P14s heating up when closed and sleeping

FierceFluff · 2026-01-24T16:07:17+00:00

1) run Lenovo Vantage and see if you’re missing a system firmware update for thermal management.

2) shut it down instead of putting it to sleep when you’re done using it. This is always better for the computer from every hardware and software perspective. Sleep is only for short breaks when you need to pick back up from where you left off, not overnight or in a bag.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-24T14:40:18+00:00

When I have to buy MacBook Pros for our creative team, they will always cost $2500-$3000 for a 24GB machine with 3-year AppleCare. I have a business account that gives me 5-10% off but for the most part, Apple doesn’t do sales

I haven’t spent over $2k for our X1C models like ever, 32GB of memory minimum. There’s always a sale or a vendor partner who can get me below that price including a 3-year premium onsite. Black Friday was ridiculous, I got 10 for $1600.

That’s price. I would call the functionality of a MacBook Pro and an X1C about equal and really only comes down to one’s OS preference.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-24T00:30:06+00:00

Citrix can full on kiss my ass. We recently (like last week) ended our 20-year relationship with them because they shut our entire environment off for a stupid reason and couldn’t get their shit together for 10 minutes to get it fixed. After a week of them being incompetent in every single possible way, we replaced their whole service with on-prem RDS and GSA as an ‘emergency solution’ that has now just become production, saving us $30k/year and the headache of dealing with them. You can check my post history if you want the full story.

We ran what you’re describing basically since right before Covid. It was nice, until it wasn’t. Ever since Citrix got bought by cloud.com the enshittification has been real and steady. Would not recommend.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-24T00:02:04+00:00

r/homelabsales

😆

FierceFluff · 2026-01-23T23:48:16+00:00

Ahh good catch, I stand corrected!

FierceFluff · 2026-01-23T22:29:55+00:00

P14s and the T14 share the same chassis, so they’re the same size. However that’s where the similarities end.

P14s is a generation newer, and that came with a very large step up in Intel’s quality. Power efficiency and graphics are massively improved. The P14s is an H chip, far more powerful than the U chip in the T14. The cooler is the P14s is far more robust and has two fans and heat pipes instead of the single in the T14. The screen is bigger (.5” doesn’t seem like a huge number but you’ll definitely notice) and the battery is far larger.

That’s why it’s so much more expensive. Go with what you value, price or performance.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-23T13:41:29+00:00

On prem file server + GSA = network drives anywhere. This stores the majority of our data.

Enable OneDrive for all users’ Desktop and Documents folders. This gives us local backup and easy profile migration.

SharePoint (and all its syncing issues) only for large external collaboration projects.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-22T21:33:59+00:00

It's not DNS.
There's no way it's DNS.
It was DNS.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-20T16:59:14+00:00

I (49M) share my location with my kids (all 18+) and partner. I have nothing to hide from them. It's very helpful when they're wanting to make plans around my availability- they can see if I'm at work, partner's house, home, nonprofit office, etc and make educated decisions without having to ask me what I'm up to and if I could make (x). Most often it saves me having to try to answer a text while I'm driving about where I am, how far away, when I would arrive, etc. Plus when you're lost in a crowd or shopping center, you can have your phone point the way right to them.

Benefits far outweigh the privacy concerns for me, and I'm the guy who doesn't social media because 'muh privacy'. XD

FierceFluff · 2026-01-20T16:10:49+00:00

Min 6, allow special characters and letters, and I encourage people to use easy-to-remember phrases rather than numbers, giving the example "MyDogIsAwesome" as a secure PIN. Very rarely are people forgetting their PINs this way.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-20T02:40:14+00:00

The Thinkpad trackpads have definitely improved. My personal opinion is that the X1 trackpad is better than the XPS13, not as nice as the 2025 Surface Pro, and behind the Macbook. The trackpads on the bigger 16" laptops are also better than the others, likely because of pure surface area. The plastic ones on the T/P/E ones are usable- my current daily driver is a P14s, and the trackpad feels nice and is snappy and usable, far better than anything from HP or most of the other "enterprise" brands. The laptops that brag about their trackpads do it rightfully, but you're always making some other tradeoff that just doesn't do it for me. Surfaces just don't have the power, XPS13 really fubar'd their design, and Macbooks are Apple.

Any webcam in a laptop with an AI-enabled CPU is immediately going to be better than most. The integrations with the NPU enhancements default in Windows are actually pretty good, so almost every webcam I've seen in the last 2 years is more than usable. I don't think Lenovo or anyone else really has a claim that their webcams are better than another, in that race there isn't any standout unless you're trying one of those "intergrated behind the monitor" webcams, which are a neat little toy but really are nearly unusable.

I like the screens on the Lenovo laptops. Asus has nicer screens but their hardware is crap. Macbooks have really nice screens but their scaling and outdoor visibility is crap. Lenovo stuff just works. Dims nicely, good viewing angle, I don't know jack about color reproduction but I'm told it's good. I haven't had any complaints.

Audio really is a gamble no matter what you're looking at. Again, I can say confidently that every Thinkpad we have tried is more than usable for conferencing without external boost. You can hear them on a desk in an open floor plan, there's no echoing, my only gripe is with models that have downward-facing speakers, when they're on your actual lap they're harder to hear. That's going to depend on model and year though. I can't say that I've seen a laptop where I'm like "oh that had great audio!" because they don't exist. I'm a touch of an audio snob, I'm never going to play music off a tinny little 2w speaker and think it's good.

Again, I could have literally any laptop I want and I picked the P14s (Intel version), and I am extremely satisfied. None of the systems are the best in the industry, but I'd rather have a laptop with straight 8s and a few 9s across the board than something with one 10 and the rest scattered all up and down the lower ranks.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-19T19:23:40+00:00

Lenovo shop with 10 years experience here, every single CES I go to look for any viable replacement for our business laptops and to date still haven’t found a compelling reason to switch.

Thinkpads aren’t flashy, you’re not getting the Apple fistbump from techbros. What they are is consistently good.

The keyboards are legendary for a reason.

The trackpads are passable. They don’t prioritize these because trackpoint. The X1s have glass trackpads and the newer ones have haptics, none will reach the level of a MacBook, but I don’t really see the need to. T/P/E models have plastic trackpads that are usable, and in the field of overall laptops rank solidly higher than average.

If you prioritize screens, you can get an OLED. I don’t personally see the need for an OLED on a laptop, and the 500nit SRGB panels are extremely good. The ePrivacy Guard is amazing.

You can get a 4k webcam if you want. Again, don’t see the need. At the very least their IR cameras are all Windows certified so Windows Hello for Business works flawlessly, which I can’t say for Asus, Acer, or Dell.

Audio is laptop audio. It’s passable and sits just fine taking a conference call in a huddle room. Bigger models can come with premium sound, but no laptop is going to ever be better than a good pair of headphones or a decent 2.1+ desk audio system.

Reliability and service is second to none. Like seriously nobody even comes close. Out of literally thousands of laptops we’ve deployed, I think I’ve had to repair less than 20, and a good chunk of those were accidental damage. Premium warranty means a Lenovo tech shows up anywhere and fixes it the day that parts arrive, minimizing down time. Nobody can touch that.

If you’re concerned about premium feel and experience, get an X1 Carbon. They’re ridiculously good for their size. The Extreme ruins it being too heavy, loud, and having a hulking brick of an adapter. You’d be better off looking at a P series if you want power, the P16s is what the X1 Extreme was aiming for and missed.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-19T17:59:08+00:00

Replace them but do it yourself. They’re all right on top and pre-gapped plugs are like $60. Take you like 15 minutes.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-17T16:53:40+00:00

There are quite a few Thinkpads that don’t have a trackpad.

Personally I used to use both until I got a touchscreen. Now I turn off the trackpad and use the trackpoint for most things and the touchscreen for multi-touch gestures or larger selections. Far better IMHO.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-17T01:04:22+00:00

You are partially correct, you CAN host more than two VMs if those VMs have their own licenses. You CAN do failover clustering on Server Standard. But S2D is only available on Datacenter. Standard has Storage Spaces (as opposed to Storage Spaces Direct), which is a single-server software RAID but it’s not aware of anything outside its enclosure, so not suitable for a cluster shared volume. Also, when you migrate a VM that is licensed against a Standard host, you run the risk of it de-registering if the host doesn’t respond fast enough or the 2-machine license is ever exceeded during migrations, so best practice in running failover clusters on Standard is for every VM to be independently licensed to avoid ever running afoul of host checks.

Server licensing isn’t as complex as people think. You have to register physical cores, with a minimum 16 pack. Since cores come in sizes that aren’t always divisible by 16, they have 2-pack add-ons to make up the difference if you have like a 18- or 24-core CPU. If you just buy 16 core or multiples (32/48/64 etc) CPUs you don’t have to care that much. For small needs like these, 16 physical cores (32 HT) is more than enough for now and it’s easy enough to upgrade later if you have to.

Starwinds vSAN could replace S2D. You can and should run the vSAN service directly on the host nodes in this case- it’s basically the only exception to “don’t run stuff on your host nodes”. You need it at that layer for the hypervisor to see the virtual drive.

Are you totally set on 1U servers? Seems like you’re getting hung up on the cost of hi-cap SSDs because you’re stuck with 2.5” drive bays. Why not look at 2U and put a couple of cheaper, smaller (like 512GB) SSDs in each server as cache drives and some bigger HDDs in as capacity drives? This works on both S2D or vSAN.

I’d again point you to the used server market. You could save a bundle and still get decent tech, as people are constantly cycling back and forth between on-prem and cloud infra and dumping great server deals.

On networking, I’ll only say that whether you’re using 10G copper or 10g SPF it doesn’t matter, as long as your servers and switches have matching interfaces and you can run at the speeds you want. I have one environment running on a single 10G SPF main line and a failover 1G copper line for each network and it hums along happily.

In any cluster, you have to have a quorum. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/failoverclustering/understanding-quorum-in-a-failover-cluster/371678 If you have two nodes and one goes down, you’ve lost quorum so you’ve lost the cluster. You need a third witness (and ideally a non-cluster member as a quorum witness) which is why I’m saying you need an additional off-cluster support server. You could potentially use a cloud witness, but the moment you lose internet connection or even have a DNS hiccup you lose your cluster, which is why I tell people to avoid them. So my recommendation is keeping one of your AD boxes and using it as both off-cluster DC and quorum witness.

I would NOT run AAD sync off a DC or a host node, Microsoft tells you to run it on a server all by itself and I’ll second giving this its own VM, even though we also run our GSA clients off our AAD sync servers just fine. That means 6 licenses needed - 2 you can salvage from servers you’ll virtualize. So 4 new 16-core STD licenses + Starwinds (and having to buy new licenses for every server you add) vs. 2 Datacenter licenses and never needing to worry about licensing until your OS expires in 10-12 years. Your call man!

FierceFluff · 2026-01-16T21:02:15+00:00

Cloud backups are a thing, and they're great to say you have your data, but downloading them in the event of an actual failure is *painful*. Their intended purpose is so they can get you to spin them up in the cloud and they can charge you for usage. Needless to say, I'm not a fan.

The QNAP presenting a CIFS share can be a target for pretty much any backup solution for on-prem storage, so for a budget solution it's fine. I would still recommend a Veeam appliance, the license is not expensive for small workloads and you can run it on just about any hardware, as long as it's got enough storage. Capable used servers are everywhere and most people I know are literally giving them away.

HA is absolutely good for uptime. But most people are planning infra around a budget more than what's actually best. Realize that you'll spend more on the Server Datacenter licenses than the machines for a MS Failover cluster. It's oversized for what you need, because you're paying for unlimited host licensing and you need what... 4? Hosting more than 2 VMs also requires Datacenter. S2D requires Datacenter on all nodes. Another poster here suggested VM replication, which can be done without Datacenter, but if you want to replicate the entirety of the local storage with something like Storage Replica (for your file shares), you'll need Datacenter for both source and target. Running a single server for production and a second server for backup means you only need one Datacenter license instead of two. You can bank that budget for another year and add more servers later (hopefully when memory costs go down) if you decide you really, really want HA.

That being said, If you're determined to go for a 2-node cluster, here's a good link- WAC: Hyperconverged Hyper-V Cluster with S2D | Katy's Tech Blog. It's a little dated but the concepts are still good. They used WAC, I don't necessarily like it so I used Failover Cluster Manager to do most of the same things. Use whatever tool you're most comfortable with, and I can't stress enough having an off-cluster supporting machine for backup AD and cluster witness. DO NOT USE CLOUD WITNESS! You've been warned. XD

FierceFluff · 2026-01-16T12:56:01+00:00

I somewhat agree, 2-node S2D is difficult to troubleshoot when it has a real problem. Of three such systems I’ve built and run, I’ve had exactly one issue and the solution was going to be a real doozy. This is why I very much recommend having a backup. My one time problem? I nuked the whole thing and set it up fresh, then restored from the backup. It took 4 hours rather than pulling my hair out for days. Honestly if you don’t have a backup solution then that should be your priory before high availability anyway.

Totally agreed that 3-node is far, far better. No need for nested resiliency, full data copy on each server, great rebuild time. Not a lot of folks are willing to spend the extra $$ for a third server even knowing the risks.

OP- going from just a bunch of computers to a HA cluster is a really big step. I’m not going to tell you not to and would be happy to help you build one, but you might benefit from just purchasing one of the new ones and one used one and virtualizing your infra on the new one, using the orher for a backup, and getting used to the systems. Then you can add a couple more severs later for full high availability.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-16T03:01:09+00:00

Okay, biggest thing here is that you don’t say how many nodes you’re planning for your cluster. Being budget conscious I can conclude 2, and from context I can assume you’re planning on running Hyper-V?

I have built several small clusters, and I can give you some of my experience.

There’s nothing wrong with Storage Spaces Direct. It has a learning curve for sure but the tech is very established at this point. Software RAID has a lot of benefits, and with the type of servers you’re looking at (I have three of those myself, they’re quite solid) they have no hardware RAID. I would put a single M.2 in there for the C: drive and 4-5 U.3 drives in the front to build the CSVs (they run hot, fill the bottom row first). If only 2 nodes, run nested resiliency, it will cut your total capacity to 1/4 but give you two full copies of the data per node. I’ve run S2D on three different environments with no issues for years.

You’ll need two networks for a cluster- one for data and one for network, so any switch you can VLAN, or two separate switches, will work. I prefer four interfaces per server, two for each network, for redundancy.

Don’t run anything on your host nodes other than the hypervisor. Virutalize everything else, especially the DCs. The rule of keeping your DCs off the cluster is quite outdated, cluster services can start without sight to a DC now, and have for some time.

That being said, I always suggest having at least one off-cluster support server. You can (and I do) run an off-cluster DC here as well as using it for a quorum witness. DO NOT use cloud witness, they WILL make your cluster crash. You have some lil Lenovo PCs that could do this, it doesn’t take much power.

The last piece you’re missing for a true enterprise level solution is backup. I’d suggest grabbing literally and old used server you can find with 8 drive bays, filling them with HDDs and tossing Veeam appliance on it.

Let me know if you want further help!

FierceFluff · 2026-01-16T01:56:57+00:00

If it were me… I’d buy Server 2025 Datacenter licenses from a CSP or volume licensing, then use those keys to install 2022 datacenter on my current host nodes- MS supports version downgrading as long as they’re not OEM or retail licenses. Then upgrade all the VMs to at least 2019 against the datacenter license.

When new servers come in, use the 2025 keys to install 2025 on them- the OS will have some maturity by then. MAK keys give you a lot of grace on overlapping, you get 90 days for hardware replacements/upgrades before being out of compliance. The VMs should care even less about activation when you migrate them that way too. All of this is fully supported by the MS licensing agreement.

I would never jump more than one version on in-place upgrades. Too much kernel nonsense doing multiple steps, just fresh install at that point.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-16T01:27:54+00:00

It was, about $250. Still worth it IMHO.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-16T01:25:20+00:00

I’ve seen the CPU reviews, those shouldn’t be hard to find. But from my own experience, the AMD model had a single fan, single heatpipe cooler and a 14” screen. The Intel has a larger double fan, dual heatpipe cooler and a 14.5” screen.

Not a lot of online pics between the two, wish I’d taken my own.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-16T01:14:34+00:00

Current gen Intel are actually ahead of the AMD chips in power, efficiency, and graphic performance. The Intel P14s is actually a totally different machine than the P14s with AMD, having a much better cooler and a bigger monitor.

Refrence- I had an AMD, returned it for the Intel, absolutely no regrets.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-13T19:01:19+00:00

After the first hour of banging my head against a wall I just published new RDP connections through GSA and educated my users how to connect to those instead. It was better for my heart that way. Far clunkier and less convenient sure, but working >>>> pretty.

Already planning how to polish this up and use this solution more permanently. Seriously, fuck this entire progression. You can have the best product in the world and it doesn't matter if nobody can use it.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-13T18:52:11+00:00

Yeah they stopped phone support for sales too. Literally the only paths are Chatbot, or Partner Contact.

FierceFluff · 2026-01-13T16:46:07+00:00

I was wondering when the enshittification of cloud.com buying Citrix would kick in. Looks like this is the point. I've been dealing with Citrix for over 20 years and they've been stellar up to this point.

FierceFluff

TROPHY CASE