it’s true in the usa and it’s true in india, exact same response to the exact same stressors. that’s interesting.
Our monthly Repair Café is part of End of 10. People bring is their old notebooks, I put in a 250mb SSD and install Linux Mint. It’s great work.
250mb?? can that even fit a web browser?
Those Distros must be very small 🤏
I have been dumpster diving after components recently, it’s crazy what people just toss out.
Most of the new devices I see are using the hard to find components (DDR5) while refurbished devices from a few years ago have more than enough RAM for school. Also capacity matters more than generation for RAM, assuming we’re talking DDR4 vs DDR5
I wish I learned this sooner, but the best device for school is a generic laptop that you can easily find guides and replacement parts for. That way you can fix things quickly in the middle of a term instead of needing to wait months for the manufacturer to deal with it
the best device
for schoolis a generic laptop that you can easily find guides and replacement parts for. That way you can fix thingsThis is the right idea. The qualifier is unnecessary. Repairability is always valuable. The more generic a device is, the more spare parts for it there will be on the market, and the longer those spare parts will be continue to be available on the market.
Buy common refurb/resale tech. Keep it for years, or decades.
My company recently switched out all of it’s older Dell for newer ones that are capable of running Win11 (because existence is pain). As a result, I now have three Dell micro PCs two of which are on DDR4, one is DDR3. All of which cost me nothing.
I’ve already put Proxmox and OpenWRT on one and shitcanned the crappy Linksys my ISP gave me, and am about to put another into service as my home server. The third one has yet to reveal its use to me, but it’ll come.
I currently have eight computers of various specs, sizes and configurations, and am happy to rehouse a bunch more.
You want a business laptop. Most of them are designed to be repairable and have parts readily available. They are also a lot more durable than the junk you find in the stores. The only downside is they are not good for gaming, but you can always pick one with Thunderbolt/USB 4 and use an eGPU. Just make sure the port has all 4 PCIe lanes connected.
My sister-in-law’s somewhat new laptop had water damage. She was surprised that I wanted to spend about $100 at a local repair shop to get it fixed.
It’s only 1-2 years old and had 16gb ddr5, a 512ssd and a 10 core intel processor. I forget what one, but it’s pretty modern.
She bought a MacBook Air to replace it so luckily she didn’t ask for any money for it.
The repair price might seem extra low because I’m not in the US.
The right-to-repair movement hopefully means we can keep doing this in the future with our ever increasingly expendable digital devices. Until 2026, my wife and I have daily driven two x30-series ThinkPads from 2012, repairing and upgrading along the way. Outright purchasing new laptops could easily have been a thousand dollars every five years or so for each of us.
I’ve been keeping all my old tech. I have some stuff that’s pretty useless, but in one instance, I was able to move a vps I have for my business and run it locally saving a bit each month. It’s running on an old MacBook Pro from 2016.
It’s also just a test server that I use before pushing to production in the cloud.
