How and why I stopped buying new laptops
lowtechmagazine.com
How and why I stopped buying new laptops
1–10 of 104 posts
Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
#2A couple of month Pre-pan our Computer Support vocational training department intercepted 2 dozen Dell E5420 with i5-2520M CPUs on the way to electronic recycling. We upgraded them to 1TB SSD and 16GB memory, half Win 10 half Debian 10.5.
Post-Pan, they became our workhorse remote training platform even running both Hyper-V or Virtual Box to teach virtual installations.
Admin had budgets for new laptops for remote teaching. Nothing offered had the specs to replace these upgraded 2012 vintage machines. (Budget was repurposed).
Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
#3Best computer I ever got was a used bottom spec Lenovo T-series I gave my sister. It's 8 years old. My new top-spec T-series had to be returned to Lenovo twice for factory faults.
Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
#4Seems reasonable, but I wonder about the SD card.
Hopefully data is duplicated from the computer to the SD card, instead of living on the SD card. I'm not sure they're as reliable as other media.
Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
#5This is a super-great article. I still have a bunch of old P60s and P61s I got for $100 each, a decade back, and (mostly) replaced the screen-backlight ballast. They did get unreliable after a while, freezing up at random times.
There is a place where you can get a completely new motherboard for a certain old Thinkpad model, that I think I will try.
My only problem with ancient laptops is that nowadays I need 32GB of RAM to run my VMs in.
Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
#6The environmental impact of an individual person buying a new vs. used laptop isn’t even worth considering. If an individual can sway the actions of thousands or tens of thousands of people, then it’s worth considering, perhaps it is.
How people (not necessarily the author) will scrutinize the environmental consequences of inconsequential decisions while willfully ignoring the big picture never ceases to amaze me.
Kids, meat/dairy, housing, travel. If you want to make environmentally sound decisions, that’s all you can do. Don’t have kids, don’t eat meat/dairy, live in as small a home/dense housing as possible, and don’t get on planes. No amount of buying used laptops can make a dent compared to those things.
Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
#7A couple of month Pre-pan our Computer Support vocational training department intercepted 2 dozen Dell E5420 with i5-2520M CPUs on the way to electronic recycling. We upgraded them to 1TB SSD and 16GB memory, half Win 10 half Debian 10.5. Post-Pan, they became our workhorse remote training platform even running both Hyper-V or Virtual Box to teach virtual installations. Admin had budgets for new laptops for remote te…
Is you’d suppose to be a cautionary tale?
Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
#8This is a super-great article. I still have a bunch of old P60s and P61s I got for $100 each, a decade back, and (mostly) replaced the screen-backlight ballast. They did get unreliable after a while, freezing up at random times. There is a place where you can get a completely new motherboard for a certain old Thinkpad model, that I think I will try. My only problem with ancient laptops is that nowadays I need 32GB of…
Just because you can technically run something on a device doesn’t mean it will be usable. A 12 year old Intel proc (even with 32 GB of ram) will feel extremely slow.
Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
#9this is bazonkers
'use low energy software' isn't that simple
me just being a person in the zoom era uses a combination of a windows gaming rig, an old mac for video conferencing, a new mac for xcode, and a linux laptop so I don't hate myself
the best tools don't work at all on old hardware. your time isn't free
we would need to legislate open APIs for every commercial service before it would be reasonable for tech professionals to use old stuff
only open source can work on old hardware
also 'replace old HDDs with SSDs' -- this tech only gets developed + exists because of the volume of laptops being produced. you can't benefit from a corrupt system and pretend to be outside it
Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
#10Seems reasonable, but I wonder about the SD card. Hopefully data is duplicated from the computer to the SD card, instead of living on the SD card. I'm not sure they're as reliable as other media.
idk about this guy but I always treat my machines like they could die tomorrow.