Monday, January 06, 2025

Re: New laptop time

On Sun, Jan 05, 2025 at 06:19:25PM -0800, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
> And finally, Murphys's law applies to laptops: they break, often at
> quite inconvenient times. The worst OpenBSD laptop I've ever owned
> was the one I had to buy (around 2008) at a small-town big-box retailer
> in a snowstorm the night before I was flying to a foreign country, after
> my previous laptop died 2 days earlier. After that experience I switched
> to owning pairs of slightly older/cheaper laptops, so I always have a
> spare on hand.

I've never had a laptop mainboard or screen or keyboard fail in
several decades of roaming. I did have a pre-SSD hard drive fail (a
decade or so ago, while at a software conference, and my fault) when
the laptop fell out of a backback onto a concrete floor. Went to a
nearby computer store (remember them?). When I asked for a
replacement, the sales person squinted at my broken drive and said
"I'm sorry, they don't make them that small any more!" It was actually
a win because I wound up with more space to clutter up. And that
laptop lasted several years and was retired in working order due to
CPU speed.

And the only massive laptop failure I saw close up was when an admin person
came to me (I was a developer, not their IT person) and said: "I spilled my
coffee into my laptop keyboard, and it made a sort of zzzzzt sound. Do you
think it can be just cleaned up?". I came in the next Monday and found
a new admin person in their desk.

So although I do get the point, I use one laptop, a Framework 13, with
the original Intel CPU. It's fast enough for general use, though I
wouldn't push it for gaming. Suspend/Resume works on current, though
I've not tested hibernate in ages.

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