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How often do you replace your laptop?


Nokra

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I have a Yoga 13 which is getting pretty long in the tooth, at 7 or 8 years old. It has been a great computer and is still running quite well, thanks to relatively frequent reformatting and reinstallations of Windows 10. 

 

My only complaints are that its hard drive is pretty small (128 GB) and its battery only lasts about an hour these days. It has 8 GB of RAM, which is usually enough, though with enough Chrome tabs open it is getting nearly maxed out. The computer does pretty much everything else I need it to do, except for its small hard drive, which is sometimes an issue with me working on larger datasets for school... I've got about 200 GB of data I'm working with, so I'm frequently having to shuffle data around between my laptop and desktop (which is also 8 years old but at least has a 4 TB HDD :lol:). Even the battery life isn't that big of an issue, since I'm pretty much always able to find an outlet. It's mostly used for word processing and coding in Java, C++, and Python (analyzing the data), so its i5 processor and 8 GB of RAM is pretty much sufficient. 

 

Basically I'm just hoping for you all to help me justify getting a new computer :p but I thought maybe there would be some opposing views, also.

 

For my upgrade, I've been eyeing a 7th generation X1 Carbon. I found a deal for about $1300 for a 10th generation i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. It would be a nice weight reduction too (3.3 lbs to 2.4 lbs), though the Yoga is already pretty light. Jumping from a 3rd generation i5 to a 10th generation i7 with 6 cores would be pretty awesome too. 

 

Any thoughts on this? How often do you all upgrade? When do you think an upgrade is justified?

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4 minutes ago, EternallDarkness said:

I only use my laptop for writing and of course the programs I use for that don't require massive amounts of power. I got a new Mac Air last year around this time to upgrade from my 2012 Air. 

 

3 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I just replaced my macbook which is my general use laptop after, 8 years. My Dell is my "Work" laptop and that's two years old so I don't plan on getting any new laptops anytime soon.

So it sounds like both of you were in roughly the same boat as me, as far as time between computers goes. 

 

I know it's a pretty subjective question that will differ from person to person, but do you feel like the upgrade was worth it? 

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3 minutes ago, Nokra said:

 

So it sounds like both of you were in roughly the same boat as me, as far as time between computers goes. 

 

I know it's a pretty subjective question that will differ from person to person, but do you feel like the upgrade was worth it? 

I definitely do... my old laptop was running so slow but it didn't have a lot of ram, only 4gigs. I still have it because it has a bunch of ports that my new laptop doesn't have and a disc drive. Besides that, I'm more than happy with my new laptop and between the three that I now own plus my desktop, I don't foresee upgrading to a new laptop anytime soon.

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My laptop was released in 2005. Not sure the year I got it, but I know I had it by the end of 2007. I am pretty sure it is a Toshiba Satellite A105 of some kind, and the operating system is windows vista. I use it almost every day, exclusively for porn. I call it my porn top. I really need a new porn top tho. Like, I can't even watch some Pornhub videos because they are so laggy. Like, back in the day, I tried played WoW on it but it can't even do that. It really isn't a great device, but it works well enough for porn. I dread the day it breaks down on me. 

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I used to replace it every couple years, but now they seem to last a long time. I also hardly use my laptop as a laptop. It's primarily for work, and while I'm in the office I have it plugged into a dock. I do think that there's a very noticeable difference between something 7-8 years old and something modern. The CPU and storage speeds in particular have gotten much better. I'd recommend going for 16GB of RAM. I'm surprised everything still seems to start at 8GB, especially given how greedy things like Chrome can be.

 

I like having thunderbolt on my laptop, though I primarily use it for docking. It's nice that my dock just has the one cable for my whole desk setup (3x1080p monitors, KB+M, GigE) and also provides the power. With more and more things going USB-C, it's kinda great that you can have one cable for everything. My laptop is kinda power hungry though. If I got a new one, I'd try much harder to find something that drew less than ~60W, that way I could use a whole host of generic USB-C chargers.

 

The one thing I haven't been impressed by is the graphics. I have an XPS 15 that's a couple years old now, running a GTX 1050, and it seems to struggle when I throw much at it. Given the i7-770HQ and 32GB of RAM, I'm pretty sure it's the GPU where it struggles. Not that I've played many games on it. It still seems you really have to go out of your way to get any decent GPU performance in a laptop.

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Usually I go 5 years.   Due to circumstances I just nabbed a 16"MBP after 12 years of not owning a MAC mostly because of not being able to do gaming on it....now with game streaming it doesn't matter.  

 

It is replacing a 3 year old MSI 15" Gaming Laptop that is still way faster than it..but heavier and worse battery due to beefy specs.    

 

Really liking the change so far, but a little sad I can't spin up more devices in GNS3 to simulate my networks for my work and study purposes....but hey..thats what my desktop is for. 

 

 

 

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I still have my first laptop, its an Asus G73jw from 2010. I've only done minor upgrades like add more RAM and an SSD, but its too old at this point to play anything modern. For fun I tried to play GTA V at its lowest settings and it looked/played terrible. I'm looking to spend around $1000 to get something that'll do 1080p gaming, whenever I find something like that I'll pull the trigger and retire the G73jw.

 

Also its good to see the PCCB is still around.

 

 

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I got my boss an X1 Carbon in the summer. While prepping it I did have a charging issue but it has been fine since my boss has been using it. I don't remember all the details but I think it didn't want to shutdown properly so I had to hold down power button to shutdown and reset something to get it to charge again and it's been fine since then.

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On 1/31/2020 at 10:54 AM, dualhunter said:

I got my boss an X1 Carbon in the summer. While prepping it I did have a charging issue but it has been fine since my boss has been using it. I don't remember all the details but I think it didn't want to shutdown properly so I had to hold down power button to shutdown and reset something to get it to charge again and it's been fine since then.

There were stories in the news in the last few weeks about the USB-C controller in several Lenovo models (the X1 Carbon included) having faulty firmware. It might be worth updating that, if you want to make easy brownie points with your boss or save yourself some trouble down the road. :lol:

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