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The laptop that won't die

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Re: The laptop that won't die

#271

Post by hospitalJail »

nirui wrote: post #104

This is another Thinkpad festival post? Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have this DELL Studio laptop released back in September, 2009, and it can still kick very well too if I decide to recruit it back to my "workforce". I retired it just 3~4 years ago because I got a T480. Heck, some of my code (old versions) for the same project that…

I think due to $100-$200 laptops floating around in the late 2000s, people started getting impressed with computers serving more than 4 years.

Even back then, you could get almost a decade out of a computer in some sort of capacity. Give it to the youngest kid or mom, they only play clicking games.

To this day, I see people amazed that their $1000 laptop survived ~7 years. Meanwhile I have $550 laptops that are still being used for gaming(Minecraft/Steam) literally 9 years later.

I think the root cause is that people only spent $1000 dollars on a laptop when it had a glowing logo on it, and were impressed that a $1000 laptop would last more than 4 years. To any other nerd, they knew that the SSD was the real game changer.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#273

Post by electrondood »

I knew without clicking that was a Lenovo Thinkpad. Those things are beasts.

Also, fuck Medium. "Log in to continue reading..." paywall.

Okay, log in.

"To continue reading, subscribe to $AUTHOR..."

Useless waste of my time.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#274

Post by marci »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #5
zitterbewegung wrote: post #3

Anecdotal evidence is obvious but Lenovo has at least tried to keep up their quality (don’t buy anything other than the thinkpad line) but Mac durability in the long term may can have issues. I remember that I had to get a repair of two Mac’s I have owned (but one time Apple upgraded me to the newer version so that’s why I am loyal.)

I'll second this: Non-Thinkpad Lenovo laptops are poorly designed trash heaps. Thinkpads have largely retained the build quality that everyone brags on. My tl;dr advice for buying a computer on a budget is, get a T480s off of eBay. They are corporate cast-offs and there are so. many. of them. The R2v3 rating system has become popular. Get one rated C5 or better (cosmetic: minor usage marks only) and F4 or better (fun…

For people eyeing a T480s, make sure both batteries inside don't have too much degradation. At some point, the switch from one battery to the other doesn't work properly and the laptop will most times suddenly switch off when battery #1 reaches 0%, even if the 2nd one is at 100%, no matter how many recalibrations you do.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#275

Post by hawski »

vel0city wrote: post #258
PennRobotics wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft and Intel are telling us we're holding it wrong. Laptops and PCs should behave like smartphones. The irony is that an Android tablet---about as smartphone-like as you can get with a laptop-sized display---never has heating problems while sleeping.

I've had bouts of battling hot laptop bags. It's almost always been software other than Microsoft or Intel causing the device to wake and start chugging away heavily. Usually some misconfigured security tool or bad drivers constantly sending wake events. Personally I really like having my device automatically connect to the Wi-Fi when I get to the office, reconnect VPN, get chat and email synced, get ssh sessions rec…

IMHO if Microsoft wanted this it is clearly them to blame. It is a bit like going back to the MS-DOS era where applications should behave as there was no memory protection.

The simple/partial solution is: if the system is in S0ix (modern standby) state then under no circumstances it is allowed to get warmer than some reasonable temperature (i.e. 36°C / 97°F) - a fan should absolutely never spin up.

That is clearly on Microsoft and Intel to omit such an obvious limitation.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#276

Post by bluedino »

I'm more amazed that someone can live with that atrocious Lenovo screen for that long. I can live with the thickness, the not so great battery life (unless you go with that monster 'slice' battery), and the heat. But the screen...

I went from a ThinkPad to a MacBook Pro in 2010. The screen was amazing. It was bright, it had viewing angles, it wasn't fuzzy... The trackpad, slimness, instant-on, speakers, and everything else was just icing on the cake.

Later on, I picked up a 2560x1440 ThinkPad X1 and the screen was great, Lenovo had finally leveled the playing field. But there was a pretty big gap in my life where I went without a ThinkPad.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#277

Post by Unfrozen0688 »

cdelsolar wrote: post #260
Unfrozen0688 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more so with desktops. I am running a 2014 CPU i7 4790k with 32GB RAM and a 1070ti. Due to it being a desktop w noctua cooler the temps never get high. Keyboard and mouse you just replace when worn out. This year I am thinking about upgrading. But my 2019 Thinkpad already feels slow... so I never got laptops for long use. They suck.

Clearly you haven’t tried Apple Silicon laptops

I haven't and they are a very new and recent creation also windows games on desktop better get it?

Every single time on this site you people just LOVE your M1s dont you.

Desktops generally offer better performance, get it? Also pheripherals

Re: The laptop that won't die

#278

Post by close04 »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #256
fefe23 wrote: post #252

> Create an account to read the full story. No. I shall not. > To make Medium work, we log user data. By using Medium, you agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy. That's now how this works. Please don't use Medium, post to Medium, or share Medium links. Sites like this are a cancer on the Internet.

The author put this behind a paywall. How is that any different to you than Substack or the NYTimes?

The paywall is the author's choice and anyone is free to reject creating a Medium account, no damage done on either side. OP's second objection on the other hand looks less "rejectable" than a paywall because the damage is done before you have the chance to reject it:

> By using Medium, you agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy.

Medium's implicit assumption that by clicking on their link the user accepted the policies is illegal under GDPR. It doesn't give the chance to reject before being tracked.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#279

Post by toast0 »

rollcat wrote: post #163
nirui wrote: post #104

This is another Thinkpad festival post? Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have this DELL Studio laptop released back in September, 2009, and it can still kick very well too if I decide to recruit it back to my "workforce". I retired it just 3~4 years ago because I got a T480. Heck, some of my code (old versions) for the same project that…

> a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have a 20yro TiBook. Both the RTC and the main battery are dead, and there's a tiny screen defect, but the machine is otherwise perfectly usable (if relatively slow). And by usable, I mean the desktop experience of Mac OS X 10.5 often feels more polished than that of some of the modern OS's... The big bummer is that the modern web keeps raising a wall t…

My favorite pattern is serve all the content on http and https, but set the favicon to be fetched via https, and serve that with hsts. Preload hsts if you can. (Handling Upgrade-insecure-request seems good, too)

Then, modern browsers will use https after the first load and older browsers will use https, but probably not fetch the favicon.

It doesn't really hurt to return content instead of a redirect to connections that come in via http, if the user is being MITMed, they could make a http request and the MITM could make a https request and the server wouldn't know, and can't do anything about.

http makes passive observation easier of course, but there's not a huge difference between having the content and having a redirect to content that an observer could also load.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#280

Post by sy7ar »

Unfrozen0688 wrote: post #136
felixhammerl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wife uses a mid-2013 Macbook Air as a daily driver still after >10 years, works in academia. What happened is simply that CPU stopped being the thing that made stuff slow, so a mid-2010s upper midrange can still hold its own today, ssd was already good then, and memory plateaued around 8gb for entry level machines some 5 years ago. So as long as your thermals don't suck, your ssd doesn't smoke out, and your keyboard…

Even more so with desktops. I am running a 2014 CPU i7 4790k with 32GB RAM and a 1070ti. Due to it being a desktop w noctua cooler the temps never get high. Keyboard and mouse you just replace when worn out. This year I am thinking about upgrading. But my 2019 Thinkpad already feels slow... so I never got laptops for long use. They suck.

Like the other commenter said, you haven’t tried Apple silicon if you think all laptops suck.

My M1 MacBook Air is way faster than my iMac with i7 7700. And now M3 pro is probably faster than my desktop i9 10850k.

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