Lenovo L430 Review

Recently to replace my HP6560b notebook, I purchased a Lenovo L430. It looks like this:

Lenovo L430 Notebook

and it's specifications are:

• 14" AntiGlare LCD monitor
• i5-2520M Processor,
• 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM (upgraded to 8GB),
• 320/7200 HDD,
• Multi-Burner,
• HD Graphics 3000,
• Bluetooth,
• Fingerprint reader,
• 720p Camera,
• ABGN Wireless,
• WWAN,
• Card Reader,
• Windows 7Professional 64,
• 6 Cell battery (max 7.5 hours run time),
• 1 Year return to depot warranty
• GPS 

It has the same sturdy feel and build that all Lenovo notebooks do, a legacy of the IBM heritage Lenovo has successfully perpetuated. I'm absolutely delighted by the keyboard on this device - it is the best notebook keyboard I have ever used. I'm comparing it to the following notebooks: HP 6560b, HP tc4400, Lenovo R500, MacBook Air, various ASUS laptops, various Toshiba laptops, Lenovo X1 and HP 6730b. Obviously I get around on the notebook scene :-)

The touchpad and other pointing device are efficient and work well. I was surprised and impressed also by the efficacy of the wireless - it has been more efficient and connects at higher speed than my other notebooks, including the HP6560b. The built in GPS is pretty neat too - although I'm not sure what the hell I'm going to do with it :-) Generally I remove a lot of the pre-installed software, but I have of course left the Lenovo software, which is gradually improving all the time and it's usefulness is improving as well. I installed 1.6GB of updates in the first two hours of having this laptop which is indicative of Windows 7 out of the box. I had a spare 4GB of RAM laying around so I installed that for fun.

Overall I've found this notebook to be quite fast in general usage, quick to boot and efficient in it's power usage. I've used this notebook all day, and by the time I left the office still had 20% of battery available. This is doing web browsing, Excel, file moves etc. The L430 also has USB3 and an always on USB port I used to good example as I travelled between client offices today to charge my HTC One X. I'm looking forward to my docking station arriving so I can plug it into my dual 22" LED monitors. For about $1200 for the laptop and the docking station together these laptops are great value. I'm not sure how long they'll be around for - pretty they'll be discontinued soon in this trend of everything going to Windows 8. Grab one if you can :-)

Virtualisation in the server space

Recently I've had the chance to view VMWare (www.vmware.com) and HP's (www.hp.com.au) entries in the virtualisation market - through VMWare's ESXi server and HP's Blade servers and SAN systems. Prior to this presentation I'd only looked into virtualisation a little bit, concerns for server redundancy and the like preventing me from spending a lot of time looking into it, and also, the size and scope of the organisation I work for is insufficient for such things - or so I had thought.

I have about 10 servers under my direct control and of these, 6 could be virtualised. Thinking about it going forward, in 3 to 5 years when these servers are due for replacement, buying 2 servers and a small SAN will cost less than the 6 new servers and provide the same services. At the end of the day, I think that's what it is all about - same services (or better), with uptime being up in the 5 nines range and cost-effective hardware/software. I've been a fan of VMWare's virtualisation stuff for several years, solely through the VMWare desktop range. Running multiple operating systems and applications on a single development machine was lots of fun. Back in the day (5 odd years ago) RAM was pricey and so was disk space so the VM's were pretty little.

Now you can run whole server instances in a file and then slip that file between servers depending on load requirements and whatever other fancy things you want to do - such as bringing one physical server down for updates and maintaining all your VM's on another server. Absolutely amazing stuff - especially when you combine it with blade technology and have dozens of servers sharing one big SAN all in the same rackspace. Truly incredible. Pretty complicated too I think as well, remembering where everything is going.

The new Blade servers from HP look very impressive too - they've done a lot of work on cooling and on cabling and everything is redundant with backup from at least one module exactly the same. Of course, when I saw those big fancy Blade servers I thought to myself - why virtualise? You could have a netboot install of a server ready to rock at a moment's notice and be back up and running in a very short time, especially if you combine the server with Microsoft's ASR technology and tape backup. There is so much chance for overkill it's every enterprise geek's wet dream. There were quite a few geeks at the presentation that looked like they were in their happy place that's for sure.

The most important thing I took away from it all was that virtualisation in the server space has come a long way since I last looked into it and the offerings from both VMWare and HP are quite spectacular. Given my quite low funds though - I'm now looking into Linux's XEN virtualisation. If you're more interested in this (any virtualisation for that matter) there is a lot of stuff on the interwebs. Mind you don't clog up your tubes! :-)