owners


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If you have several minutes, please, reboot your laptop into BIOS and say if the following things are possible:

1) Can you change the display brightness?

2) Can you enable/disable Wi-Fi and BlueTooth (verify by booting into Windows)?

3) Can you enable/disable touchpad (if your laptop has a hot button for that)?

4) Can you switch between the internal display and the external one?

5) Does the display go off if you close the cover but not completely (i.e. leaving an inch or two aperture)

I'm asking this question because some laptops enable these features only if 1) you're running Windows 2) have appropriate drivers installed (Sony) - that's utterly inconvenient and in case your laptop manufacturer goes out of business or stops supporting your laptop, these features may stop working in the next version of Windows.

Please, don't forget to mention your laptop model.

Thank you very much.

A sample answer:

Dell Inspiron 11-3137 (not valid, just an example):

1) Yes

2) Yes; N/A (no hw switch)

3) No

4) Yes

5) Yes

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Lenovo Thinkpad T440s (and my older T410s)

 

1. Yes

2. Yes

3. Yes (no switch however, just setting)

4. Yes (I can specify which one boots first when an external is connected but not completely disable the built in one).

5. No. Stays on all the way till 5mm or so.

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1) Yes
2) Yes. However bluetooth has no hardware switch, seems to be Windows driver based.

3) NA\no switch
4) No monitor to test, but there is a button.
5) Yes

 

** wifi light stays orange in BIOS and Ubuntu (suggesting its turned off), turns white (on) after Windows 8 starts booting.

 

HP Pavilion TS 15-N088CA Notebook PC TS=Touch

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May I ask why you're looking in BIOS? Windows has most of these settings built into the OS.

 

 

I'm guessing he's considering Linux as an option or some other alt OS 

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I'm guessing he's considering Linux as an option or some other alt OS 

Exactly!

 

Besides running Windows without additional drivers and applications results in a considerably faster and stabler system.

 

I recently set up a Toshiba laptop for my friend, and his hardware buttons only work after installing 350MB of drivers (Toshiba Value-on Addon plus Toshiba bluethooth stack plus Bluethooth drivers) - you can imagine the laptop become quite slower after that.

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Exactly!

 

Besides running Windows without additional drivers and applications results in a considerably faster and stabler system.

 

I recently set up a Toshiba laptop for my friend, and his hardware buttons only work after installing 350MB of drivers (Toshiba Value-on Addon plus Toshiba bluethooth stack plus Bluethooth drivers) - you can imagine the laptop become quite slower after that.

How slow a laptop do you have for drivers of all things to impact your performance negatively?

 

Maybe it's just me, but I prefer to run Windows with all drivers and applications I need installed. The drivers to get all of the features and performance out of the hardware, the applications installed to do what I want without having to mess with portable apps.

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Consumers buy garbage, manufacturers keep producing garbage. i7s with mechanical hard drives, ultra-low-end videocards slower than IGPs and with gigabytes of VRAM, touchpads with the dumbest most-innatural gestures, HD audio cards with wrong pinouts that require custom drivers to work (that ofc are never updated again), hundreds of megabytes of drivers loaded for bluetooth or hardware buttons that often aren't even present, all sort of unnecessary wifi/camera/dvd/burning garbageware. The PC market has basically been inkjet-ified, cheap garbage that works like crap and is expected to be regularly replaced, because all most people care about are "TEH SPECS!" or the "nice case color".

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How slow a laptop do you have for drivers of all things to impact your performance negatively?

 

Maybe it's just me, but I prefer to run Windows with all drivers and applications I need installed. The drivers to get all of the features and performance out of the hardware, the applications installed to do what I want without having to mess with portable apps.

 

Without OEM garbage installed boot time is around 20 seconds. Occupied RAM: a little over 1GB.

With all the garbage installed boot time is over two minutes. Occupied RAM: a little over 2GB.

 

If it makes no difference for you, I'm glad for you. 100% of people around me prefer faster boot up and more free RAM (Firefox can easily eat 2 gigs of RAM, Chrome can easily eat all available RAM).

 

This topic is only about drivers. Let's not talk about applications here.

Consumers buy garbage, manufacturers keep producing garbage. i7s with mechanical hard drives, ultra-low-end videocards slower than IGPs and with gigabytes of VRAM, touchpads with the dumbest most-innatural gestures, HD audio cards with wrong pinouts that require custom drivers to work (that ofc are never updated again), hundreds of megabytes of drivers loaded for bluetooth or hardware buttons that often aren't even present, all sort of unnecessary wifi/camera/dvd/burning garbageware. The PC market has basically been inkjet-ified, cheap garbage that works like crap and is expected to be regularly replaced, because all most people care about are "TEH SPECS!" or the "nice case color".

 

I don't see a vote up button. This is exactly what this topic is about. I want my PC to work right away without all OEM BS installed.

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I don't see a vote up button. This is exactly what this topic is about. I want my PC to work right away without all OEM BS installed.

That's why I always check the manufacturer website for drivers (to see which components were used: ALPS, ELANTECH, CONEXANT, CMEDIA and many others are a big NO) and for the user manual (to see the BIOS settings) so I know more of what I'm getting. If you are registered on Amazon you can try asking questions there to know which extra drivers are required for the laptop to work.

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Sounds like no one else owns a laptop. Sigh. I thought there would be like dozens of answers.

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Sounds like no one else owns a laptop. Sigh. I thought there would be like dozens of answers.

 

You realize people need a pen and paper for this, which is likely why nobody is doing it. They need to write down the 5 questions you want answered, reboot the system, find and write down the answers, then reboot again and type what they wrote down and submit it... Or they need a laptop and secondary system, together. Also don't forget most if not all windows 8 machines have UEFI, not a BIOS, which is a confusing menu-mess to get into. 

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You realize people need a pen and paper for this, which is likely why nobody is doing it. They need to write down the 5 questions you want answered, reboot the system, find and write down the answers, then reboot again and type what they wrote down and submit it... Or they need a laptop and secondary system, together. Also don't forget most if not all windows 8 machines have UEFI, not a BIOS, which is a confusing menu-mess to get into. 

 

They just have to take a picture of his questions with their smart phones;.

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I recently set up a Toshiba laptop for my friend, and his hardware buttons only work after installing 350MB of drivers (Toshiba Value-on Addon plus Toshiba bluethooth stack plus Bluethooth drivers) - you can imagine the laptop become quite slower after that.

Wat.

 

Buddy, storage space doesn't impact system speed.

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Lenovo Thinkpad T440s (and my older T410s)

 

1. Yes

2. Yes

3. Yes (no switch however, just setting)

4. Yes (I can specify which one boots first when an external is connected but not completely disable the built in one).

5. No. Stays on all the way till 5mm or so.

Lenovo Thinkpad T440p (and my older T400)

1. Yes

2. Yes

3. Yes (no switch however, just setting)

4. Yes (I can specify which one boots first when an external is connected but not completely disable the built in one).

5. No. Stays on all the way till 5mm or so.

Was faster to quote than to type it all out.

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Also, OP if you used Neowin's poll function it would be easier. Like others said, a lot of us are using UEFI now.

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Wat.

 

Buddy, storage space doesn't impact system speed.

I had the same experience with my Toshiba. It's not the size; it's all the third-party stuff included in the installers, which you need to have to control things (ie. power plan settings, volume buttons/wheel). It's either you use Toshiba's software (which must communicate with internal hardware on the logic board at quite a low level), or don't get the functionality at all. Basically after installation/restart, you have about 10 extra things appear in your task tray and some 'control center' appear on your Desktop, all adding about a minute or two to the boot time (if you don't have an SSD drive).

 

Thankfully other vendors allow you to run Windows 'clean'.

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this thread is asking me to do something that sounds exhausting.

Im quite lazy in the morning.

Maybe I'll reconsider after I have had my 2-3 Diet Cokes, (no I wont)

Just ditto what Roger H. said - I have a T430.

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I hate to break it to you but installing a third party driver for something like Bluetooth is no different than using the drive that's included in the Windows installation media.  It's just one got included and the other didn't.  They're both still getting loaded into memory.  As for hardware buttons, it's normal that buttons that do things that aren't standard would need a separate driver to control them.

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