So I’ve just bought a new laptop. Its not because my old one couldn’t do what I needed it to do or that it was just getting old. I added more ram at the start of the year and processors haven’t changed too much in recent years so it’s still powerful enough. The reason I changed my laptop is that it kept falling apart. In the last year, I’ve had Dell come out five times to service my laptop. Most of the time they have replaced the whole motherboard so its not even a repair I could do myself.

The old laptop was a Inspiron 7577, a low end gaming laptop I bought originally because it was powerful and wasn’t too expensive, like many workstation laptops. The original intent was that it should last me the whole five years of university, and by all intents it should have. It all started when the computer would crash whenever the graphics card would be used. It took a lot of arguing with Dell to get them to come out and service the machine, not the best experience. The rest of the times were better but still not the best customer experience.

After enough of this, I just got fed up with the build quality as well as the other incompatibilities with Linux. The biggest problem is the lack of optimus support in NVIDIA laptops. While this wasn’t normally the biggest problem as I’m not the biggest gamer, it became a problem for using multiple monitors as the HDMI port was connected to the dedicated graphics card while the internal monitor was connected to the integrated graphics card. Windows has a solution to deal with this but Linux has to rely on community software. I was using Bumblebee until it stopped working one day so I moved to the newer optimus-manager. Using optimus-manager in hybrid mode was alright, although it didn’t turn off the dedicated graphics card. While generally it worked, every now and then there would be an update to python or something and the whole program would need to be rebuilt or it wouldn’t work. Just generally not a great experience.

With all of this, I ended up buying a new laptop. I decided on a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 AMD. Being a ThinkPad targeted towards businesses should help with the build quality and reliability. So far it seems good, definitely enjoyable having a portable laptop for a change. Plus the keyboard is pretty good, I mean you always hear it in reviews but having it in person is another thing. The laptop is pretty powerful also, so it should be able to do what I need it to do. For virtual machines and the like, I’m thinking of building a desktop to compliment it. I’ll try and set up a remote desktop connection to it also or something. Could be a fun project to try and set up.

Anyway, lets hope this laptop survives better than the last one, should be enough for uni at least. Unfortunately it has a slightly small ssd, but I can replace that if its too small. I can also add a bit more ram should I need it. We’ll see if Lenovo’s customer support is any better than Dell’s, at the moment I’m convinced it can’t be any worse.