When I bought this laptop, it was mostly because I have to spend so much time in the dining room with a cat away from my desktop setup. I didn't intend it to REPLACE my desktop, though. The desktop has a much larger hard drive and a large ssd, even though the motherboard is older. I didn't transfer all my media directories because that computer was still there.
Buuuut then my motherboard finally kicked the bucket and the desktop wouldn't boot at all. Since I was only turning it on every few months, replacing it did not seem urgent and I didn't feel like looking up the specifications I would need to follow in ordering a replacement motherboard (to be compatible with my compact case and be good for installing Linux on... etc).
Except then the LLM "generative AI" (it's not AI) bubble got so big that datacenters started buying up all the computer components as well as sucking up all the drinking water, and now motherboards are very expensive and they just keep getting MORE expensive.
At dinner the other day (we ate with BIL's family the night before last) our teenaged niblings were talking about Nvidia and how their nerd friends are shocked and full of condemnation for Nvidia's actions and how everybody should sell their Nvidia stock and also how their nerd friends are also stuck putting off building new PCs for the foreseeable. I assume some of them are going to have to cave since they are gaming, which is probably a bit harsher on their systems than I am on my little laptop. I didn't quite comprehend the nature of Nvidia's scam, partly because I was the only one there who hasn't read a news article about it apparently, and partly because I probably stopped paying attention mid-sentence a couple of times, but I gathered that everybody hates it.
So now my main computer is my beloved laptop, Nenya, a Lenovo ThinkBook 14 (I used a ThinkPad for work and they really are great, but they cost a lot more and I don't really need to be able to throw my laptop off a cliff..., so I scaled down to one of their slightly less sturdy lines), about 3 years old now. And I don't have all my files on her - my music collection, most notably. I just have the last set of songs that I had transferred to my phone before my desktop died. Nenya still has the Windows install she came with in case of emergency, but she dual boots and I have been using Linux Mint whenever I didn't need to log in with Windows in order to like, buy media files with DRM on them, or whatever.
In the last six months or so, the mouse started being way worse, and I found out that replacing its batteries or using a corded mouse didn't help. The trackpad was also bad, but not as bad as the mouse. It was enough to prevent me from using Nenya to fill my design blog queue, but streaming video doesn't require a lot of mouse movement. However,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
waxjism had occasion to borrow her and ask me more specifically about the mouse issue, and we finally reinstalled the OS and upgraded to Linux Mint 22.2 Zara, the latest LTS release from last month. (I have preferred LTS releases for the last decade or so because I am much less willing to go through the hassle of reinstalling than I used to be in my early 30s.) I'm not positive about the mouse issues so far - the trackpad is better by default, but I noticed it getting laggy when I had a ton of tabs in Firefox open. Maybe Firefox is hogging processor or something.
Buuuut then my motherboard finally kicked the bucket and the desktop wouldn't boot at all. Since I was only turning it on every few months, replacing it did not seem urgent and I didn't feel like looking up the specifications I would need to follow in ordering a replacement motherboard (to be compatible with my compact case and be good for installing Linux on... etc).
Except then the LLM "generative AI" (it's not AI) bubble got so big that datacenters started buying up all the computer components as well as sucking up all the drinking water, and now motherboards are very expensive and they just keep getting MORE expensive.
At dinner the other day (we ate with BIL's family the night before last) our teenaged niblings were talking about Nvidia and how their nerd friends are shocked and full of condemnation for Nvidia's actions and how everybody should sell their Nvidia stock and also how their nerd friends are also stuck putting off building new PCs for the foreseeable. I assume some of them are going to have to cave since they are gaming, which is probably a bit harsher on their systems than I am on my little laptop. I didn't quite comprehend the nature of Nvidia's scam, partly because I was the only one there who hasn't read a news article about it apparently, and partly because I probably stopped paying attention mid-sentence a couple of times, but I gathered that everybody hates it.
So now my main computer is my beloved laptop, Nenya, a Lenovo ThinkBook 14 (I used a ThinkPad for work and they really are great, but they cost a lot more and I don't really need to be able to throw my laptop off a cliff..., so I scaled down to one of their slightly less sturdy lines), about 3 years old now. And I don't have all my files on her - my music collection, most notably. I just have the last set of songs that I had transferred to my phone before my desktop died. Nenya still has the Windows install she came with in case of emergency, but she dual boots and I have been using Linux Mint whenever I didn't need to log in with Windows in order to like, buy media files with DRM on them, or whatever.
In the last six months or so, the mouse started being way worse, and I found out that replacing its batteries or using a corded mouse didn't help. The trackpad was also bad, but not as bad as the mouse. It was enough to prevent me from using Nenya to fill my design blog queue, but streaming video doesn't require a lot of mouse movement. However,
waxjism had occasion to borrow her and ask me more specifically about the mouse issue, and we finally reinstalled the OS and upgraded to Linux Mint 22.2 Zara, the latest LTS release from last month. (I have preferred LTS releases for the last decade or so because I am much less willing to go through the hassle of reinstalling than I used to be in my early 30s.) I'm not positive about the mouse issues so far - the trackpad is better by default, but I noticed it getting laggy when I had a ton of tabs in Firefox open. Maybe Firefox is hogging processor or something.
