Ideapad Yoga?

Does anyone have pics of the "slot-in cover"? No pics on Lenovo's site.

I got my Yoga 13 at BestBuy a few days ago on a complete impulse buy. Went in to buy the VivoTab ($499 PM to Microcenter + free keyboard dock from ASUS). They had the Yoga on TWO prominent displays, and I fell in love. This is the perfect hybrid device. It is way large and heavy to use as a mobile tablet, but for in bed and around the house it's perfect. I find I use "stand mode" the most in bed, it supports the device perfectly.

Evidently, the fan noise people are complaining about seems to be coming from through the keyboard (vents are on the back edge). In "stand mode", the keyboard is against a surface and it completely mutes the sound. Doesn't affect circulation since, the vents arent blocked but strangely the sound isn't really coming from the vent. Curious if there might be some room under the keyboard for sound deadening material.

 

I tried booting up with my Windows 8 Pro install disk and it says the key is not valid. I also noticed when going to Control Panel, Systems, that we only have the Windows 8 (non-pro edition). Now I'm wondering where the heck we can download the non-pro version from. According to many, W8 machines have the keys built in to BIOS, so when you do a fresh install, the OS will look for that key and use it--otherwise it will prompt you to enter a key. Which seems to be true otherwise it would've asked me for a key instead of telling it was a bad key when I tried installing Pro.

Either way, I used the latest version of Acronis and made an entire image of the HD. Then I just erased the 8gb partition, and the 20gb restore partition. Joined them all together with drive C: then i made a separate partition for 4096mb for the Intel Rapid Start.

Re: Ideapad Yoga hard disk allocation - Page 8 - Lenovo Community

I now have 52 gb free on drive C. And notice that the system is more responsive

 

I wish you could just burn a disk, but windows will let you create a USB recovery drive.

If you search settings for "recovery" and tap "create recovery drive", the recovery drive software allows you to "copy the recovery partition from the pc to the recovery drive".

I haven't done it yet, but it seems like an easy way to move the recovery partition to usb if you want to wipe the partition from the drive to free up that 20gb.

 

There's pics of the case on BestBuy... it's nice but not sure if it's $45 nice.....

 

I couldn't find any options to download the regular Win 8.... so I have cloned the factory Yoga SSD to a spare SSD and bought w win * pro upgrade key for 14.99 and plan on doing a complete wipe and fresh install of Win8 Pro so I can get the Media Center added on... theres no way to add the media center now without paying $70 to upgrade to the Pro Pack which is unfortunate... kind of backwards marketing.....

 

I hadn't even noticed that. The touchpad is awesome, considering it's size and multi-touch capabilities. My only gripe is physical buttons would have been better than the pressure area of the touch pad. It's not that big of a deal in Win8, after playing with the Synaptics settings. You can configure the driver to ignore touches in the area where the buttons are. This + palm checking makes a big difference in Win8. In Linux, however, it's another beast. Synclient is far less friendly to configure when compared to Windows. I've made some progress, but still can't set button area as a no-touch-zone and retain the button pressing. I'm sure it'll get sorted out in time.

 

Agreed. Hard to justify $45 for it. This Ideapad is already turning heads (namely many Mac fanatics). <myopinion>Lenovo should toss a couple of accessories in the box to make the sale more appealing, and to further one-up the competition. </myopinion>

 

Where did you get a Win8 Pro upgrade key for $14.99?

 

Does the laptop go totally in the case or the hinges are not protected as in the picture? And what kind of material is this?
Moreover, isn't useful (and how practical) when in tablet mode to protect the keyboard?

 

Does the slot-in cover have elasticised sides so that it stays on when used to cover the keyboard in tablet mode?

 

The day Win8 went on sale I bought the Toshiba U845W-S400 cuz BestBuy didn't have any Yogas in stock..... Then on Friday the Yogas came in and I exchanged it but before I did I took advantage of the 14.99 Win8 upgrade offer since the Toshiba came with win7.... the peculiar thing was and I think it was a glitch or mistake on Microsofts behalf... when I registered for the 14.99 upgrade offer the registration page only asked me for the.... - date of purchase, brand name and model and just the place of purchase... so initially I just filled it out using just "Toshiba" and then Sattlelite" expecting it to then ask me for the new win7 key but it never did (there was a note that said" Register on the PC you want to upgrade")... so I just assumed it grabbed the new key somehow.... so out of curiosity I tried it again but just used any random Brand.. put in "Sony" and then Vaio" and it worked and they sent me a 2nd 14.99 upgrade key... I did it 5 times the first night.... I was surprised Microsoft wans't asking for the new win7 key to verify it was being purchased for a new PC... well then my mother in law and brother wanted to upgrade their old Win 7 pcs so I tried to do it again on Saturday but now after I entered the PC brand and model it was now asking for the Pc's win 7 key which it didn't require the first 2 days.... so I just tried to use an old Win 7 key and it came back unsuccessful... then I tried another more current win 7 key and no luck.. finally I used the new win7 key that came with the Toshiba I had returned and it finally worked again...... so anyways.. the first 2 days after Win8 went on sale the Microsoft website was not verifying that you had purchased a new PC with win7 for the upgrade but that was short lived as they fixed the process 2 days later.... I would've bought a few more for 14.99 if I knew they were going to start requiring a current win7 key.....

 

It feels like leather(polyurethene) has a nice tactile feel to it and protects keyboard great when in tablet mode... fits snug with access to all adapters/outlets

 

For any Linux users interested, dual booting works great. After imaging the disk, I simply wiped out the LENOVO partition and formatted it as ext2. I kept the UEFI and all of it's new-age boot/key/crap intact and installed grub2 to /dev/sda. At boot, via f12, I can choose to boot the SSD (which loads grub), or to the first UEFI device, Windows 8 loader, which points it to the GPT partition (I think /dev/sda2?) by default. Once my second SSD arrives, I plan to restore the original HD to factory and use the second disk for storage & linux.

Ubuntu 12.10 takes literally 5 seconds to boot. It's incredible. The touchscreen is responsive but only supports single touch. There are drivers for our wireless chipset (RTL8723A), however it is not yet supported/patched to work with 3.4+ kernels. Ubuntu 12.10 ships w/kernel 3.5. I'll try a backport kernel today, or just live boot a 2.6.x or earlier 3.x kernel disto to see how wlan works there.

Other than wirelss not working yet, my only gripe w/linux is the touch pad. Since our touchpad is multi-touch, it's constantly jumping the cursor around and pissing me off. Synclient seems to support most every feature Synaptics has available in Windows, but neither the parameters (as found in windows registry) or their values seem to match 1:1 to synclient's parameter:value pairs. I've figured most of it out but the rest will take some patience.

I'll keep you posted on WLAN driver success.

 

One more question, is the $1,299 version the most topped out version you can get in terms of the specs? (Not including warranty and all that...)

 

Chiming in to say I bought the i5 4GB version from Best Buy.

I prefer the i7 (which BB doesn't carry) so I'll most likely be returning it and ordering an i7 (lowest configuration) from Lenovo - hopefully with a coupon.

I'm annoyed that BB only carries one configuration of this, also not happy with the way the drive came partitioned.

I'm hoping to upgrade the ram to 8GB and and drive to a 512 SSD, and NOT have a any problems with getting drivers.

 

The BB i5 build is a blessing for us. You're saving a lot vs the $1300 (w/coupon) from Lenovo. Granted you'll need to upgrade the memory yourself ($40 from crucial). All you're really missing out on is +200mhz from the i7. The i7 would hold it's value later, but for now, $999 is a great deal! It's also nice to take advantage of BB 18 month financing when buying yourself toys right before the holidays .

 

Argh... those pictures confuse me even more. Does the screen also fit inside to transport as a sleeve? Otherwise, you can only leave it on for tablet mode? You need to take it off completely to use the keyboard?

It seems you could use any sleeve type case in this manner, just slip the keyboard half in and flip the screen over. Heat shouldnt be an issue since the vents are on the top/back.

 

Interesting POV regarding the i5 vs i7. I've never used owned the i5 and usually run VMWare so I assume the 8 cores would do better. If I hear more positive info about the i5, I may keep it like you said.

I'm really hoping to see more success stories regarding replacing that hard drive and re=installing though.

From the manual, I couldn't tell if the SSD was micro or what. I'd like to have 512 and as few partitions as possible. Doesn't sound like this will be an easy feat.

 

I was wondering if any of the owners could give us some info on the battery life?

I would really like to hear from some of you who have added a ssd.

 

Please be advised that both the i5 (3317U) and i7 (3517U) have only 2 cores. The i5 is 1.7Ghz while the i7 is 1.9Ghz. This is nominal difference for everyday use.

i5 (3317U): ARK | Intel® Core
i7 (3517U): http://ark.intel.com/products/65714

Don't be oversold on the "Intel Turbo Bursting" bs because it's only active on one core.

Also, the Ideapad Yoga 13 has an unused mini PCI-E slot, perfect for adding a second mSATA disk. The existing SSD is also mSATA with a mini pci-e interface.

You could add the additional disk and use it for the bigger stuff, or you could image/clone the factory disk to your new SSD, then just grow the Windows partition.

 

Almost except for the ssd size. BB will have some with the 256GB this month for $1599. Im not sure I would trust them on that and I know after reading this thread im not willing to pay them that much.

 

Thanks. I understand about the physical cores vs the hyper-threading stuff - just hadn't owned an i5 machine for development / VM use.

I do appreciate the clarification on the 2 mSata drive situation. You make a good argument for keeping the i5 version and upgrading.

 

The laptop fits totally inside the sleeve. Take a look at this Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga unboxing video, starting at the 0:46 sec mark:

Lenovo Unboxed: IdeaPad Yoga - YouTube


Btw, I've seen it at a local Best Buy for $39.99. It has a suede-like texture, feels nice.

 

I found this article about the Europe sale dates and prices.

UK to Get Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga Next Month

 

Thank you for that, I am very interested in running Linux on this.

Specifically running two 256gb ssd's with one for data, and the other split between win8 and opensuse 12.3 (march13) which will hopefully have good hardware support for the yoga by then.

 

I'm still hitting dead ends trying to find a wireless driver that works in linux. The onboard lan/bluetooth device is identified as 0bda:1724 (via lsusb). No network peripherals are reported from lspci. From the interwebs, the vendor & product above looks to be RT2573, however, in Windows, the device is identified as RTL8723A. Unfortunately, I have followed both roads, trying rt2500usb, rt2x00usb, and rtl8723e. I have emailed Realtek asking them for help but so far my email has fallen on deaf ears.

I've posted the output of lspci -nn -v and lsusb -v to: lspci -nn -v: 00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge DRAM C - Pastebin.com

I've started an askubuntu thread, to which a user pointed out:

vendor: 0b05 is "ASUSTek Computer, Inc."

vendor: 0bda is "Realtek Semiconductor Corp."

vendor: 0b05, product: 1724 is an OEM Realtek 'RT2573'

But ..

vendor: 0bda, product: 1724 is NOT a known Realtek product ID


I've emailed Realtek again to see if they can help us out any.

 

Just got mine the other day, but I won't be able to open it till a week from now. Any comments on the battery life?

Hopefully the wifi problem is not that bad. The internet at my place is atrociously slow anyway. I'm curious about the Linux developments as well because I'm hoping to dual-boot openSUSE on this thing.

 

Heads up to those still looking I noticed BB has removed some of the models from there website and changed some of the statuses.

P.S. Still no orange

 

Yes, they removed i7/8 GB / 256 GB altogether. and i5/4 GB / 256 GB now says Coming Soon instead of "Sold out Online" .

Moreover my Lenovo.com order is still showing the staus of 01/02 shipping...

 

Lenovo status of 01/02?, do they want to sell Yoga's or not? I noticed that the base unit is available at BB again.

 

Just had a chat with Lenovo Sales ... they say 01/02 is indicative , it should change .... Hoping that i7 configs starts showing up in BB soon.

 

Can anyone verify the model SSD they have with their Yoga??? SAMSUNG MZMPC128HBFU-000L1 (128GB, SATA600, SSD)

Has anyone done any bench mark tests on the type of read and write speeds you might be getting with this SSD?

 

Yeah, unfortunately it seems to be running at SATA II speeds. I've seen that come up on some secondary mSATA ports, but frankly I'm really surprised that it is on both ports of a brand new Win8 laptop.

 

The service manual identifies the drives and manufacture (see below insert):

 

The service manual isn't always correct as manufacturer's consistently vary the internal parts based on which phase of production they are in.... you can easily have 3 of the same Yoga 13 128gb/4gB/I5 with SSd drives that are provided from various manufacturers and carry various specs depending on time of production and market trends.

 

.. I am in the 250 MB/s read and 240 MB/s write range consistently in both real time bench tests and synthetic tests...

 

Anyone else having problems with the stock Synaptics software crashing? Happened to me twice today, I'm still pretty bare bones, only Office 2010 and Adobe 9 Pro installed. It's SynTPEnh.exe that crashes, two finger scroll and gestures stop working, but the mouse movement still functions. All is fixed by locating and running C:\Program Files\Synaptics\SynTP\SynTPEnh.exe.

I'm not looking for a solution... just verifying issues with others.

 

That's what I'm seeing too, but that is what I was seeing with my OCZ Vertex 2 which was SATA II, my Samsung 830 which is SATA III gets nearly double that. I'm not sure exactly how much difference it will make in real world use, but I hope they can fix the issue with a future driver or BIOS update.

 

The i7 will give us a better processor number but I thought the integrated Inter HD Graphics 4000 would give a better number. I guess I am wrong about the Inter HD Graphics 4000 (for me that is the low point on this machine). I can add SSD Storage and 8GB RAM but can't do anything about the graphics performance.

What do others think about the graphics performance?

From woolooloo test (post on page 36):

Processor 6.9
Memory 7.2
Graphics 4.6
Gaming Graphics 6.2
Primary Hard Disk 7.7

 

I have one more question. I don't understand what the Windows Index Performance numbers really correlates to. For example, if the mSATA drive is only functioning as a SATA 2 (as indicated on this forum) and in testing has lower than expected read / write but still records a Windows Experience Index number of 7.7 ????? If only working as a SATA 2 I would have expected a much lower number than 7.7 (yeah, this shows my lack of understanding on this stuff so any help will be appreciated).

 

A few things to remember, one is that the scale goes to 9.9 on Win 8 and it is only 7.7. My SATA III drive on Win7 (which only goes to 7.9) is 7.9, I'm not sure how much higher it would go if it were on a 9.9 scale. 7.7 was a great number when Win7 came out and SATA II SSDs were just starting to trickle out, so yeah, it seems impressive if you compare it to Win7's 7.9 scale. Also remember that most people are still using spinning disks.

 

For those who were worried or have experienced sluggish response on some of the touch screen usage (particularly edge swiping), it looks like it might just be a "sleep mode" issue with how it is configured:

Fixing Touch Screen Delays / Lost Input on a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga | Precision Computing

Hope that helps! I know that I was holding back a little on purchase worrying about sluggish touch functionality. This might be the push I was looking for to commit finally

 

The HD4000 is what you will find on most intel based ultrabooks with both I5 and I7 chips... really not much you can do to upgrade as it seems to be the consensus among manufacturer's... a boost in Ram will minutely help the graphic performance but not much more can be done.

 

While not ideal, if this is to be your only system, you could look into an eGPU solution utilizing the USB 3.0. There are decent products out there now, ViDock is one if I remember correctly. The only problem would be, it would really only be a viable solution at home on the desktop, and there are driver issues, etc. sometimes. Have heard good things about current eGPU's recently though.

 

I did about 20 benchtests last night with the msata and 4 other SSD drives to compare.... it really performed quite well and up to par on the posted results from PassMArk.... PassMark Software - Hard Drive Benchmark Charts ......

I used CrystalDiskMark, AS SSD Benchmark and ANVIL'S Storage RC5 to do the testing of 4 different SSD and 2 HDD sata3 mechanical drives just for comparison.....

I used an:

Intel 510 120Gb SSD,

OCZ Agility 3 480Gb SSD

OCZ Agility 4 128Gb SSD,

a pair of OCZ Agility 3 240GB in RAID0

and the Samsung mSata from Yoga...........

In all the benchmark tests the only thing that beat the Samusng mSata in all tests was my pair of SSD's running in RAID0 of course.......

The mSata demolished the older Intel 510 120GB and the beat the OCZ Agility 3..... it came out about even with the OCZ Agility 4.....

Sample result from CrystalMark:

OCZ Agility4 128GB -- READ = 251.6 WRITE = 287.3

Intel 510 120GB --- READ = 185.5 WRITE = 159.5

Samsung mSata - READ = 262.3 WRITE = 247.6

OCZ Agility 3 480GB - READ = 198.4 WRITE = 129.5


OCZ Agil 3 RAID0 --- READ = 370.0 WRITE = 250.3

These scores were consistent on all the benchmark tests I used across the board and correlated with the performance guide listed by PassMark reference chart... each test ran minimum of 5 times to look for any anomalies....

ANVIL RC5 - Sequential Read/Write combined test scores......

Intel 510 120gb --- 1188.68

OCZ Agility3 480gb --- 909.41

OCZ Agility 4 128gb --- 1871.90

Samsung mSata --- 1961.51

OCZ Agility3 Raid0 --- 3019.61

 

I just installed 8gb. Wasn't tough to do at all. I didn't use any metal nor sharp objects. I used floss to pull the keyboard off. I positioned the floss over the top right gaps, and used the business card (or something thin) to shove the floss into the gaps. Once I was able to get the floss to latch onto the corners, I pulled gently and lifted the keyboard upwards.

I was also able to stop the rattle when hitting the "-" and "=" key, by bending the the small metal cushion just a tiny bit to add more resistance to the keyboard. So far so good!

 

I have a problem. When I flip the laptop into tablet mode and portrait view, the CPU is throttled to 0.78 ghz. Nothing I run will get it to 1.7ghz or turbo. Unflip it back to normal laptop view, throttling goes away and cpu spikes back up to normal. Is anyone else having this issue? I was playing the Birzzle game and once I flip it to portrait mode, the game started locking up. Very annoying; and I don't see any power settings to allow me to configure this.

 

I never understood the obsession with benchmarking. From what I've read here, some of you sound disappointed with the Y13!

Look, unless you know the metrics you need to hit in order to perform your primary & common tasks optimally, benchmarking should be used only for sport. The Windows Experience Score is a joke.. it's a great way to get you to spend more money on hardware though!

 

Does the problem persist when the machine is plugged in to AC power also?

 

yes it happens plugged and unplugged. The only thing I've changed recently is

Upgraded.to 8gb of ram 1600mhz so should have no impact
Removed Intel appup
Reinstalled rapid start

I even downgraded the video drivers to lenovos just in case. Still no luck.