New laptop suggestions

[barnfind]

Need to buy a new laptop for reading/flashing and looking for OS suggestions: Windows 11 Home or Pro and any other features to consider. Thanks

[vlad01]

I find most modern laptops have crashing issues due to flexing and primarily dropping ram connections when handled. Both modern lenovo and HP laptops at home did that from new.
My partner's last work's dell one would go mental with the keyboard and mouse rapid fire clicking the mouse and keyboard when it got too warm, I suspect the battery would expand a little pressing on something that sorted out and made the keys and mouse go ballistic.

On my current lenovo which was highly recommended by reviewers and also iirc the laptop expert jarrods tech on YT, it suffered the same issue with the crashes. I ended up making a shim for the ram to support it when the laptop was picked up, it solved the issue. I never had any of these issues from laptops from 10 years or older as they were all thicker and more rigid and generally didn't have the components jammed so close to the casing.

So as much as I hate the lack of upgradability, I'd look for one that had has soldered in ram with a decent amount, that should avoid the reliability issue when physically handled. I don't really have a suggestion for make and model since even the recommended ones we got had issues as mentioned.


As for the OS, I switched this lenovo to linux Mint with the guidance from Ant, it was actually much easier for me to install and use than win 11.

I was sick of 11 crashing or loosing data from the updates. I had at least 3 such incidences in the last 2 years. Last one was a month or so ago where I thought I had lost all my tuning files from the last 2-3 years and I was very upset about it. Turned out windows update removed all my files from everything including onedrve (which you can't turn off pretty much, obviously useless since it deleted my stuff anyway) and shoved them into a random folder that took me days to find by accident, the folder and files were not searchable or indexed for some reason which made it only possible to find by manually exploring random locations. Even was hidden from data recovery software which I have no idea how that is possible.

This was the point when I was done with win 11 and started to make the switch to linux.

Honesty linux has been easy to use and really good, it worked out of the box on this one year old laptop, no additional drivers or anything else was needed, 100% worked out of the box, even detected and installed the network printer automatically without any intervention from me (it was like "hey, I've detected a printer and installed it for you!) , where as on win I still couldn't get anything to print in the right scale or orientation to the point I was going to get a different printer when the ink was out, on win it also needed a standalone app to work and was constantly pestering with kind of baked in ads. Had none of these issue with the printer on linux or the need for software to be installed.




The one issue is that TP and eeprom and various tuning software and hardware doesn't really work on linux due to hardware comms not having linux support. But this created the ideal problem and solution for me. For windows I really love 7 and it sucks that nothing from 2017 and newer really supports 7, most won't even run 7 at all. So I installed virtualbox which is totally free and installed 7 on the host linux laptop. Was a bit of a learning curve since I never used a VM before and never used linux really either. But I got it to all work and now this laptop is my daily driver PC. I got to have my cake and eat it, win 7 on a modern PC and linux as the the main OS for that stability and reliability that 11 never had, and it's easier to use too since nothing is hidden or missing and the UI is much simpler, cleaner and intuitive than win 11.


Also, linux makes the laptop fast! That is an understatement! Win 11 made it almost intolerably slow, when linux pretty much feels instant for most things, and I'll point out that this laptop isn't poor on specs so there was no reason for it to be slow on windows other than windows being shit itself. It has a 6 core 12 thread CPU, Radeon GPU, 16GB of ram and a 512GB NVMe drive.


Also, for any tinkering, and modding stuff which there was a few things I had to do to get the VM to work properly, there are solutions easily found on the net for linux, where I found with windows in general, there would be many people with the same problem but no solutions often or you hit dead ends or the solutions simply don't work, or the option on your PC is just not even there. Linux has very good community support from what I am seeing.

I'd recommend to anyone to have a go at it. When I loaded up linux, it loads up as a live boot, so runs off the USB stick and is fully operational, that way you have play around and get a few for it. When you feel ready to install it, you click the one icon on the desktop "install" and it installs it for real and gives you options to keep windows as the primary in a dual boot and a few other options. I was done so I just chose the option to wipe the entire PC and install linux Mint. I do not regret that one bit, I really am enjoying this OS.

Also, there are many distros, I am using mint which is good for beginners that are more familiar with windows, there are many others that suits other needs and styles.

I also want to try out Bazzite which is more gaming orientated and had built in windows gaming and software support out of the box, it's more similar to SteamOS than windows from what I heard, where Mint is like a desktop OS for general daily use and from what I am finding isn't the best with windows software support, it doesn't work out of the box. But it didn't matter for me as the VM with 7 on it was a much better solution to that anyway.

Probably not the response you were expecting, but I thought I'd share me experience with the currently windows offerings and laptops in general.

[barnfind]

vlad01

You are correct - a response I was not expecting...however it is an awesome and info packed response!

Thank You