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General => Chit Chat => Topic started by: radu81 on December 15, 2019, 06:20:12 am

Title: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: radu81 on December 15, 2019, 06:20:12 am
I just bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T450 for only 170€ on ebay. It is used but in PERFECT conditions, no scratches, no glossy keys or trackpad, seems new just like removed from box. I think I did a good deal, I like having my own things in perfect aesthetic condition. My old Thinkpad T410 just decided to abandon me after 6 years of flawless work.

Specs: core I5 5300U, 4 GB RAM, 500 HDD
I just updated the RAM to 16 GB and installed the 256 GB SSD i had on my old T410. Next upgrade will be an IPS full hd screen panel.
I run Linux Mint XFCE in dual boot with Win10 which I use rarely.

(https://i.imgur.com/srLPV8v.jpg) (https://i.imgur.com/Bcr30xf.jpg) (https://i.imgur.com/C0tsI3e.jpg) (https://i.imgur.com/MwONrD1.png)
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: ahrasis on December 15, 2019, 08:23:10 am
Nice. I bought few laptops myself this year but for my brothers and sisters whom consulted me. They are almost similar to yours but mostly i5, generation four.

I didn't upgrade their RAM since all except one is already 8gb which is enough for their usages. Only one is upgraded to 1TB SSD, 3 others stayed with 256gb SSD and one stayed with 1TB HDD.
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: Spuds on December 15, 2019, 08:47:30 am
NIce find :D ... now get busy putting a shine on that trackpad!
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: radu81 on December 15, 2019, 09:49:19 am
Yep, for web usage 4 GB is enough, my I5 is 5 generation, but it's not hat different to a 4th generation. My old T410 had a first gen I5, that with only 3 numbers series and was discrete for a normal usage. SSD disks are doing miracles on these machines.

There are a few things I am missing from my old T410:
For the rest is better than my old one ;)

Quote from: Spuds – NIce find :D ... now get busy putting a shine on that trackpad!
 I will ;)
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: Wunderbaum on January 14, 2020, 02:21:59 am
My laptop just died on me during the Christmas and I didn't have so much time to look around. Ended up with the Lenovo 14" Lenovo Yoga. Super satisfied altough the keyboard is a bit small. But it is super handy and has touch so you can also use it as a pad.
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: radu81 on January 18, 2020, 05:12:10 am
Good choice the Lenovo Yoga ;)

In the meantime I changed the sh**ty TN panel 1366x768 with a full HD IPS panel 1920x1080, and there are no comparision: IPS panel is superior in every aspect. I broke the screen bezel while opening the screen, but should I receive a new one in these days.
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: Zioclive on January 20, 2020, 02:34:01 am
Nice thinkpad Radu81,  I'm using Linux mint me too, It's a nice os.
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: emanuele on January 29, 2020, 02:38:31 pm
I have a lenovo yoga since 1 year and the hinge is broken and the rubber under the laptop is detached.
I use it for work, mostly at home, so no stressing environment.

I'm pretty disappointed.
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: radu81 on January 29, 2020, 07:25:00 pm
I finally changed the screen bezel and it's perfect now 8) Or almost perfect, I will change the thermal paste under the CPU fan, sometimes the CPU fan is starting to run high for a few seconds even if I'm doing basic stuff like browsing the web. I had the same behavior on my T410 and changing the thermal paste solved the problem.

Quote from: Zioclive – Nice thinkpad Radu81,  I'm using Linux mint me too, It's a nice os.
Thank you. I use the XFCE version and for a 14" and 1920 x 1080 resolution XFCE is probably not the best solution, the scaling is not so good in XFCE if compared to Windows or KDE Plasma, but with some tweaks is pretty decent. So I'll keep xfce

Sorry to hear that,  I thought they are pretty solid...

I started using a Thinkpad 15 years ago when I started to work, they gave me an used IBM Thinkpad (T41 IIRC) and I hated that notebook. It was very slow to boot, but since my job was mainly word processing I couldn't complain. After a few months I bought a cheap notebook, faster than the Thinkpad, but the keyboard and the whole experience was awful. So I started to regret and appreciate the old Thinkpad. :)
At work I only sow Thinkpads, mostly T series and Carbon for the boss, a couple of Sony Vaio (worst experience), but today I sow a new HP Zbok 15" workstation so I asked how come no more Thinkpads? The answer was: "we want to try something new since the Thinkpad quality is not the same we were used to"
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: Frenzie on January 30, 2020, 05:39:20 pm
Quote from: emanuele – I have a lenovo yoga since 1 year and the hinge is broken and the rubber under the laptop is detached.
I use it for work, mostly at home, so no stressing environment.
I have an ASUS Zenbook UX305C. It's going on four years old now, still decent except for the 4 GB soldered-on RAM.[1] That was okay when it was new and now it's terrible. Something like Discord eats up hundreds of MB while a few years back Skype was rather significantly less memory-hungry. Now it's all freaking Electron. It's bad enough that it's slower, but the RAM usage is the death knell.

If I got a new one I guess I'd go for a refurbished old business laptop this time around. Not sure if I'd go for at least 8 GB or just straight for 16.

Build quality on the ASUS was excellent. Everything's still in good shape.

(I stuck a proper 32 GB RAM in my desktop. Bliss. I suppose 24 GB would suffice, 16 GB would be workable. Less, no way.)

Quote from: radu81 – Thank you. I use the XFCE version and for a 14" and 1920 x 1080 resolution XFCE is probably not the best solution, the scaling is not so good in XFCE if compared to Windows or KDE Plasma, but with some tweaks is pretty decent. So I'll keep xfce
Btw, here's my ~/.gtkrc-2.0 because otherwise the taskbar buttons are rather small on UHD:[2]

Code: [Select]
style "xfce-tasklist-style"
{
  # The maximum length of a button before the label ellipsizes.
  # When this value is set to -1 the button will expand to the
  # entire available space.
  XfceTasklist::max-button-length = 400

  # Ellipsizing used in the task list and overflow menu labels.
  XfceTasklist::ellipsize-mode = PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_END

  # Lucency of minimized icons. Valid values are between 0 (completely
  # hide the icon) and 100 (don't lighten the icon).
  XfceTasklist::minimized-icon-lucency = 50

  # Maximum number of characters in the menu label before it will
  # be ellipsized.
  XfceTasklist::menu-max-width-chars = 48
}
class "XfceTasklist" style "xfce-tasklist-style"
Totally my own fault of course, but I never realized such a  thing could even exist when I decided 4 GB would be fine at least for the first few years… all my laptops have always had regular laptop RAM sticks and I've typically added some more a few years down the line. Very displeasing. The SSD is basically the only thing you can replace… well, and some stuff like the wifi/bluetooth but those are pretty good by default.
Btw, five years on UHD here. Long live sharper text. \m/
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: emanuele on January 31, 2020, 02:15:36 pm
8GB nowadays are barely enough to browse.
Well, I use it for work (so I have quite a bit of stuff open), but 8 are not enough for me. 16 would be likely fine. 32 would be great.
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: ahrasis on February 01, 2020, 10:27:09 am
Quote from: emanuele – 8GB nowadays are barely enough to browse.
Really @emanuele? I am still using old headless Acer Aspire i5 laptop with 4GB ram as PCTV and browsing is still very good. It may be because I have 100mbps internet connection and assigned its 16GB unused ssd to compensate any memory inadequacies for it.

But of course for programming work you may need far more.

Anyway, I personally didn't have time to learn more on programming for quite sometimes now. I have been busy moving into a new house and entering into new partnership. Hopefully everything will settle down, soon.
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: Frenzie on February 01, 2020, 11:10:42 am
Well, right now my Fx is doing basically nothing, a dozen tabs, maybe less?

Code: [Select]
$ smem -ktP firefox
  PID User     Command                         Swap      USS      PSS      RSS
23566 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0     8.1M     9.5M    31.4M
11427 frans    /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/sm        0    16.7M    17.4M    21.1M
10721 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0    94.7M   102.9M   186.0M
 7885 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0   159.4M   171.4M   277.5M
 7939 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0   197.7M   216.7M   315.3M
11032 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0   143.1M   232.0M   408.7M
32191 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0   230.3M   243.1M   370.0M
20938 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0   244.4M   260.2M   391.3M
 8025 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0   247.7M   268.3M   378.9M
30111 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0   379.9M   391.6M   493.8M
 7965 frans    /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefo        0   687.8M   801.8M     1.0G
 7810 frans    firefox-esr                        0   620.9M   935.0M     1.3G
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   12 1                                           0     3.0G     3.6G     5.1G
Because I'm on my desktop that's fine, but it means that on my laptop I can barely browse and use websites sensibly anymore (except for sites like this one and Wikipedia that aren't crazy).

So yeah, I think I'd probably just shell out the € 60-75 extra for 16 GB. Otherwise in a few years I'd just end up in exactly the same situation as I am today with 4 GB. Well, except I'll make @#$ sure to check for idiotic concepts like soldered on RAM.
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: emanuele on February 01, 2020, 08:11:26 pm
@ahrasis shrugs
I don't do much programming, most of the times I use chrome, albeit with some 50 pages or more open at a time. If I open an excel file, then I cannot turn on the VM I use from time to time.
Yeah, could be a fancy way to work, though it's mostly browsing... and I have a hard time with chrome losing pages constantly that have to be refreshed, black screens, random freezes, etc.
Yeah, I know, I should change the way I work.  xD
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: radu81 on February 02, 2020, 06:56:15 am
Quote from: Frenzie – Btw, here's my ~/.gtkrc-2.0 because otherwise the taskbar buttons are rather small on UHD
 
Thanks for the info, the taskbar buttons are probably small, but that doesn't bother me, only thing I would enlarge is the bar with minimize and close buttons. I've read that for those should I use a theme designed for high resolution screens. I need to investigate more on this.
Firefox looked weired, too small if compared to Chromium, but there is an option to scale Firefox in "about:config"  and that worked perfect for me.
I used Inkscape, Gimp, QCAD, Librecad, Libreoffice and many other programs and scaling is good, yesterday I started to use Sweet Home 3D (interior design app) and this is the only program that looks too small on my screen.

As for RAM I could use the 8GB I had on my T410, but I decided to go for 16 GB. For the use I do I usually stay under 5-6GB of RAM and occasionally use more than 8 GB. But I know that these numbers can only grow.

Here a screen on how my screen scaling is now:
(https://i.imgur.com/t5fG5B5.png)
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: Frenzie on February 03, 2020, 07:22:58 am
See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI for a large collection of tips.

My "not really doing anything" RAM use is ~6-7 GB on my desktop (most of that comes from Firefox and/or Vivaldi/Opera and a few Electron apps like Skype & Discord); seldom much more than 16 GB I suppose, but 24 GB isn't really something you can/should plan afaik. We did end up putting 24 GB in my wife's desktop. We put hers together with 8 GB (2*4) back in 2014, which had become a big source of complaints by '17 so we upped it to 24 (2*4+2*8). Works fine but they say it can be risky.

Having 32 GB enables certain types of convenience you'd traditionally never think of. You can just stick a several GB file(s) in RAM (tmpfs) without a second thought, which makes SATA-600 feel pretty slow. Sometimes useful. And you (almost) never have to close anything before opening something RAM-heavy like Kdenlive. It's quite liberating.

Which isn't to say I'd recommend 32 GB to my mom or whatever. For her it'd just be a waste of a hundred Euros. Also I was able to get the 32 GB for € 45 extra compared to 16 GB back in '16. That was a decent value even then. Prices are still worse now, although not nearly as bad as in '17 and '18.

But yeah, 8 GB is definitely low-end in 2020, imo. :)
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: radu81 on February 03, 2020, 10:58:01 am
32 GB is out of my budget, 1 single DIM 16GB costs 136€ (DDR3L double voltage costs more than DDR3)
For 2 x 8GB I paid a total of 69,90€, much more affordable.
Title: Re: Just bought a new used laptop
Post by: Frenzie on February 03, 2020, 11:38:23 am
Yeah, I guess the 4 * 8 I've got in my desktop is more affordable no matter the current price fluctuations.[1]Pity these CPU sockets change constantly, because otherwise I'd probably just toss a new CPU in my PC in a few years. Oh well, it'll be motherboard+CPU+RAM again then.

The only thing I worry about a bit is my aging HDDs. I took out my oldest a few years back for risk mitigation, but even my "new" 2 TB HDD from 2010 has been powered on for a total of 3 years now. I'm not really sure what that does for chance of failure. I also have one that's been powered on for 7 years, 3 months & 18 days; it dates back to… gosh, 2006 or 2007? Meh. The one I took out was my oldest, which had been powered on for 8 years.[2]
As I said/implied it was € 90 for 32 GB; the extra 16 GB for my wife a little over a year later cost more than that D-:
One upon a time that was my system drive, but I've gone through three different SSDs since… all still in use of course.)