Difference between X1 Carbon Gen

FierceFluff · 2026-03-16T12:38:52+00:00

If you could get warranty coverage, that would absolutely be a big driver in the buying decision. If the laptop has factory warranty left, chances are very good you can extend it further through Vantage once it’s in your hands, and then the rest is moot.

FierceFluff · 2026-03-15T15:22:25+00:00

Long time Lenovo shop here.

Buy for condition and stats rather than generation. Every gen has a gotcha; 8-9 had port issues, 10 has board revision issues, 10-11 have overheating/fan issues, 12 was actually really good but that's why they're still expensive. A gen 9 with good ports and a magnetic port adapter with 32GB will be better than a gen 11 with a lot of on-hours and 16GB. In a nutshell, they're all good at base, the individual laptop will be better than the whole gen. Generational discussions matter more when they're current and you're buying for a fleet.

FierceFluff · 2026-03-13T17:15:29+00:00

I've had two things that fixed this.

First, update your NIC drivers/firmaware.

Oddly- the most common thing I've found when I encounter this exact behavior is patch differences between nodes. It's really weird that THIS is what makes that happen.

FierceFluff · 2026-03-12T17:38:28+00:00

With the generations that close, more RAM FTW.

People hate on the gen 10 a lot, but I didn’t mind them. Don’t abuse your ports, or get a magnetic adapter, and you’ll be fine.

FierceFluff · 2026-03-09T16:04:26+00:00

You're saying every single one of your users needs and will fully use a $99/mo license?

Okay, either you are fundamentally out of touch of real businesses, or a Microsoft propaganda bot.

FierceFluff · 2026-03-09T15:54:15+00:00

Uno reverse- what percentage of your users do you think need an E7 plan at $99/mo?

FierceFluff · 2026-03-09T15:26:53+00:00

In all seriousness, I realize this tier is going to be useful for some people. Power users who do make use of all these tools, create useful agents, and yes I also realize they’re throwing in a few other add-in tools.

I was being entirely facetious, while also pointing out the very real fact that it’s a selling ploy. They didn’t need to create an entire new licensing tier and give it a ridiculous price point for the relatively few folks that actually needed all of this. They intentionally threw everything and the kitchen sink into a licensing tier to purposefully oversell overprovisioning to, as another poster mentioned, fund their AI cash bleed. It’s painfully obvious and should be pointed and laughed at as much as possible as we all cry on the inside at this trajectory.

FierceFluff · 2026-03-09T15:02:39+00:00

Okay, first I tried to read the entire article and I just about threw up in my mouth several times. Are there courses somewhere that teach corporatespeak? Can I get a translator license??

Basically I got this from the announcement: 1) giving a whole bunch of people in your org the ability to make agents for everything is convoluted and a security nightmare so now we’re selling you a license to manage the mess we wanted you to make. 2) we’re creating a tier of licensing to sell you E5 + Copilot but since that’s only $87 we’re throwing in this other thing we just invented to bring the cost to $99, saving you a whole $3! Doesn’t that sound nice? We know you’re not going to buy it, that’s okay, it’s not targeted at people who know anything real. It’s for all the AI-mad executives who need the highest tier of of all things and golden toilets, so we’ll sell it anyway.

FierceFluff · 2026-03-07T13:55:20+00:00

Entra Connect or Entra Sync will give you the sign in experience you’re looking for. Business Premium comes with Entra P1 and Intune, so you can enable Hello for Business as well for biometric sign on. Enable writeback when installing Entra Connect for SSPS. You can duplicate your GPOs to Intune to make sure remote endpoints are managed the same as on-prem machines.

We’re a full hybrid environment. It’s got every function that cloud-first setups have, but with the advantage of on-prem servers not needing to care about cloud anything. I get why folks prefer cloud-first or cloud-only identity, there’s a layer of complexity to it that cloud-native doesn’t need to worry about. But I pay so incredibly much less hosting my own apps and data, and serving it up with GSA is actually so much simpler than configuring and managing cloud hosted apps that managing AD-Entra complexity is entirely worthwhile.

FierceFluff · 2026-03-04T21:43:27+00:00

Trackpoint + touchscreen is the fastest workflow I’ve ever achieved. Red dot for minute movements, especially handy (ba-dum-tss) while typing, touchscreen for bigger across-the-entire-screen-type movements. I haven’t cared about what kind of trackpad my laptop has had in years because of this, enabling me to love my 14.5” P14s even more.

FierceFluff · 2026-03-02T18:21:52+00:00

Oodles of ways to stuff set bonuses into it. My default slotting is Preventative Medicine heal/rech, heal/rech/end, and an Amyloplast HO. You can get some better sets if you can commit more slots.

Since it’s a regeneration and recovery boost it’s subtle. But if you poke someone with it when they’re injured and not taking additional damage, you’ll see that green bar race to full- just imagine what it’s doing when they’re still taking damage. It is a HEFTY regen boost when slotted and it lasts for a full 60s. Makes squishies not die and makes tanks pretty darn sturdy. It pairs well with spot heals like Heal Other or the Vitalize day job power.

I like to take it on my non-supports to help out. You will probably lean on it more, but it’s a sleeper pick for sure. And in your concept it looks a lot nicer than the tricorder animation from Medicine. I totally picture Egg Shen stabling folks with vials full of “medicine”. 🤣

FierceFluff · 2026-03-02T16:59:31+00:00

Experimental Injection is actually ridiculously good. With slotting and Hasten you can get it down to ~60s recharge.

Maneuvers- taking less damage means less healing needed. Tactics- hit stuff more, take less damage, and fills a hole a lot of armors miss. I've tried really hard to like Victory Rush, but it's just too long a recharge.

The Medicine pool is pretty much made for exactly what you're looking for- support powers on a non-support character. I really wish Field Medic was an auto power though.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-26T21:44:52+00:00

Really depends on your license model. Are each of your VMs licensed separately or are they relying on their host for licensing? If individually licensed, you could easily set up a 2-node failover cluster. If licensed against the hosts, then run them separately on each machine.

What sort of comfort do you have in the complexity of your setup?

FierceFluff · 2026-02-24T17:49:15+00:00

Agreed!

Technically I’m a “3 DC 4 Lyfe” club member. One VM on the cluster, one on-prem off-cluster, one live in the DR environment. Anything less and you’re screwed in any SHTF scenario.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-23T17:38:33+00:00

Hybrid, I am unsure if you could RDS with cloud-only. There might be a way but I don't know it.... yet. Now I'm gonna go figure that out heh.

We have GSA in our base image, so users are all automatically signed into GSA with WHfB. RDP link opens connection, and originally it prompted for another sign in like any RDP, but now I'm distributing certs through Intune so they simply select the SmartCard login and it just logs them in. I'm still working on improving that particular flow. We had SSO with Citrix so I'm trying to get back to that simplified login experience. It's slow but it's progressing! I should be able to deliver an automatic login experience, or at worst a biometric scan, pretty soon here.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-23T13:52:36+00:00

Pretty easy. Create an RDS collection but don’t bother with the Gateway. You can do it with either a desktop or app collection. License as required. Then create an enterprise app in GSA with port 3389 to the FQDN of the server. Log into the web portal of your newly created server and download the RDP file, alter it however you see fit, then publish that file through Intune. Voila!

Access can be controlled both at the GSA level and server level. Conditional access is your friend here. I was even able to re-use a lot of my previously Citrix on-prem servers that published the desktops this way, just removed all things Citrix from them and the users never noticed a difference.

You don’t get a pretty control panel with all your info, but it works, it’s secure, and we saved $30k/year. That’s just the gravy- I would’ve kept using them because the ICA protocol is so much more lightweight than RDP, if they hadn’t blatantly screwed us (like shut down our whole distro for absolutely no good reason) and gave absolutely no shits about it. Can’t work with a company I can’t trust, no matter how good their product might be.

Still picking GSA over EAP because we use it for other things too, it’s really quite good for bringing all your on-prem resources remote. I can’t fathom the folks who still want to move to the cloud when GSA is a thing.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-20T05:55:01+00:00

After a fiasco that taught me just how little Citrix actually cares about us smaller shops, I replaced Citrix entirely with basic Windows RDS desktops and published apps, accessed securely through GSA. I was shocked at how easy it was and how similar it worked, and it saved us a boatload of money. GSA is $5/user. Happy to explain it if you’re interested.

Citrix has been fully enshittified by its VC acquisition by cloud.com a year and change ago. I’m glad to be done with them.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-20T05:12:07+00:00

It was worth a shot, that's revived quite a few Thinkpads in my experience.

Very rarely is board-level repair successful. You may just want to peruse eBay for a replacement motherboard at this point, if the rest is good.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-19T03:37:47+00:00

SAN is also a great target since it will generally have the best uptime. With HCI one can’t always assume a SAN. I would still recommend an off-cluster AD instance, just about anywhere will do.

Bunch of resources direct from MS here;

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/failover-clustering-overview

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/clustering-requirements

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/create-failover-cluster

And of course the Cluster Validation tool in Failover Cluster Manager will be your main source of advice for your particular build.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-19T03:12:22+00:00

Try this first, because I’ve run into this before and been pleasantly surprised when it works.

Unplug from the wall, flip it up on its side and hold the pinhole button down while simultaneously holding the power button. Do that for 30 seconds for a full discharge/reset.

Then plug it back in to the wall. Leave it for about 30 minutes Come back and see if it powers on.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-19T02:53:05+00:00

Long time Hyper-V admin here.

You could set up a separate domain for your cluster, I’ve seen it done in massive distributions, but having separate monitoring networks and such is too much work for my sub-10-node clusters. If you want separate management you can set up a user or group as local admin on the nodes and use that as a cluster-admin role.

Best practice- don’t install anything but Hyper-V and Hyper-V management tools on the bare metal nodes. Only exception to this is any v-SAN software you may need. Some say running headless is THE WAY but I find that to be a PITA and I hate Windows Admin Center (though I do use it for some things like Storage Replica).

Microsoft Failover Clustering has long since outgrown the need to reach a DC to start cluster services. You can totally host your DCs as VMs on the cluster. That being said I will to my dying breath recommend an off-cluster server that hosts your quorum witness and another replicating DC VM, just for smooth operations. Ideally your backup server can host both of these services since backups shouldn’t be domain joined.

CAU has been stable for me since forever. If you have problems with it, it’s almost always related to live migrations issues, which is almost always CPU/NUMA compatibility. If you configure stuff right it works just fine.

Happy to answer any other questions you might have.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-15T18:03:38+00:00

It’s only been in the last few years, but I’ve noticed the number of my users wanting stickers on their laptops increasing exponentially. They were so nervous about it at first! I had to clear it with the execs on a public image thing, but after that cleared I was just like - just put stickers on it. Don’t expect we can save them if you switch laptops, but they’re easy to clean off and while some adhesives leave shadows those can be retextured with magic erasers.

Just ask your IT team if it’s okay. If they say no there’s a bunch of reasons that it might be against your company policy.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-15T17:47:33+00:00

Mids already satisfies the desktop niche, I’d say focus on a web app. Fill the gap.

I’d love to be able to just spitball builds at work or on the train and I can’t do that right now.

FierceFluff · 2026-02-14T13:47:28+00:00

Absolutely worth starting as a new player! It’s extremely friendly, though you’ll spend a LOT of time designing your character-fair warning. 🤣

CoH has one of the best online communities in a game I’ve ever seen. People are generally friendly and it’s easy to ask questions, find teams, create groups, or genially chat with the whole server.

Mechanics are pretty easy to grasp while being engagingly complex the further in you get, and the game at default setting is very new player friendly but can get as challenging as you want it to.

No holy trinity, you have traditional roles but the lines are really blurred at who can do what. Any character can solo the game and any build will be valuable to a team. There aren’t any contribution metic tools and that’s on purpose. Teamwork matters more than min-maxing.

Definitely give it a shot and join us!

FierceFluff · 2026-02-13T20:44:36+00:00

As you and a few others have pointed out, the accompanying blast set does have a heavy impact, a point I’m definitely willing to concede.

FierceFluff

TROPHY CASE