A laptop you can take apart and put back together and it’ll be fine. You take apart a phone and put it back together and it’s like haunted now. You can’t get it wet anymore, and it rattles sometimes. It says it doesn’t like its new screen, so it’s not gonna let you unlock it with your face anymore. It doesn’t trust you since you took it apart. The buttons feel different now. They still work, but they feel… different.

This person and I have had wildly different laptop experiences.

I've got a 23-year-old netbook that slowly perished under the weight of windows. I've got some lightweight Linux distro on it and its absolutely fucking fine.

I resurrected it specifically to use as a digital reference guide for electronics, and to program my new Arduino. It can even barely load Firefox (exclusive) OR play videos!

Tldr is: Buy old electronics. Use better software.

There’s definitely a ring of truth to this. Not for me personally - as others have commented, I know what I’m doing and tend to look after my tech well - but for plenty of friends and family who are seemingly incapable of taking care of a real computer with a desktop OS.

Happens all the time: they buy a new laptop, probably without asking for advice first, and within weeks they’re asking for help because it’s on its last legs. The fans spin up like jet engines, two dozen random apps open as soon as it boots, the desktop is a landfill of icons, normal actions cause error messages, etc.

‘Oh yeah, it just does that.’

Some people can’t be trusted with full control over their hardware.

I only recently sent my old as fuck Windows Xp laptop that didn't hold a charge anymore and had to be plugged in just to be turned on off to a recycler. I still worked. Probably coulda slapped a new battery in it if I could have found one. I used to use it for WarDriving back in the very early days of wifi when everything was either just open or using an easily broken encryption method. Shit made me feel like one of those heist movie hackers even though all I was doing was mapping where I could get free internet. 😎

Try buying quality laptops.

My experience is pretty much the opposite. Phones give weird problems and I can't even properly diagnose.

Mobile phones are so locked down from regular users that those usually just physically break before the operating system becomes unusably slow.

Laptops can be destroyed by software. Give a regular user permission to install programs, and suddenly there are a random purple monkey sitting on the desktop telling jokes and multiple crypto miners.

Y'all're talking about this as a windows problem but for my old laptop it was the USB ports started dying then some keys stopped working and finally the frame began dying. It didn't last 5 years.

I'm afraid to even hear what this person thinks about a desktop.

That motherfucker should lay off the DMT

I think this is more of a bloated ass windows problem than the form factor. It's so fucking heavy that it kills the machine, crushed under the weight of an inferior OS

A computer is like a pet. You need to care for it, clean it, feed it (cooling paste) If it's left neglected for too long it will suffer.

Also, here's your reminder to clean your keyboard. Properly, remove the keys and give a good cleaning. Take a picture first so you know where it goes back.

I have no idea what this means

I have a 2010 Thinkpad that I ordered new. I still use it on campouts and in the garage and stuff (plugged in, no battery)

Lmao what have y'all devolved into?

It's not that I don't like it, I'm just scared

That's just windows, install mint, breathe new life into your old companion.

And going forward, for even more resiliency, prioritize reparability, like Frameworks.

Sounds like Windows laptop problems.

@flamingos@feddit.uk peep this article - long worthwhile read

On November 21, I purchased the bestselling laptop from Amazon — a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage (which is, and I’m simplifying here, though not by much, basically an SD card soldered to the computer’s motherboard). Affordable and under-powered, I’d consider this a fairly representative sample of how millions of people interact with the internet. […]

It took 1 minute and 50 seconds from hitting the power button for the laptop to get to the setup screen. It took another minute and a half to connect and begin downloading updates, which took several more minutes. After that, I was faced with a licensing agreement where I agreed to binding arbitration to use Windows, a 24 second pause, and then got shown a screen of different “ways I could unlock my Microsoft experience,” with animations that shuddered and jerked violently.

[…]

The computer pauses slightly every time I type a letter. Every animation shudders. Even moving windows around feels painful. It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system — previously something I’d considered to be “the thing that operates the computer system” — is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.

So much more!:

Never Forgive Them
EDWARD ZITRON
DEC 16, 2024
42 MIN READ

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

My first laptop needed a new CPU fan installed annually because I dared to use it. Not while chain-smoking, or inside a sauna, or anything. It just ate thermal paste.

I still miss it compared to my reliable modern phone, which reliably goes 'hey guess what bitch, I'm installing an update in the next three hours, and you can't say shit about it.' Several times it has booted into some lock screen I've never seen before, and viscerally hate. Occasionally, with ads. I've had to open the camera using the power button double-tap just to get around some 'By clicking Okay you give permission we're totally not forcing--' that I had no say in installing or using. I can't even silence that inane 'use report' that tells me I somehow touched it even less this week than I did last week, when I use it essentially never. The battery lasts two weeks because it just sits there, face-down, until I receive a junk call or need to take a picture. And I might just buy a camera.

Maybe someone will know here. Is there a best-choice for replacing an old laptop battery when the official stuff is not around anymore? Like a third party option that isn't a company there today and gone tomorrow, who's company name is a string of random characters?

I was telling someone my laptop was old yesterday and they commented, "yeah, I know. it has a disk drive." x_x

my original school laptop, a shitty ThinkPad 11e, had lasted me 8 years without any issues, and I stopped using it only because I got a better laptop for free, the 11e still has probably another 8 years left if I take care of it, since it's battery life is virtually the same as I first got it and no matter the amount of drops that thing takes, it will never break.

I put Linux distros on it from 2021 to 2024, sure it stuttered because I liked GNOME and I didn't adjust anything, but it was still amazing. Now that I think of it, I should definitely get windows off my newer machines, probably flash fedora or something.

I have an old macbook that's been around for years. Its been featured on my profile before as part of an old project. It has lived far beyond its prime. The fan mounts snapped off the motherboard so if I wanna use it I have to deal with the fan vibrating against the internals and lemme tell ya, she screams. She's been laid to rest, until I need access to a machine with USB 2 ports and don't have my desktop available for some reason.

I don't know what I read, is it a copypasta

Laptops are always so much more Fucked than phones in my experience. A laptop is like a beautiful horse that wants nothing more than to break all of its legs. A decently solid android phone will act normal. A laptop is a living creature. It has weight to it. A laptop breathes and produces body heat. And it wants to die badly. Mobile phones are not sentient like that & that’s why they don’t experience mental illness. A phone problem is like “out of storage :(” or “charging port broke”. Laptops will cough weakly as they fade in and out of consciousness. You will hold a laptop in your arms and it’s like “I can’t feel my legs”. And you tell it girl you never had any.

Laptop or just windows?

I have laptops from the the last two decades that still work. My X201 has been used and abused in every which way, it has problems that I gave it (BIOS), but for the most part it's completely fine, my T440p is fine but the screen was cracked, again, by my dumbass leaving it on the floor and stepping on it, and I also replaced the keyboard with one off another model that didn't quite fit. Still, besides all that it worked like a champ, can even put a quad core in it.

While I'm overall not impressed with my new laptop - the X1c because it's performance is dog shit and I've not figured how to control the fans manually yet (thinkfan doesn't seem to work), it's far from the worst - my MSI GT60 2PE was such a piece of shit and definitely fits this post, so does anything labeled "Netbook" and/or anything that has an Intel Atom CPU which is truly cursed

Phones on the other hand? Imagine you want to take a screenshot of a video on a phone for future reference, but android says:

So you have to use the volume down+power like in the good old days

My LG Gram still going strong after almost 3 years. Amazing battery life, extremely lightweight. Absolutely useless for gaming, but it's been awesome for what I actually use it for. It travels with me every week in a backpack.