I have a Taiji classmate who has a used laptop that I think was giving to her. It has Ubuntu on it, and she has complained that it does run properly. Like, one out of three times, she can’t use the Zoom link for class properly. For whatever reason, it does not have Google or Microsoft, so it makes life difficult for her. I have no idea if she paid money for it or if someone gave it to her, but the amount of time she’s had issues with it has been in equal parts amusing and aggravating.
The former because who has Ubuntu other than uber-tech people? The latter because she has to go on and on about it and how anxious she is about it. In that, she reminds me of my mother, which is probably why it annoys me as well.
Here’s the thing, though. She buys used laptops (or is given them?) because she thinks it’s outrageous to spend money for a laptop when it’s going to be useless in three years. I can’t blame her for that, exactly, because PCs aren’t cheap. At all. You can get a basic one for $600, which, for three years, isn’t terrible. But if you want any amenities that make the machine more than a glorified tablet, it’s gonna cost you.
My current laptop was a thou or so. I bought it four years ago, and I felt the limitations even when I bought it. See, at the time, I wanted to keep the price down, so I went as low as possible. I got the bare minimum amount of memory, for example. Then, I ran out so quickly.
In addition, the keyboards are crap in a laptop. I am a heavy user, yes, but a keyboard should last longer than three weeks. That’s how long this one lasted. Yes, I hit the keyboards hard, but three weeks is outrageous. Now, i just use an external keyboard, and even then, I have to replace them every other year (and they supposedly last 100 million keystrokes).
Then, I ended up in the hospital and was not supposed to live. Afterwards, I realized I had to get a desktop in order to play Elden Ring. And, yes, everything is related to FromSoft somehow. They dropped the specs for the PC version rather late, something like ten days before the game released.
My laptop was not going to cut it, and my desktop was about a decade old. I hadn’t touched it in years. There was no way it was going to play Elden Ring. I scrambled to put together a new rig, and I decided to splash out. I had already known the joys of SSD (after had said I would never get it), and I made sure to get plenty of memory. The specs for the game was 1060 Nvidia, and my laptop only had 1050. I got a 3070 graphics card in my desktop.