Lenovo T420S: HDD vs. SSD

26 January 2015 Hardware Review

Yesterday we pimped the laptop of my good friend Nicolas. In order to improve its performance we replaced some hardware components so that the laptop could now access twice as much RAM (4 GB → 8 GB) and boot from an SSD instead of a slow HDD.

The laptop model is a Lenovo T420S and I must say upgrading its hardware was very easy. It took us less than 5 minutes to replace RAM and HDD (no comparison to upgrading a MacBook Pro)! We put the SSD in the primary SATA slot and moved the original HDD to an UltraBay cartridge in order to gain maximum performance and keep the HDD easily exchangable. The performance boost was massive, of course: Instead of taking nearly 2 minutes to power up, the system now launches in about 20 seconds. And thanks to the still-remaining HDD in the UltraBay slot there will still be enough (slower) space to store data like movies and music.

If you consider giving your laptop (or desktop computer) a speed boost, switching to an SSD for system-relevant applications definitely does the trick – especially with SSDs getting cheaper and cheaper nowadays.

Another surprising (or rather annoying) fact though: Windows 8.1 took an awefully long time to finish doing random stuff like installing apps (that nobody likes) on its initial launch. The installation that happened before with a bootable USB stick only took a few minutes though! Hopefully Microsoft will streamline this process for Windows 10 and maybe let users decide if they want bloatware like “Contacts”, “Calendar” and “News”. Aside from being a usability nightmare, Windows 8.1 is at least a fast and reliable operating system.

You'll see this for hours, days or even months.

Update: Changed “ExpressCard” to “UltraBay” (thanks to Felix for the hint).

New Christmas EP!

13 January 2015 Free Music

It has been online for a while already on Bandcamp and SoundCloud but of course my new Christmas EP should also arrive here on the (more or less) official bm_128 site! Check it out.

Behance

10 January 2015 Design Music

I’ve got a profile on Behance now! My first post is my resume, the second one is vector keyboard I re-created from an official product photo. It’s a Novation Impulse 61, the keyboard I’m using to play live with MØDI!

My resume is online

23 December 2014 Design HerrHerrmann

My resume (Lebenslauf) is online! You can find the full version on the About Me page. It’s free! :P

Update: Due to spam from recruiters (even phone calls from abroad), I decided to remove the resume again. Feel free to inquire about it (if you’re not yet another lame recruiter)!

GDG TalkTime Xmas Special 2014

17 December 2014 Event Frankfurt Software Development

I wouldn’t have expected to be involved in some tech event so immediately again after organising Hack-a-Lesson but since I have been back in Frankfurt (Main) for work reasons, my colleague and friend Darren Cooper quickly invited me to co-organise a GDG (Google Developer Group) event!

This time it was the TalkTime Xmas Special 2014, basically four talks about Google- and Android-specific topics. Some of those topics were really interesting, like the one about Google’s webdesign framework Polymer that I’m motivated to try out now.