So I've had a new laptop for about a week now and am still nowhere near "moved in" to it. I'm going slowly because my old laptop (Toshiba Satellite Pentiumsomething 4G RAM mechanical SATA 40G or some such originally I upgraded to 240Gb SSD SATA) had some huge number of programs installed on it and I'm not sure which ones I'll keep on it vs transferring to the new laptop. It's also over ten years old and software that used to run on it crawls now, despite completely flattening it and re-installing new W10 on it twice in that time.
I've had a $300 Ideapad 10" convertible and the wife has a 14" Lenovo of a similar style to the new kid on the block but about four years old now. Most importantly, the Lenis have been reliable - and after my current one, my third Toshie, developed broken hinges leading to a broken casing, I'm regretfully saying buh-bye to the Toshiba brand.
The 10" IdeaPad has been great for a glorified tablet running W10, and I've used "Lena" as it's known, for about four or five years now as a note taker, Zoom and Skype machine, general take it anywhere machine, and between the wife's Lenovo and "Lena" I'm comfortable around the sleeky little grey/silver machines.
And apparently (and despite a long career in IT, system and network admin, and freelancing) I'm the least machine-proud person I know. When I was filling in for a worldwide logistic company's IT guy while they went for a six month stress leave, I had to buy a new phone because my current one had bit the dust. I walked to a corner shop near work in my lunch break, found another Nokia that looked like it'd do, charged it, whacked my old SIM in, and rang a mate. This is the conversation:
DD: (the friend) "I thought your phone was cactus? Waaaaasssssuuuuup?" (Yeah. Unfortunately. It was back THEN...)
Me: "Yah I just bought one at lunch, charged it and put my SIM in it. Much better battery life now."
DD: "So? Tell! What have you bought?"
Me: "Ummm... Hang on. Uh - it's got a salmon pinkish case." (And fair dinkum I had no bloody idea what make or model it was at that stage. And still don't to this day. Nor do I care.)
DD: ". . . kidding, right? Right?"
Me: "fraid not, it was a phone, I needed a phone, now I haz one..."
Pretty much always since starting a full-on career in IT, that's been my attitude. Screw the brand name, screw the accessories and bells and whistles - does it do the job and do it well? - then buy it and set it up, give it to the person it was built up for. Luckily a lot of the office machines, besides compiling software and letting the person program on it, also partook of the daily network FPS deathmatches we ran... So I did get to know the name Radeon pretty well...
But the thing about getting Toshies was - I got a secondhand Toshiba CHONKBRIK when I needed a machine to take out in the field, and it was surprisingly tough and capable so I was really pissed when one day I went to open the lid and there was a *crack!* and the lid separated from the hinge, the screen cracked across a corner, and that was all she wrote...
I finagled the second one from a supplier at a good price, copied everything off the old hard drive, and had a good machine I was still using six years later when I retired with disability and moved interstate to here. Then one day opening the lid creaked like opening the Great Hall doors at a haunted mansion, and from then on I didn't close the lid... (I did hear that a touch of oil applied with a fine tip syringe helped. And it did, for a few more months, but apparently the issue is mechanical damage inside the hinges.) Then one day the cleaner pushed the lid down when they went to dust...
And now, my latest Toshiba "whatever" has been sitting with the lid open for the last four of its ten years next to a big HP display, with a wireless keyboard and mouse... "Ruby" will let me roam with my machine again.
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| It's a bad shot of Ruby but I think we all know what a laptop looks like. |
So for the people who will want to know:
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Lenovo Ideapad Slim, aka "Ruby" because it arrived by courier on Tuesday 13th Feb, specs etc from the supplier website: Lenovo 14” Ideapad Slim 1 Laptop R5 16/512GB Connectivity Display Anti-Glare Display Performance Photo and Video Capture Ports Power Processor and Memory Storage |
And straight away I can tell you that the claimed max battery life is not all that. I tend to leave power save settings on the performance side because otherwise why did I buy a new faster machine to run updated software? - And so, I get about five hours.
Other than that, I still don't much like W11 and may yet retrograde to W10, who knows? I don't do Evil Things on my machine and it's set up as a work machine so there's nothing worth Microsoft's time and processing cycles to exfiltrate, either. I might grit my teeth for the moment and keep using it, maybe even set it up with a linux or ReactOS and see how they go.
I'm reasonably comfortable around touchpad use, but I got a $20 BT mouse because I prefer a scroll wheel to a two finger drag. Speaking of which "Ruby" has 2,3, and 4 finger drag actions, most of which I'll never use, but it's good to know I can 3-drag up to open task window views and left / right to select one, but alt-tab also still works, y'know?
Anyway - you may be wondering about how I could afford the princely sum of AUD$808 and maybe donations have helped finance the machine but no - I took out some superannuation since I'm now fully entitled to. Previous donations went to pay some part of the online fees I rack up for the hosted WP blog and domain names, and that's all she wrote. If you'd like to help, I direct you to the last part of this post, visit my Ko-Fi page and send me the price of a cup of coffee perhaps.
As always - stay awesome!
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