44 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
44 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "Buying someone a new laptop"
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date: 2020-09-09
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description: ""
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---
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My partner's been running with a 2015 MacBook Air for a few years now,
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but it's no longer doing what she needs. That is to say, it rapidly
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converted from “ok” to “very stinky” over the last year-ish. YouTube
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videos stutter. It's madness. We even re-installed MacOS, and no dice.
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An upgrade was in order, and with all the remote work stuff, it needed
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to be a sizeable one.
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Now, my current laptop is a Dell Precision M4700 from early 2013 (that
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I bought in 2018). It's a fat boy. Nearly an inch and a half thick,
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and not exactly _chamfered_. Priorities for that purchase include:
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number of hard drive spots, number of RAM slots, can play Factorio.
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My partner did not want a Dell Precision M4700. She has frivolous
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requirements like “battery life more than an hour”, “un-terrible
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webcam”, and “less than 6 pounds”. This narrowed down the options
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significantly. Of course, what narrowed it down more was that I
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insisted on finding something with swappable RAM and storage, but I
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stand by that.
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The search for new technology is kinda fun, but I spent way too much
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time on it, and it got to be pretty draining. There exist far too many
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devices with good specs and terrible trackpads. We also try to buy
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used where possible for not-being-wasteful reasons, but her work uses
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very poorly-optimized software, so we bit the bullet and found
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something new.
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And when I say “we”, I mean “she”. I spent hours on the search (and
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picked up plenty about the current laptop “market” or whatever) but
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ultimately she found it, tucked away on a manufacturer's website. I
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gave it the know-it-all computer-guy seal of approval, and we ordered.
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It looks pretty cool, and should totally blow mine out of the water.
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But it hasn't arrived yet, so maybe it's terrible.
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#100DaysToOffload
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PS: For those interested it's an Inspiron 15 5000 with the Ryzen 5 4500U.
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