The Last Psion | Alex

Recently bought myself a second-hand #ThinkPad T480. A very good laptop, except for two things.

The first is the worst IPS display I have ever seen. I've found an ICC profile that improves things a bit. But it's still somehow manages to be both under-saturated and over-saturated.

The second is a pair of anaemic speakers. I tried Easy Effects, which uses LV2 plugins. It does vastly improve the sound, but it uses a lot of CPU. So, I've switched to JamesDSP - almost as good as Easy Effects and uses a fraction of the CPU. Plus it handles profile switching much better than Easy Effects - I can have separate profiles for the speakers, my headphones, and the HDMI outputs.

End of the day, though, you can't polish a turd. A replacement panel is on my shopping list, as soon as I can find a reliable supplier. I've also seen a couple of speaker replacement mods on Reddit, so I might attempt one of those.

Coming from the Vaio, where the screen and speakers were excellent (for a 13" ultrabook), it's been a bit of a shock. But the rest of the laptop is excellent. Especially the keyboard. Plus I get a TrackPoint and a trackpad.

Nov 14, 2024 at 5:17pmWeb
Show threadThe Last Psion | AlexNov 15, 2024

Update on the #ThinkPad T480 speakers. I've just found this repo with a few IRS files designed for use with #EasyEffects on Linux. Happily, they also work work #JamesDSP.

https://github.com/shuhaowu/linux-thinkpad-speaker-improvements/

Importing into JamesDSP is easy. Copy the relevant .irs file to ~/.config/jamesdsp/irs/, go to the Convolver tab, select the file and click Enable convolver.

The speakers are still bad, trust me. But now they almost feel like they're responding to sub-120Hz frequencies, and that they're playing through a slightly more roomy tin can.

#LinuxAudio #PipeWire

GitHub - shuhaowu/linux-thinkpad-speaker-improvements

Contribute to shuhaowu/linux-thinkpad-speaker-improvements development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadThe Last Psion | AlexNov 23, 2024

More #ThinkPad T480 thoughts.

I've got weird battery/power issues and I can't find a consistent answer online.

I'll get 3-4 hours of use out of them from being charged to 80%. But if I shut the laptop down with about 20% left on a battery, there's an even chance that it'll be dead at the next power-on.

The charge counts aren't that high, but they could still be bad from being consistently over-charged.

Tempted to contact the seller.

Show threadpenguin42Nov 23, 2024
@thelastpsion Maybe try TLP to do a a battery recalibrate? https://linrunner.de/tlp/usage/tlp.html
However it could just be a firmware/software bug forgetting to power something off I guess (or maybe related to soft power on - have you disabled power-on via USB and net?)
tlp — TLP 1.9.0 documentation

Show threadThe Last Psion | AlexNov 23, 2024

@penguin42 I switched to Win10 and used Commercial Vanced to try calibrating the batteries. The wear values have stopped bouncing around, but the weird drain at power off continues.

At the moment I can't use TLP as I'm already using power-profiles-daemon (Arch have set the two packages as conflicting), and the Plasma interface for ppd is pretty handy. I am pretty close to swapping, though, just to see if it helps.

I'd already turned off the power on USB, but only just turned off wake-on-LAN. Right now it feels more like a firmware bug than a battery fault, but I'm not ruling anything out. I've seen a couple of people report similar issues online, but no concrete answers. One person said it just went away!

Show threadpenguin42Nov 23, 2024
@thelastpsion I was thinking of just using tlp once to calibrate, but sounds like Vanced has done that for you? I guess you need one of those funky thermal cameras to find what's still on.
Show threadThe Last Psion | AlexNov 24, 2024

@penguin42 Well, after completely disabling WOL last night in the BIOS (i.e., not just enabled when docked), it looks like the batteries didn't drop any noticeable charge at all! 10% remaining at switch-off, 10% remaining this morning.

I'll have to give it a few more days to check, but that seems to have done the trick. 🤞

I've just installed powertop. Looks like there are a few things that can be tuned. Interestingly, Linux is reporting that WOL is enabled... There's a udev rule that I can use to force that off, so I'll do that too.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=180496

[SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down / Laptop Issues / Arch Linux Forums

Show threadpenguin42Nov 24, 2024
@thelastpsion Odd isn't it - WoL on battery makes very little sense to me as a default; I can see WoL when powered makes sense for IT departments to update workers laptops etc But on battery is odd.
Show threadpenguin42Nov 14, 2024
@thelastpsion I had a work t*5*80, and the display was the same - it was really hard to describe, colours just didn't 'pop'
Show threadThe Last Psion | AlexNov 14, 2024
@penguin42 Exactly this. I know these are meant to be "business" machines, but they do have to be used by humans! From what I gather, the T490/T590 onwards had much better displays. From what I've seen, T480 panel replacement mods usually just use the panels for the T490.
Show threadpenguin42Nov 14, 2024
@thelastpsion The older t530 I had before was much nicer colour wise. Even as a business machine it sucked, things like highlighted text, or the colours of peoples text in chats didn't really show up; I'd love to know what they actually messed up.
Show threadThe Last Psion | AlexNov 14, 2024

@penguin42 Indeed.

According to hwinfo, it's an LG panel, so it's not like it's a no-name brand.

Show threadpenguin42Nov 14, 2024
@thelastpsion I did wonder if it could be a bug (e.g. getting the colour depth wrong somewhere?)