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Laptop recommendations
(sh.itjust.works)
Low hanging fruit, but whatever. It is what it is.
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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The refurbished thinkpads you find are usually three years old after the companies who lease them buy new ones for the users.
You can do a lot of things with a three year old thinkpad...
ah fair enough, my bad, I thought people are always talking about the older style thinkpad
here it's typically early-to-mid 2010s thinkpads being sold, so you're probably getting a laptop with horrible performance
4th and 6th gen intel isn't too bad yet (which would be early 2010s), especially for a Linux desktop/laptop. I wouldn't go older than that just because 4th and 6th gen is so readily available for so cheap, but they certainly aren't anywhere near e-waste yet. Mid-2010s would be more like 7th-9th gen Intel which is newer than all but one of the computers in my home.
I literally use a laptop with a mobile i7-6700 as a daily web browsing computer (and I tend to keep over a hundred tabs open) and really don't feel any slowness. I've got a desktop with an i5-4590 running 5 different Minecraft servers (a couple of which have over 300 mods running) plus most of my homelab services as well. They're not for the graveyard yet!
well, the i5-5300u definitely is, at least for my use cases. it took so long to compile a diesel-actix rust project that the battery died before it finished (it was at 100%), and it can't even run fucking Minecraft. even a raspberry pi can run Minecraft!
Wait why are you compiling on battery?
In what way? My wife plays minecraft with several hundred mods on a (desktop) i5-4560 and I have 5 Minecraft servers running on a desktop i5-4590, and I've played plenty of Minecraft on my laptop with a i7-6700u (vanilla, lightly modded, heavily modded, etc.) so I'm confused by what you mean by "can't run Minecraft"
power strip died and i hadn't realised.
different cpu. I'm talking about the i5-5300U specifically. Not some other i5 of the era. Also, this doesn't really matter but you're addressing 4th and 6th gen, while the i5-5300U is, obviously, 5th gen.
Yes it is a different CPU, of almost the exact same age and architecture. I don't have a 5300u otherwise I'd be able to compare directly. I'm pointing to similar processors (remember this was about the time that Intel stagnated. They didn't improve much from Haswell (4th gen) until about Coffee Lake, and kept continuously refreshing Skylake (6th gen) for years. By memory 5th gen was just rebadged Haswell as well) I do have that I have relevant experience with.
On the Minecraft front I don't think it's the processor, I suspect you either have a configuration issue, or a thermal budget limitation. I had a Ryzen laptop that was really good, except it did not have the thermal capacity to maintain a workload, and would throttle itself all the way down to 600Mhz if I was doing something CPU and GPU intensive for a long time (such as running a bunch of VMs and trying to browse the web while using an external monitor)
something something NBLK-WAX9X.
i have no idea what it is. I have tried everything.
It was actually a midrange HP provided by my school when I went back to college. Super sucked trying to build a virtual Windows domain while in a zoom class and waiting forever while it struggled with the sustained workload and kept thermal throttling lower and lower and lower...
I'm not sure what to tell you on Linux since I've never had good luck monitoring throttling on processors on Linux, but I was just watching it in Task Manager (again, school laptop) and saw the integrated graphics temperatures get pretty high (>90C) then the CPU start throttling down lower and lower until I either gave up or it got down to ~600Mhz
no i was actually referencing a laptop I had that did just that.
Yeah, I'm starting to believe it's thermal throttling too. Perhaps
watch -n1 sensorsin one terminal window andwatch -n.1 "grep \"^[c]pu MHz\" /proc/cpuinfo"in another?UPDATE (putting this in a separate reply so you'll see it): So I just dusted the laptop again, it actually performs somewhat well, turns out my first pass where I also changed the thermal paste didn't get all the dust.
EDIT: This probably won't hold, I've been seeing some γαμάτα deals for newer ThinkPads here lately.
Hey glad to hear it! The longer any computer can have a useful life the better!