Alrighty, I’m pulling the plug on this laptop because it was going to hit end-of-life Windows 10 support in a few months and I don’t have whatever CPU thingy Microsoft wants to upgrade to 11. It served me well for years and I got more than my money’s worth imho.
Now! I have a Surface Go 2 which I guess I can get a USB-C dock for and connect to the big monitor and keyboard/mouse.
Or, I guess I can finally pull the trigger on scouring my little Chinese mini-PC to make sure whatever spyware it supposedly came preloaded with is eliminated and start using it as the main PC. It’s been sitting in a box ever since I caught wind of the potential issues.
Took this picture to enter a lenovo contest (the theme was Show your love of Lenovo). My boyfriend has two Lenovo laptops of his own that aren’t in the picture. I also have an old chromebook running linux.
kinesis advantage update: i have used the keyboard’s on-device programmability function to swap backspace and delete, which it places under the left thumb, with enter and space, which are on the right. this is essential for wasd gaming.
now i need to get some of those keycap removal calipers so i can swap the keycaps
there is something i find so charming about a keyboard that takes like 4 days to relearn how to type on, that lets you arbitrarily remap keys and define macros on the keyboard itself, places a warning buzzer whenever you whenever you hit caps lock, and has an option to attach foot pedals which are bound to modifier keys by default. i may as well get the foot pedals. if the economy’s going to shit, may as well invest in flamboyant means of production
more software than hardware, but tonight i set up navidrome (media server for music) with tailscale (personal mesh vpn that essentially links your devices on a private network) using play:sub as the frontend player on my phone
so yeah i guess now i can stream my FLACs from my computer to my phone. for free. and it scrobbles
i’ve already had to change one setting (by default it’s set to scan hard drive every minute, lol) so i hope this won’t have any dire consequences for my hardware. i’m not setting up a different machine for this it’s my main pc that’s doing the media serving.
on the other hand, i do have a spare laptop upstairs that could be converted into a media server, i guess. but it would mean moving my hard drive with all my music and movies upstairs, instead of plugged into my gaming pc (which is hooked up to my tv already).
Is there a clear winner these days, for a mini-PC that’s meant to act as a small home/hobby server? There’s an absurd amount of options out there, and many of the good ones don’t even seem to come with all the parts needed to run OOB. What is the play? This is one of the few items I still need to buy while prices are sane.
My wife came back from packing up her childhood home with the NES she played as a kid and I thought I’d clean it up for her and hook it up and… this piece of shit it doing the red blinking light thing. I cleaned all the games, I cleaned the edge connector on the board, I lifted all the little fingers up in the original connector, I tried a new connector, and still no dice
One time I got SMB3 to start up and 90% of the grapics were correct, except for mario and luigi, so it’s probably something with the connector but I don’t know what else to try
Actually that might help the replacement connector The plastic warped as it cooled and the whole thing is in a u shape so the cart is hard to get in and the middle fingers make more contact than the edges. Maybe softening it will get it to flatten out
Just do what I did and scrounge craiglist and freecycle until you find someone else’s old computer (preferably ITX) at a good price. Then slap linux on it and call it a day.
so i think i said here i’d been thinking about about getting one of those new macbook airs
and while those are very convenient home laptops (and easy to carry), i was coming back to the idea that in reality, a Windows machine is probably more useful to me these days
I had a Lenovo gaming laptop for a long time which I liked a lot and lasted me about 8 years before it died a warrior’s death the other day. So I am willing to vouch for their quality.
Now I’ve gone down the rabbit hole and apparently the laptop 4070s are quite a step up from the laptop 4060s but I guess how much money that’s worth is a ymmv situation
logaze is a neat site for browsing lenovo’s refurbished inventory. Currently they have a lower-spec (AMD 7735HS, RTX 4060, 16GB RAM, 165Hz display) version of the notebook you posted earlier for just under $1000.
The difference between Raptor Lake i7 and i9 is slight: both have 8 performance (P) cores; the i7-14700HX has 12 efficiency (E) cores and the i9-14900HX has 16. Both are built on an older process, I’d lean toward an Intel Ultra 7/9 or AMD CPU (the latter is often cheaper than any intel option).
Also apologies but I can’t resist quizzing you re: macbook: how much work are you going to do on this machine? Do you need Windows to work efficiently?
well, the thing is, i have a work laptop (which sucks/is a Macbook that runs badly), but i’d like to have a better personal laptop to do personal laptop things with
the Macbook Airs are really nice uh “lifestyle” gadgets imo. very light etc. and would be easy to take with me wherever. i could also record music with it.
that said, games and numerous programs and whatnot are mostly-Windows based, and so if i’m getting a new laptop, i think at this point i’d rather have something that changes my at-home computer situation in a more significant way. i feel like the Air will be nice, but basically just a better-performing version of a thing i already kind of have
yeah, I’d like to disagree with this, and there was a solid 10 year period when I would have, but if you don’t currently have a windows machine of any kind, and you don’t need a Mac for some work purpose, I would get a windows machine. Mac software support has lost a critical 10 or so percent in the last 5 years, and while I still think their laptops are much more reliable and portable, that 10% can only be worked around if you have also heavily invested in a Windows PC and networking hardware
The plastic warped as it cooled and the whole thing is in a u shape so the cart is hard to get in and the middle fingers make more contact than the edges. Maybe softening it will get it to flatten out