IANA expert either, but having done a bunch of laptop shopping recently for myself and others, this appears to be the case. You’d be hard-pressed to find a laptop with a mechanical spinning drive, and why would you want to?
My desktop, though, is typical. It has an SSD system drive, and a large capacity mechanical drive for data storage, though even that will be replaced with an SSD as soon as I get around to it. I already have the SSD but for the moment I’m just using it to periodically mirror the HDD in case the HDD decides to fail. After more than 49,000 hours and currently running at 49C, it may not be long!
I’m an expert, or at least I should be since this is what I do for a living. At the very least, by 2920 the laptops we were procuring for our agency came with SSDs and I don’t believe there was even an option to get a traditional drive. There is this article to back that up.
The slowdown in HDD products has already started, with the fourth quarter of 2019 seeing a 9.4% drop in products sold through IT distribution.
Context found that 93.3% of new laptops sold in the quarter had SSDs as their primary storage, a significant increase from the 66.7% at the end of 2017.
So SSDs in laptops were pretty common by the end of 2017, as the majority of sold laptops had them, and by the end of 2019 it was rare for a laptop not to have one. A 2022 laptop without an SSD would be pretty surprising.
Which suggests that @Jack_Batty’s problem is failing or dust-jammed fans and weirdness (possibly including SSD weirdness) caused by heat problems.
Back when I had a laptop that had a fan, it (and the guts downstream of it) needed frequent cleaning. Which entailed taking the back cover off, but no greater disassembly. Just blowing compressed air into the inlet screen only served to wedge more dust deeper among all the components, impeding the airflow from getting much past the plane of the fan blades.
I swear the pipes in my basement are cursed and show their disdain whenever I have travel plans.
I am scheduled to leave for a trip to the Sleepy Hollow, New York area on Thursday morning.
I went to my basement to let the routine bug spray man in the door and discovered a puddle of water with no apparent pipe issues. But the puddle was kind of big so I spent all afternoon calling plumbers and handymen.
Totally destroyed my sense of peace and stability.
Only one responded positively with a visit scheduled tomorrow between 8 AM and noon.
I had noticed a bit of a wet spot in this exact location earlier this year and in fact had both a plumber and a handyman take a look and no one could see anything. It was a mystery.
Today it appears to be at the end of a dripping stage so I believe it must be a drain issue somewhere.
I had replaced almost all of my water pipes 2 years ago following a major break so almost everything is new except the drains. That particular messy episode occurred about a week before a trip to Europe and was quite involved.
I’ve had this laptop sitting atop a cooling tray for about the last year. It seemed to be running pretty hot all the time, so it seemed prudent. I don’t know if maybe that ended up blowing extra dust inside or something. Anything’s possible. Physics is weird.
I’m sorry. The novel I just finished started as a NaNo project and I wrote most of the first draft that month. I know it meant a lot to a lot of people.
The last thing I remember was one of the members taking some heat because they made some comments in support of AI. It seemed like there was a lot of other drama going on too.
NaNoWriMo fundamentally changed the way I approached writing. I tend to be a loner when it comes to writing (well not just that really) and although I made some very small attempts at writing, I never got very far. With NaNoWriMo that changed. I “won” many times after the first attempt by reaching the word count though often with the story unfinished, and I ended up even self-publishing one of my better efforts. It was something my family all knew I was participating and would ask about. Last year I was surprised by the lack of announcements leading up to it and this year it is simply gone. Even thought I did not participate a lot with the community via the forums, etc. It still feels like a loss (worth a mini-rant anyway).
Thanks, I did not know about that. There is a local discord group that I briefly joined so I will look into what they have as well.
Been a bit surprised how much faff it’s been trying to find coworking space in my town.
I naively thought it would be like with modern gyms, where you can sign up and pay online, and then just have an optional tour, and you’re ready.
Instead, they don’t have their prices online and require you to fill out a form and someone calls you back (). I just had a 15 minute call collecting information before the lady told me “Ah – we don’t currently have any spaces in the office in your town”. Such a waste of time given that I had mentioned the town in the online form.
The others quoted me prices for renting a whole office and when I brought up coworking it was like a wacky new idea I had just come up with, rather than the thing the website had claimed they offered.
This is in the UK, and not London. Presumably it’s simpler in most other countries or London.
For a while I used deskpass, which had a subscription service and a lot of places you could use. This is in the US but I did see they had locations overseas. It worked great for my purposes and I only stopped using them because I found it easier to work directly with the only spot I was using anyway. You may want to try that or another website that is similar.
I’m getting ready to leave for work this morning, and that’s when my wife decides she wants to talk about paint samples for our bedroom. Then acts all pissy when I say I don’t have time right now. She had five or six hours where she could have done this last night between when I got home from work and bedtime, but she waits until five minutes before I’m walking out the door. And she’s shoving paint samples in my face while I’m trying to brush my teeth, like it’s super urgent that I look at these now! Jeez…
Let me tell you my tale of woe. Being an uninsured medicated anxiety ridden individual is no fun.
So here’s the thing … in August my prescription ran out. Lexipro. It has helped me tremendously over the years. There have been zero problems that have arisen from my taking the medication - only positives. But, as I said, I’m uninsured. I don’t have a PCP, so I went to a ZoomCare. Three hundred dollars later I had my prescription refilled but when I picked it up, I discovered that she half-dosed me. I got 10mg pills and not 20mg pills. So I had to double them up and I ran out forty-five days later instead of ninety. With my prescription up again, I remembered that Teledoc is a cheaper option. Sure enough, inside of about ten minutes, they hooked me up. When I went to pick up my prescription, they told me they couldn’t release it because there was still time left on my last prescription – which was gone. I explained the situation to the pharmacist but there wasn’t really much she could do for me. I had to have the prescribing doctor call and clear it up. So I traipse it down to the ZoomCare, which is a block from the drug store, and explain the situation to them. The tell me that Teledoc has to call the drug store to clear it up … which made no sense to me, but that’s what I did. I went home and contacted Teledoc. Without fail, they told me that they had nothing to do with the previous prescription so there’s nothing they could do and I’d have to contact my PCP - which I don’t have.
Jesus Effing Christ! This fucking merry-go-round.
I called the ZoomCare again and re-explained the whole situation, calmly, professionally, explaining that I have no insurance and no PCP and they are the only ones on the planet who can release my simple prescription for Lexipro, which I’ve been off for a week and the withdrawal symptoms suck, so please call CVS and release my prescription. I didn’t hear back. That was yesterday afternoon. I have to work this afternoon and I’d really like to have my prescription in hand before starting another week of work. It’s not easy working with this swimmy head.
Car’s in the shop, should be done Fri. They were able to repair the kinked bumper, so I didn’t need that one large expensive part. But somebody’s momentary inattention and/or carelessness is gonna set me back $1800+. Idjit.
So far I’ve only needed one Uber, to get from the shop to home. Will need another to go pick up the car, but otherwise I’ve gotten by walking and biking. So not much cost there. It’s good to live urban.
$1K deductible and I’ve hit that carrier for $40K on my last claim, and $45K on the previous one. Not wanting to push my luck.
Secondarily, if I wanted the insurance involved I’d have had to drop the car at the body shop, they’d have made an estimate, called the carrier to send out a verification adjuster, who’d show up in a week, then the work could start, but they’d want to use cheapo parts, not real ones.
So I’d lose the use of the car for an extra week (at best) for $800, and a potential premium bump even though the physical evidence all but ensures it’s a non-fault claim. Seems a poor tradeoff to me.
What have I done … under the influence of intoxicating beverages, a sleepless night, too many Caesars, and the well-intentioned advice of my fellow Dopers … I have committed to the purchase of the Camry. Subject only to the necessary safety certification, which one would assume any decent car should pass. Which of course the Camry did, just this afternoon. It’s probably quite proud of itself.
But the struggle, my friends, was hard. How I ever made important decisions in my youth is now a distant mystery to me. This was a monumental struggle. I started filling out the forms for the tax rebate donating the Sebring to the Canada Kidney Foundation car donation program, and I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. My eyes got too misty. It was like filling out a form for giving up a baby!
Great! I now have two cars: a nice Camry practical car, and a Sebring that I don’t need any more but to which I’m emotionally attached and cannot part from. Keeping them both was never an option, but my sentimentality is making me run short of driveway and garage space.
I also now have to ponder tire options. Natch, the all-perfect Camry has fine tires, but they consist of a set of winter tires and a set of all-seasons, all on their own rims. Which requires a switchover twice a year, which I believe has something to do with the Earth’s axial tilt and its orbit around the sun. My preference is all-weather tires (not the same as so called “all-season”) good in summer and adequate in ice and snow, but replacing four tires with decent all-weather ones is a fairly hefty expenditure. But with a new fridge, Ukrainian handymen, and Snowplow Guy, I think new tires can wait at least until spring.
Good for you, listening to your wise friends!
Hope you enjoy having a dependable car!
FWIW, we live in the snowy tundra, and we get by with one set of all-season tires. I’d rather slip around a bit than deal with switching rims. But maybe your local mechanic would switch them for you on a regular basis.
Sigh… our next door neighbor had that issue. It didn’t end, though, and he ended up with five junkers in his yard.
But, since he was also “a heart attack waiting to happen”, it did happen. And a day or two later, all those cars had been towed and his widow had replaced them all with a new sports car.
). I just had a 15 minute call collecting information before the lady told me “Ah – we don’t currently have any spaces in the office in your town”. Such a waste of time given that I had mentioned the town in the online form.