So last night the hinge to my laptop display broke. It was a cheap model ($350) with a plastic case bought in Mar 2018, but it’s been fine for my needs. I started shopping for a new laptop and discovered brand new copy of my current laptop for sale on Amazon for $600. It’s tempting - I could just swap over my SSD and be back in business for another five years. I honestly can’t see a reason not to, so I thought I’d ask here: why not?
There’s no reason not to. Repairing the old one is certainly not worth it.
I give you full permission to buy a new one.
I just did about 3 months back. I posted the specs in some thread or other, but I don’t remember where. At any rate, I got it from Micro Center in Westmont. It’s dead silent, plenty powerful enough for my gaming, and has performed flawlessly thus far.
FYI: My previous machine was from Digital Storm. It was overpriced, poorly put together, and had issues right out of the box. Based on my experience, at least, I’d recommend them to no one.
I have an old 2013 trashcan MacPro that I’ve essentially decommissioned after buying an M1 MacBook Pro last year. It’s still connected to the network, so I can screen share it, but I do all my photo editing work on my laptop now as it’s so much faster and more powerful. And now I run three screens—the two external and the one on my laptop. It’s quite nice.
When you say swap over your ssd, do you mean the boot drive ? 'cos it
may not be that easy…
As it’s a new copy of your current one, it should work smoothly but you
will still need to do the first time startup routine.
Might want to think about whether you’d prefer a clean install of windows 11
rather than upgrading your windows 10 (unless you already did that).
(I’m having to make these decisions myself as my current laptop can’t run win 11)
I’m getting there but I am still amazed that GPU prices are not going down. They are not as expensive as in Bitcoin miner days but still way up there. I am not expecting “cheap” prices but neither these very expensive prices.
Used to be I could build a whole PC (and a good one) for the price of a high end GPU these days.
Mine is starting to show signs of needing replacement, and I’m terrified.
I am not a computer person, but I am a Person with Opinions, and that means that I have to fiddle with every single factory setting to get what I want.
My last computer, it simply ignored all of the fonts I tried to transfer, because they got install into a Windows folder, and Windows didn’t like that I had my own fonts—many downloaded, but a few bought. So every transfer, I lose things I like. Never mind having to go through and convince Word etc. to let me have my files look the way I want them to!
Maybe if I get one now while the old computer is still alive, I can at least cross-check the settings.
I’ve needed to replace my computer for probably three years now, but the problem is I’m a cheapskate. As long as it powers on and more or less does the job, I will tolerate the frequent restarts and memory-management handholding.
I have a shiny new computer (2 years old) that I’m thinking of upgrading, and selling the one I have on swappa. So my advice is to go for it.
The main counterargument I have is that you may not need a $600 computer if your original was $350. You might want to look around more.
And assuming your laptop has a discrete SSD, you may not want to actually move it over, as the new one may be better. I’d Instead clone it to the new drive, if that’s what you want. (Put the old drive in a USB enclosure, or use software that can clone settings and apps from one computer to another.) But I’d recommend just trying to use the new install first, since it’ll already be there, and you will be paying for it.
My laptop hinge broke a couple months ago. I brought it in to a repair shop and they gave me an estimate of $220 to repair it.
I went back and forth about whether to proceed with the repair or replace the device. I was happy with the laptop, and I was already into them for $50 for the estimate, so I had them fix it.
I am glad I went that route.
And guess who is very careful with how he handles his laptop these days.
mmm
I got my primary desktop, my work machine, in 2010. It was the first pre-built machine I’d ever had for work. Prior to that I had cobbled together my own machines from parts from other computers my dad got from work.
Anyway, when I bought it I bought it to be pretty beefy with an i7 processor. In the intervening years I did switch all the drives to SSD and added RAM.
I just this year upgraded my machine. I was running several instances of Visual Studio (a fairly resource-hungry program) at once plus Photoshop and mail and SQL Management Studio on a daily basis. My machine was working PRETTY well but it could be better.
The new machine I got had triple the RAM of the original, more drives, a much better GPU and a more modern i7 and it cost $100 more than the one I bought in 2010. Same brand (HP), same business model (Pavillion). Pretty cool.
I just upgraded. My old machine, bought right after Win 10 came out, had only 6 gig of memory and had gotten real slow. I bought a new one from Costco with 32 gig of memory and a terabyte disk. Much, much faster.
I used the PC Mover program to copy all my files and apps from the old computer to the new one. That worked fine - it did it overnight using wifi. But I think something got screwed up, and the new computer got into a diagnosis loop. I had to reload Windows to fix it (no hardware issues, I could run the diags) and was able to keep my files, but had to reload all the apps.
This happened just before I went to Europe, so I took my old computer with me. Before I got around to fixing the new one it crashed - and got into a disk repair loop. I somehow managed to get out of it by power cycling and hitting F2 while it booted, and it has been fine ever since. (Anyone know how this happened, or should I go into the computer resurrection business?)
Still slow, but nice to have it to move the stuff I forgot to move.
Moving files is easy moving apps is hard.
My ThinkPad is so old it runs on coal.
Seriously though, Windows 7. Most everything still works fine, although I’m getting threatening messages from some programs saying they can’t upgrade any more. Which is mostly fine with me so long as they work, but slowly they are losing some functionality.
I dread changing computers because it means all the stuff that now works… won’t anymore. Example: I use a very old version of MS Word / Excel / PowerPoint. It originally came on disk, which I in turn burned and saved to my hard drive. Even having it on an external drive, I afraid it won’t work when I eventually transfer it to a newer computer. And I absolutely won’t go for using the modern version of Word on a subscription basis. F*** that in the neck.
So here I sit, hoping to continue on this ancient machine until it can be completely emulated and replicated on a Star Trek type computer of the future.
Where I work, we have to provide our own computers for home and office from grant money. My office computer is an old iMac that is very slow and can’t connect to the department printer. My home computer, also an iMac, is newer so I am planning to replace it with a new machine at home and use it at the office.
My dilemma is, do I stay with Apple? My partner and I have iPhones, I use my iPad a lot, amd appreciate that everything is more or less connected smoothly, but Apple is expensive and I could use the grant money for other stuff if I bought a cheaper machine. But not figuring out a new OS is worth something to me. I care about the tech like I care about my refrigerator: if the milk is cold and the ice frozen, great, I don’t about how it works or how I could tweak it.Thoughts?
I think you hit on the main pain points.
- Price
- Effort to leave the Apple Ecosystem
I think the second one would be a chore since you have so many other Apple products (not to mention things like iTunes). It’ll cost more but that’s why Apple has people locked in as best they can.
If I were you I would stick with Apple. It’ll be much more simple for you even if it costs more.
Just my $0.02
My main rig I bought as a custom built in 2021 (I picked the parts, someone else ordered them and put it together because I couldn’t be bothered at the time).
I’ve recently replaced everything except the case and the fans it came with, some out of necessity because broken, other components just because I could. It shouldn’t need any upgrade for years, but I’ll probably replace the motherboard and CPU sometime early next year with something newer because I just can’t stop messing with it.
I have an LGA1200 socket mobo, but I’d like to have an LGA1700, as I’ve more or less maxed out what I can put on the 1200. There is a marginal upgrade to be made there, i7->i9, but the difference in performance is not worth the money, time, and effort.
You can still buy a copy for “home and family” that isn’t an annual subscription. M$ keeps nagging me to “upgrade to Win365”, though. Libre Office works well for most people, too, for the excellent price of free.
OpenOffice too.
As I mentioned before (in some other thread) the ONLY reason I would pay for MS-Office is for Excel and I was a power-user. MS-Excel blows all other spreadsheets out of the water. But most are fine unless you want that next-level of complexity that I think only Excel delivers. Powerful program.
I just upgraded my system, and now Mrs Cad wants her upgraded because it is slow … an i5 Haswell. A lot of the components she has and the case will work for her and over time we can upgrade the little stuff. Later we can exchange her hard drive (still with 1.5T empty) for an SSD. Replace fans as they die. PSU is 750W. CPU cooler needs a good cleaning. Etc.
Here is her Christmas gift
Rocket Lake (11th Gen) i7
ASrock Z590 mobo
32 GB Corsair DDR4 3600
Sapphire Radeon RX 6700XT
Price before taxes and shipping? $770 of which over 40% is the video card.
ETA: Don’t tell her but the 6700 may end up in my computer and she gets my 6650