Comment by yoyohello13

Comment by yoyohello13 4 days ago

5 replies

My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware.

It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better.

The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.

Telaneo 4 days ago

> a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core

Yeah, those things are born e-waste. I'm surprised Intel even bothers. Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. A dual core from several years ago, assuming it's a proper i5 or i7, will do a lot better.

Windows 11 doesn't make things any better.

  • ryukoposting 4 days ago

    > Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration.

    Video decoding has always been a brutal workload, but that isn't Microsoft's fault. I had to replace my Thinkpad X220 with an X270 for no reason at all except h.265. It's a ULV i5 too, so the perf is almost identical to the old laptop's... until you watch video on it.

    • Telaneo 4 days ago

      h.265 can get annoyingly heavy, but the better compression isn't coming from nowhere. But for less powerful machines, H.264 works just fine and works back far enough that even I got surprised. Even LGA 775 machines will do that just fine, and h.264 is more or less a constant lowest common denominator.

      If it can't play a blu-ray off CPU, then it's either so old that DVDs were the media du jour, or it was never meant to be in a general-purpose computer. They'll do e-mail and Office in a pinch, and they'll play video within their limits, but venture outside for anything else, and it all comes crashing down.

TrackerFF 4 days ago

Me and my fiancé both bought Lenovo laptops with 16GB RAM and 5000-series Ryzen, 500 GB SSD. They were on sale, and the price seemed nice.

Some of the Windows 11 features are laughably, hilariously slow. If I enter anything in the taskbar search, it will take a solid 6-7 seconds for the app to appear in the result. The result window will just be blank. If I press enter after having typed in, the app will start - but still, it is so, so laggy.

And some weird flicker when running certain applications. It was like that out of the box, and I feared I had gotten a defective screen - nope, only certain apps.

TacticalCoder 4 days ago

> I may just try to load ChromeOS on it.

If you wife would be OK with ChromeOS, basically all she needs is a browser. I just installed Linux on the computer my wife is using. For a while she was on Ubuntu and then once she got used to it, I replaced Ubuntu with Debian (because I use Debian everywhere: NUCs, laptop, dekstops, servers, hypervisor (Proxmox, which is debian), etc.). It's easier for me to just slap Debian everywhere but YMMV.

People have no idea the amount of people who nowadays only need a browser (and working sound/microphone: but that nowadays Just Works [TM] on Linux).

It's never been easier to switch people to Linux than it is today.