Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga i7 : Day 3

All that apps

I installed tons of application yesterday, including all the business and development apps that I use:

• Visual Studio 2013
• Microsoft Office 2013
• Microsoft Visio 2013
• SQL Server 2014 (Express) with Management Studio

And they ran very well.  So I know for sure that this machine will be capable enough to handle my business need.

For graphic design, I tried Sketchbook Pro and it works well.  The pressure sensitive range is much better than Surface Pro 3.  And the less glassy screen makes drawing better.  In fact, it almost reminded me the days I draw on the Lenovo X60T matte screen.

Heat and Screen

However calibration issue still concerns me.  Using the 260 plus point calibration trick, I was managed to have a pretty fine digitizing screen and give me nice sketching experience.  The problem is that even after you calibrate every spot properly, when you flip the screen around (in "yoga" mode, with the screen being upside down), all the spots shift and thus you don't get the perfect drawing spot you want.  So that means that I am pretty limited to the up front mode for sketching, or maybe a little bit of portrait mode.  So yes, it's indeed a bit compromising here.

Also the auto rotate actually irritates me, so eventually I turned it off from the display property screen.

The heat issue still irritates me. It's not as horribly annoying as SP3, but when I put the machine on my laptop, or turn it flat so that I can hold is on my arm, rest the front edge on my lap and sketch, I can sense heat from certain spots at the back of the machine.  Still, most area of the screen stays cold, and only the spot at the lower side of the screen stay warm.  Let me keep trying and see if it can accept it (hope Stockholm Syndrome doesn't kick in.

Game, game, game

I tried a bunch of game on this machine and the result was great.  The gaming experience is definitely better on this machine than the i5 Surface Pro 3.  I don't know if it's because of the i7, or the fact that the GPU drives less pixel here in ThinkPad Yoga.  All I know is that games like "Killer is Dead" ran sluggish on SP3 runs smoothly on this machine.

Here's the games I tried and my comments:

• Broken Age: works great on mouse and keyboard mode; does not work on touch screen mode, which is fine with me.
• Contrast: I got "Graphic Card is unsupported" error.
• Gone Home: works fine as mouse and keyboard game.  When I turned the screen quality to Max, it rans very slowly.  Lower the graphic to 1280 x 720 dramatically increase the respnsiveness.  At the end, I settled with: 
• Graphic Quality: Medium
• Resolution: 1280 x 720
• Motion Blur: On
• Killer is Dead: Great performance, unlike running it on SP3 which was sluggish.
• PacMan Champion edition: super smooth, and love the game.
• Final Fantasy 3: works fine, doesn't have the control problem I had in SP3
• BioShock 1: Doesn't work ... hmmmm ...
• Limbo: I have problem starting it up at first, but at the end the system seems to pick up the problem, fixed it, and now I can launch it properly.  Awesome game and runs great.
• Need for Speed Shift: Got "can't start because PhysXLoader.dll" and didn't care enough to reinstall the game.
• Pacman Museum: runs great
• Portal 1: I have to run the game in Windows mode (instead of full screen), and XBox360 controller doesn't work.  Other than those, the game ran fine.  I ended up using these screen setting:
• Aspect Ratio: 16:10
• Resolution: 1400 x900
• Run in a window
• Portal 2: Works great, smooth performance, works with XBox360 controller, keyboard and mouse.  Love the game.
• Street Fighter vs Tekken: Once followed my own instruction, everything went well.  Smooth operation.  BTW, I was surprised that the tutorial was hided inside [Challenge][Tutorial].  Not the place that I would expect.

P.S. Love it when games keep the save data in the same folder of the executable:

including but not limited to:

• Broken Age
• Killer is Dead
• Limbo
• Portal 1

Sound

Sound is just fair.  There's zero bass, and once you crank up the volumn higher than 60, sound starts to crank up at bit.  It's OK for casual usage, but don't expect much.  

BTW, love the volumn control button at the side, makes changing volume very handy.

Screen

The screen is nice at all angles, orientation and direction.  

Graphic Design Apps

Here's my experience with graphic design realted apps on ThinkPad Yoga:

• Sketchbook Pro 6: works great, not much complain.
• Photoshop CC 2014: All the menus are tiny, and when I use the Experimental UI feature, everything becomes too big.  So I have to live with tiny menus and icons.  Features and pressure sensitivity on stylus work fine, though.
• Manga Studio 5: works fine AFTER I set the Perference setting to "Tablet PC".  Just like SP3, I lost gesture support on the screen, but got back pressure sensitivity on drawing.
• Blender: fine ... well, it's a desktop app after all.
• Toon Boom Studio 6: No pressure sensitivity.  But then my version is old, so maybe the newer one works better.