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1379 sats \ 18 comments \ @Scoresby 23 Aug Goods_and_Gadgets

My trusty old laptop is giving up the ghost. Rather than continue to nurse it along, I've decided that I am going to get a new (used) laptop.

Criteria

Fairly small and lightweight.
At least 4 hrs battery life.
Less than $400.

Usage

The most compute-intensive stuff I do is probably having 200 tabs open at the same time. Occasionally, I do big spreadsheet stuff and also graphics editing with GIMP (but mostly smaller files).

I don't watch shows or game, so screensize isn't important to me.

Top contenders

Thinkpad X1 Nano Gen 1
Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 7 or 8

I'd be grateful for any commentary/opinions about these two or other models I should investigate.

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269 sats \ 10 replies \ @ek 23 Aug

Fwiw, I have a refurbished ThinkPad X1 Carbon G9 14" i7-1165G7 1TB/32GB and I'm very happy with it. @Car also said it's very light.

I can't say anything about any Nano model or Carbon Gen 7 or 8 though.

I would just make sure whatever you get has at least 16GB of RAM.

My trusty old laptop is giving up the ghost.

Have you tried running Linux though?

135 sats \ 7 replies \ @SimpleStacker 23h

How is the two-finger scrolling on the touchpad? That's the only complaint i have about my Thinkpad, but i'm not sure if i have a defective unit... mine is just really finicky

51 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 23h

It's not easy, but for a while i was doing so much work on GIMP (where I was using two-finger scrolling A LOT) that I got pretty familiar with the quirks.

25 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 23h

ok, so i guess it's not just me then. I have both a Macbook and a Thinkpad, and the 2-finger scroll is sooooo much better on the macbook that when I got the Thinkpad I thought something might be wrong.

133 sats \ 4 replies \ @ek 23h

Mhh, don't really use the touchpad, I almost always use an external mouse

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 23h

yes. I spent so many years using trackpads because I never really had a desk or significant flat surface on which to work that I'm more familiar with trackpads than mouses at this point.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @anon 23h

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1 sat \ 1 reply \ @ek 23h

Hey, I was just thinking about you

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 23h

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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 23h

i am. it's the screen (there's a 4cm band of pixels that are super distorted). and the battery is fully dead. and some of the keys don't work. and one usb port is gone. and it really started struggling when I bumped up to ubuntu 22 (because 20,04 is no longer supported, I think).

44 sats \ 0 replies \ @Car 22h

this is true can confirm, and ek is also a cool

too!

612 sats \ 1 reply \ @fd055dcc2f 21h

I have carbon gen5 and nano gen1 nano is definitely smaller and lighter keyboard is worse (key travel is 1.5 vs 1.8mm). battery life is worse (like 5h vs 7h, same usage)

overall I prefer nano cause it's faster and smaller.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 21h

This is excellent! Thanks for the info. I am feeling pretty confident in the nano option. Found a gen 1 for $300.

102 sats \ 4 replies \ @optimism 23h

At least 4 hrs battery life.

Wait... I was expecting to see a number like 12 here.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @Scoresby OP 23h

my experience with buying used laptops is that you never get anywhere near close to that, especially as I usually buy older laptops. I'll settle for four. It's possible I need to be willing to spend more.

Also see the point about 200 browser tabs...

Are you able to get 10-12 hrs while doing a lot of web-browsing on sub $400 laptop?

204 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 22h

Are you able to get 10-12 hrs while doing a lot of web-browsing on sub $400 laptop?

Not too old a Chromebook? With 200 open tabs, this should be doable, I think, because inactive tabs don't take CPU on modern chromium/webkit implementations. Just some memory allocation.

Running tight controls on websites/ads also helps. I found that mullvad's blackholing DNS helps a lot because I don't see any ads. That's tons of CPU time (=energy) saved.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 22h

chromebooks are an interesting idea. I had one back in 2017 but switched to normal laptops because I couldn't run much other software on it (just did some digging and it looks like they enabled a linux environment around that time). I kinda wrote them off back then.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 22h

I was about to buy one but the trackpad on macbooks is unmatched, imho, and I felt I would need a mouse (see above) and that is simply not workable for a neobum that needs to work from couches and in planes and ubers.