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How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#91

Post by Jolter »

jjkaczor wrote: post #44

... well... this is all good except... if you use Windows and want to upgrade to Windows 11... am currently fighting with a Lenovo W530 from 2013 - and nothing is working "well", even the recent 2024 Win 11 IoT Enterprise release build that can make TPM/etc optional via a Rufus-created USB stick. And then testing newer Linux distros is also not working with the nVidia K2000M discrete graphics system. Am thinking it m…

I can’t tell if you read the article. The idea is to not use resource demanding operating systems but stay on some lightweight alternative like a particular Linux distribution.

So how to get Windows 11 running seems entirely off topic.

Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#92

Post by cowboylowrez »

tgma wrote: post #76

[flagged]

Yeah, the guy griped about replacing keys at 15(?) eu whatever so I get where he's coming from. If you can't afford 2 keyboards worth of replacement keys then it places you in certain economic tiers. If your laptop use is personally very profitable for you then it absolutely makes sense to go first class.

Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#93

Post by tgma »

unicornporn wrote: post #81
tgma wrote: post #76

[flagged]

> the author is quoting prices in Euros, which is pretty much synonymous with "extreme poverty" I mentioned before :) Care to elaborate? > Especially ironic this article is from 2020 when M1 was launched and now laptops, both Qualcomm and Apple ones, are leaps and bounds better than before. Something tells me you haven't quite grasped the blog post or what LOW←TECH MAGAZINE is about. https://permacomputing.net

> Care to elaborate?

Europe is increasingly a basket case.

> what LOW←TECH MAGAZINE is about

Yea, I did sense some hints of political ideals, but did not know that it is explicitly part of some movement. Thanks for elaborating.

Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#94

Post by strls »

jmclnx wrote: post #19

My newest laptop is a Thinkpad W541 with Linux purchased used a few of years ago. That is just as good as any new laptop made today. The Old T430 I got from a relative who went to a MAC is also quite adequate for daily use. I have NetBSD on it and just finished upgrading to 10.1, so this was typed on that T430. So unless you are a heavy duty gamer or work on complex 3d graphics professionally, any recently used lapto…

I had to replace a perfectly good T450s because of terrible performance when using external 4k monitors. I had it for 6 years, upgrading everything I could, and it could probably last for at least another 4 hears if not for the outdated CPU. Replaced with a ryzen elitebook because RAM is expandable to 64Gb, hoping it will last for up to 10 years. The difference in performance is staggering compared to the old core i5, well worth the cost of a base model.

Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#95

Post by tom_ »

ksec wrote: post #8
cf100clunk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, saw that too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646791 374 points, 530 comments

LOL I posted this in the previous thread > I am still on my MacBook Pro 2015 because of the Keyboard and Trackpad. So in about 2 years time this will be 10 years of usage. I dont intend to replace it any time soon. For browsing it is fast enough. And if you look at the Louis Rossman Channels it seems newer MBP just aren't built the same. It may be worth looking at it again I 2025. How little ( or big ) the past 10 ye…

I'm still using my 2015 13" Macbook Pro. I bought it in April 2015, and I think I'll actually get ten years' use out of it. The form factor is still decent, and it generally runs cool and quiet, but the performance is nothing to write home about (shall we say). It's still useable, for now, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that nobody is optimising their software for this tier of system any more.

You do have to be pretty determined to squeeze 10 years out of this sort of laptop. macOS gave up on my laptop a while ago (it runs macOS Monterey), and the app store moans at me occasionally about not being able to upgrade this or that because I don't have a recent enough macOS. It seems Apple gave up on selling replacement batteries for it at some point last year, too.

Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#96

Post by bluGill »

Jolter wrote: post #89
bluGill wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on what you do. a newer cpu is often enough more efficent per unit of work as to pay for itself. I first calculated this when we were arguing if the price of a 80486 was worth it over the cheaper 80386 and if you kept it busy 24x7 you would pay for the new computer in a year from your electric bill (more in summer when you need ac)

The idea of the article is to not run the newer, more demanding software which drives the replacement cycle. Instead install a lightweight Linux or similar and don’t use all those extra CPU cycles.

But even then wht if you ran the lite linux on the newest. Would the increased efficiency pay for it?

Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#97

Post by em-bee »

scarface_74 wrote: post #90
em-bee wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the data storage alone is not the issue. the cost of accessing that data is. not every place has unlimited fast internet that would allow you to download that much data without problems. with a replaceable SSD i can (and in fact just did a few weeks ago) take the SSD from the old laptop and put it into the new one. took me 5 minutes. restoring all that data from the cloud would have cost me a few hundred dollars in m…

With BackBlaze you can have them ship you your data on a hard drive. They charge you for the hard drive. But if you send the hard drive, they refund your money.

backblaze doesn't support linux or any kind of unix at all, which makes that a non-starter. and i could not find which countries they can ship to, but i am pretty sure they won't be able to ship to china without me having to pay import tax on the disk and cost of shipping back. and i wonder if they can even ship worldwide. i also have to install their proprietary software on my computer which means that despite encryption i have to trust them with my data. i'd rather not.

so sure, there are ways to get around the limitations of a soldered SSD, but so far i have not seen any that are worth the benefit of a few grams saved in the weight of my laptop. because that is what we are arguing about here.

backups are good, and everyone should have one, and they are certainly covering several failure modes regardless of whether the SSD is soldered or not. but an unsoldered SSD also covers a few failure modes that a backup doesn't cover. at the cost of a few grams of extra weight. my goal is to maximize the recovery options. so i have backups and a replaceable SSD.

the ultimate solution would be a laptop that supports two SSDs so i can run a raid mirror like my desktop. one of those SSDs could even be soldered in that case.

Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#98

Post by scarface_74 »

em-bee wrote: post #97
scarface_74 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With BackBlaze you can have them ship you your data on a hard drive. They charge you for the hard drive. But if you send the hard drive, they refund your money.

backblaze doesn't support linux or any kind of unix at all, which makes that a non-starter. and i could not find which countries they can ship to, but i am pretty sure they won't be able to ship to china without me having to pay import tax on the disk and cost of shipping back. and i wonder if they can even ship worldwide. i also have to install their proprietary software on my computer which means that despite encry…

That’s fair.

But soldered versus non-soldered is a secondary issue to you not having up to date backups somewhere that are easily accessible.

But even then there are backup solutions for Linux that backup to S3 and S3 Glacier is cheap. I have 3TB and my AWS bill is $4 a month.

And “RAID is not backup”

Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#99

Post by Uw5ssYPc »

This idiot first buys several laptops for 5000 Euro, then he switches to garbage 15-years old 50 Euro ones. From one extreme to another. And his website promotes anti-humanism propaganda, like turning off running water in people's homes for "sustainability". What a joke.

Re: How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops (2020)

#100

Post by hyperliner »

cowboylowrez wrote: post #92
tgma wrote: post #76

[flagged]

Yeah, the guy griped about replacing keys at 15(?) eu whatever so I get where he's coming from. If you can't afford 2 keyboards worth of replacement keys then it places you in certain economic tiers. If your laptop use is personally very profitable for you then it absolutely makes sense to go first class.

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