I just bought this yesterday for my 16 year old son. He is in year 11, doing subjects heavy in maths and science. His old laptop was 8 years old and falling. I had a budget of $1200, reluctantly, as I knew that DDR prices and storage prices had gone through the roof recently. Typically, I have spent $700-800 on laptops for my kids.
I walked into a local retailer and this was presented as a laptop that had been ordered and not collected or paid for. Price was $1,999 firm.
After some negotiation, I walked out with it for $1,500. Way more than I was comfortable spending but it seems to be a good deal, unless I am missing something?
I picked up a loq over black Friday sales last year for $800. Very happy with it. Linux mint. A separate account that runs steam when connected to the living room entertainment center.
great price.
Overkill for the use case, great deal for the price. Also will last forever with 4 battery cells.
If he is getting a gaming gpu the kid is probably a gamer
We are on Lemmy.
I am obligated to not only ask that you switch to Linux (please do), but I also must suggest a distribution (Mint).
I don’t make the rules.
He has to have windoze for school. No choice. My computer runs mint, my wife’s runs Ubuntu, and my other son runs Arch.
Winblows.
Winslop
Loosedoesnt
Dual boot maybe and have it be the Tiny 11 version of Windows instead?
My partner had to still use Windows at the time when I got her a gaming laptop about 2 years ago and it ran so much better under tiny 11 then standard stock Windows. Also fixed a wifi issue some of the bloat ware was causing.
As a graduation gift you can wipe it and set him up with linux. It’s like the burning of old homework, but the burning of the bits
I use Arch btw, so it’s my job to say you should totally use Arch.
the hardest part of using Arch is the obligation to tell anyone that you use Arch. if you forget it won’t boot anymore.
I haven’t used raw Arch, but I have been using Garuda for a while. I’d recommend this or CachyOS rather than pure Arch for someone not used to Linux, and especially a child.
I use Nyarch, because I’m an arch user of exquisite taste, so it’s my job to say you should totally use Nyarch while I tip my fedora
Tips my fedora as a sign of respect, whilst secretly studying the blade.
I second both of Adulated_Aspersion’s suggestions.
Praise be to our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds!
OpenSUSE here. I dont recommend or condemn any actions unless you are comfortable and happy to do so.
YAST QUEEN.
Yes, though I would endorse Fedora or an atomic variant e.g. Aurora or Bazzite
I think you mean Manjaro
They guys who keep getting their domain cert expire over and over… and over… and over?
🤔 works for me
It’s not the functionality I’d be worried about.
I heard CachyOS is the new hotness now. Mine is still running Mint though, because I like it and it just works.
I’ve been using Manjaro for a couple years, and of course didn’t see any of the hate for it when trying to pick a distro, or for the first like 6 months of using it. But tbh the only part of my manjaro experience that isn’t fine is that they disable hardware acceleration for h.264 and h.265, with no easy way to enable it. Which is very annoying since I run a Jellyfin server on my desktop. But overall it’s been trouble-free for me.
But along with the seemingly constant power struggles over there, makes it hard to recommend. I hear endeavor OS is the new “easy” arch
At work we buy workstation laptops for our engineers. From Dell, the exact same laptop cost $3,200 in January, $4,400 in April, and $5,900 as of mid-May.
We’re just not buying them and instead shopping different brands.
The AI bubble has absolutely fucked pricing for computers.
Remember to reinstall Windows, so you get rid of some of the bloat, if you aren’t gonna install Linux on it 😎
Great deal and it should last a while. Don’t listen to the people here recommending you uninstall windows, let your kid figure out what they want to do with it.
You can remove any 3rd party antivirus though, if it came installed. Defender is good enough.
First thing we did was uninstall the third party antivirus
First thing you do is reinstall Windows. And then run wim11 download script.
So, I bought something better spec than that shortly before they fucked up the ram and storage prices for about $400usd less. All told, you got a great deal, I think? It’s good hardware and I think lenovo isn’t putting backdoors in the hardware anymore.
Stay strong out there friends. Even in AUD, this shouldn’t be so expensive, right?
Yeah, absolutely crazy prices and based on absolute bullshit too. Can only hope the bubble bursts soon
Idk how much Australian dollars are compared to pounds, but it seems like very good specs for the price. I got a fairly similar laptop (4080 vs 5060 would be the main difference) for about £3000 last year
£3000 is about $AUD5,600. Feeling a bit better about spending the money now
Yeah honestly, not really knowing price trends in Australia, from the US this looks like a steal.
Not sure on those specific specs but on ebay you can often comfortably find ex-corporate laptops in mint condition for just 2-300 quid. Il never buy a first hand laptop after i “discovered” this trick.
Fair point. I like warranties when buy for school
for school the specs are waaaaay too overkill. You can easily get away with much much lower and cheaper specs.
But had a quick browse for similar specs on ebay, and it looks like you can get second hand for roughly a little bit more (for your specs), so overall its a reasonably good deal for the specs
if they cant/arent willing to move to linux, i recommend installing something like tiny11, a stripped-down version of windows 11, without ads, edge browser, copilot
Oof. Glad I bought my rig off a friend and paid in drugs.
Yep. Unfortunately, retailers don’t accept drugs. Well, not the one I went to
Yeah it’s not typically the most reliable form of transaction I’m afraid.
Sounds like the best deal, honestly
What’re we taking here? This thing worth like 2 or 3 rocks of crack, or like 5 Marijuanas? Or what?
I think I just scooped speed paste into a baggy until we both felt it was about enough lol
dad got a deal tho
Are those prices in dollaridoos or did you already do a conversion?
In dollaridoos
Seems like a good deal.
You are a good dad for getting your son something he can really use. Most people would just give their kids a tablet or cheap out and get something that just barely works. This is a good machine I would happily use myself (after putting Linux on it). A bit chunky for taking it on the road, but presumably he would just use it at home anyways.
I’m out of the loop on prices, but I can tell you Windows Home is a disaster. I’ve had the displeasure of having to interact with one and it was so anti-user, it still hurts to think about.
The bloatware is by default a scam. All the My Documents stuff is set to OneDrive by default, and i do mean all of it.
Copilot is on by default - that’s browser, windows search and Office demos (you need a subscription to use them fully and they’re all in the cloud, not really local). It will add itself to all texts created or edited with default Microsoft programs like notepad or Office. Any schoolwork done with Copilot active will possibly create problems for your kid at school.
Login is set to require an online connection by default. You literally have to set it manually so that you can login on your PC when the internet is down. Imagine my surprise when I had to reboot while offline and couldn’t get past the welcome screen. We’re not very welcome on our own PC anymore.
Files are encrypted by default, which sounds nice and safe, until something goes wrong. The access codes are kept in your Microsoft account, online, so if you don’t have access there, you’re screwed out of recovery.
File indexing is wonky, so Windows at times ends up keeping a cache or copy of everything, doubling occupied space for seemingly no reason. 100Gb gone missing for no reason, it’s usually file indexing at work.
Every security-related* network request gets logged. It gets added to a specific file somewhere a Home user doesn’t really have access to and needs to jump through hoops to find it. Windows 11 being telemetry hell full of spying bloatware makes a network request for location access every 5-15 minutes, which gets logged to that file. It will generate an encrypted log file that will eventually reach over 100Gb in size, similar to file indexing only more routinely, that’s a bitch to get rid of. I would know.
Windows Home treats the user as a delinquent juvenile offender. It’s not your PC when you have it on, but a heavily restricted and surveilled privilege that everyone but yourself can control. Get rid of it.
File indexing is wonky, so Windows at times ends up keeping a cache or copy of everything, doubling occupied space for seemingly no reason. 100Gb gone missing for no reason, it’s usually file indexing at work.
I still can’t understand why MS doesn’t use the features they themselves implemented in NTFS to make the search work like in Everything. Those features are not even new anymore, and still they implement a search that sucks so hard that i’d rather search manually by browsing random folders.
