[DMcCunney]

in which Alice doesn't quite fall down a rabbit hole, but does encounter quirks.

This is not really a vent or rant, but is technology, so...

I finally broke down and got a new laptop. My primary machine is a desktop, and a laptop is for infrequent travel. For a while, I borrowed by SO's laptop when traveling to check email.

My SO decided she needed a new laptop a while back. The one she had been using was an emergency replacement for one that had failed. My go to supplier for computer gear is Cleveland based retailer Micro Center, who opened a location in Brooklyn a while back that is a hop, skip, and jump from me by NYC subway. I can access Micro Center, find what I need, make a purchase, and generally go and pick it up that day. I get an email the order was picked and awaits me.

We were about to travel and were in a hurry. MC had a deal on a Lenovo laptop for $200. Sold. My SO's needs are modest, and the Lenovo more or less met them. But it defined "low end" beginning with a whopping 4GB of RAM, and running Win10 Home. The RAM sweet spot for Win10 is 6GB. That or more and you are okay. Less and you will not have a good experience.

She decided she wanted an upgrade. (I didn't blame her.) MC is a Microsoft Certified refurbisher, and has refurbished off lease ex-corporate machines at excellent prices. (My desktop is one such.) I found her an ex corporate HP laptop at an acceptable price. Among other niceties, it came with 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD as boot drive, with Intel 4600 HD graphics on the motherboard. Sold. Performance was an order of magnitude better, and she's a happy camper.

In a spirit of "waste not, want not", I took her old Lenovo and hacked. I replaced the 4GB RAM stick with an 8GB unit, and replaced the SATA drive with a 240GB SSD originally purchased for another machine. Performance became reasonable, and I could coerce Win10 Home into doing what I needed. Unfortunately, it got wet. My SO was pouring me a cup of tea, the mug had a crack, and some of the water got to the laptop. Video went haywire. I put it aside to salvage parts.

Fast forward a bit. One of my hobbies is planning and running literary SF conventions. I'm usually the guy who deals with the venue, but COVID-19 had in person events on hiatus. I found myself on the tech side doing Zoom hosting, as the cons used Zoom Meetings and Webinars to pre4sent virtual events. I learned there is no such thing as enough screen real estate when you do that. I had already added a second 23" monitor to my desktop for that stuff, but more was better.

And we had travel coming up (to an SF con that was virtual last time but in person again this time, where I deal with the hotel.) So off to Micro Center.

The result was a refurb off-lease HP 650 G laptop, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Intel 4600 HD graphics, and Win10 Pro Cool. The price was about $350, which was reasonable.

I'm in the final stages of configuration. It has a selected subset of what's on the desktop. A lot of software on the desktop is for things I don't expect to do on the laptop. So Win10 Pro, an old version of MS Office,VLC media player, Irfanview picture viewer, Firefox, Chrome and Edge browsers, and current versions of the Zoom and Discord clients, plus a few utilities.

256GB is more than adequate local storage. I have a USB3 external drive enclosure and a variety of USB thumb drives if storage is needed.

One thing I do tend to do when traveling is get eBooks. I use Calibre on the desktop to maintain the master library, with a drive essentially devoted to it. So I got inspired, and installed the Calibre Portable version to a USB3 thumb drive, with a local Calibre library on the drive. I'll run Calibre from the drive, and save collected eBooks to it. Stuff I acquire while traveling will get imported to the master with metadata applied. It's relatively trivial to merge Calibre Libraries, so I can copy the library on the thumb drive to the desktop and merge it with the master. Essentially, I am managing metadata updates. I update metadata when I get the eBooks, and import the eBooks to the master library with that stuff already there, instead of having a pile of updating to do when I'm back home.

A major reason I prefer HP gear is that is it designed for easy service. On the HP Desktop, if I need to fiddle with hardware, I shut it down, pull it out, lay it on its side, press a lever, and that panel comes right off, with easy access to everything in it. The HP laptop is almost as convenient. The Lenovo was a cast iron PITA to open and service, and a similar pain to close it up gain, involving about 15 tiny screws of several different types. (The designers appeared to assume the user would not try to roll their own, and would take it to a tech who got paid to deal with that. They are likely right, but meanwhile Lenovo and Dell gear are off my list unless there is no other choice .)

The HP has two slots for RAM, and can take a max of 16GB in two 8GB sticks. I salvaged the 8GB stick I had put in the Lenovo as well as the 240GB SSD, and hoped I might be able to use the RAM in the HP. As I more or less expected, I couldn't. But opening the laptop revealed a quirk. It had 8GB RAM in the form of a 4GB RAM stick in both slots. So much for adding 8GB to take it to 16GB. I can add an 8GB stick and take it to 12 GB, which I might do, but given the use cases for the machine, adding a second 8GB to bring it to 16GB is likely not worth the cost.

In all, these was relatively painless, and a lot easier than some of the upgrades I've tried to carry out. Remaining quirks consist of beating Win10 Pro into submission, and turning off some MS annoyances (like asking me to DL and run an MS utility to see if the laptop can be upgraded with Win11. I already know it can't and don't care. Win10 meets my needs, and nothing in Win11 is compelling enough to make me get new hardware.)

(For that matter, I am not concerned about Win10 going out of support in 2025. I have layered defenses, and not getting Critical Updates will not make my local sky fall.)
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Dennis