Continuing with the recent string of laptop related posts, I thought I should post a few of the disassembly photos I took of the Lenovo X200. Taking the laptop apart is rather simple – just remove the screws on the the laptop (depending on what you want to remove, you only have to unscrew certain ones) and carefully pull off the lower top casing. After that, remove the keyboard (be careful of the ribbon cable to snaps onto the motherboard for the keyboard/TrackPoint. From here, you can swap out the WiFi card or just have a quick look around. For replacing the RAM or HDD/SSD, you don’t need to take apart the laptop. Just remove the side drive bay cover (one screw) or remove the two that secure the RAM bay cover on the bottom. I should have a full review of the laptop up sometime this week, but I hope these photos are useful. If you’re unable to view the slideshow, check out the image set on Flickr.
iTunes Visualizer – Seven Years Later
Many years and many software updates ago, the iTunes visualizer was a very prominent feature of the application. It was used in television ads to illustrate the power of the iMac G3 coupled with the the iTunes jukebox/CD-burning application that was miles ahead of MusicMatch and Windows Media Player. However, as the version number climbs for iTunes, the visualizer has declined in importance, cast away and buried in the ‘View’ drop-down.
When using the visualizer on a current Intel-based machine, the visualizer operates fine (ignoring the fact that it hasn’t changed since 3.0) and is mesmerizing as always. However, could somebody give me a reason why a task that was a cake-walk for a 500Mhz G3 from seven years ago is consuming 126% of the available CPU cycles from a Core 2 Duo portable?
(click to view full-size)
Are they running the old visualization code from the PowerPC version in emulation? What on earth can make this so taxing on the CPU? For reference, I’ve embedded the thirty-second spot Apple ran in 2001 for the iMac G3 – great ad by the way.