I got a new laptop
I have gotten a fair few new cool things I would like to share. One of these is a new laptop. Now, I get maybe 75 bucks a week from an after school job I got a few months ago - how did I afford a laptop I hear myself ask? Well, for the first time ever I have bought something second hand, found it on gumtree(a website for selling second hand things in Australia) the first day I started looking, didn't find anything better value for a week and then bought it.
What I ended up with was a Lenovo thinkpad X13 yoga gen 1. First of all horrible naming scheme lenovo. Second of all, I went looking for a thinkpad specifically because I knew I would be able to get new parts for it if anything ever got damaged. And yes, while it may cost me more than what I paid for the laptop to get a screen replacement if it ever broke, at least I have the option to.
Also I think it is pretty nifty that it has a touchscreen and pen. On that topic, today I spent like an hour looking for a good app that uses the touchscreen and pen for notes and sketches. Eventually I found Rnote which is working pretty well for me. I would also like to note how ubuntu(non free iso) somehow manages to work with the touchscreen and pen without downloading any additional drivers? Litterally just plugged it in and everything worked.
Have I mentioned that I use ubuntu? Why not windows I hear myself ask so I can carry on this method of reasoning. Because I don't need all the things that windows has, I need firefox and simply the ability to run an application? Also, while windows manages to hog 80% of the avaliable ram on the system somehow. Ubuntu is using 3GB. And battery life, turns out using all of your system resources to make it feel just a little more responsive all the time is a bit draining on the battery. At my school, we are given thinkpad L13s from a few years ago with windows 11, they last about 3 hours, not even enough to actually get through the school day. I havent done a proper battery life test with this laptop because I don't really care. but i had it on charge overnight, its now evening, i was using it for a few hours this morning and its been sitting asleep on my desk since then, and its still on 55%.
I got this laptop for $350 Australian dollars, or about $220 USD. The brand new equivalent of this laptop starts at $1600 AUD. I think I got a pretty good deal. This model is from a few years ago.
In terms of internal hardware: It has a 10th gen intel i5, specifically a 10210U, which means its on the lower end of mobile i5 chips from the generation but its certainly capable of running firefox. It has an igpu, to be expected, it is of course horrible at most gaming, but it works well in 2d games, even if the only thing I have tried is openttd. 8gb of ram and 256gb of storage, the storage is great because I have no clue how im going to fill up that much space with anything I would do on a laptop ever. On my main machine the things that take up the most storage are video games, and my dozens of unfinished unity projects, in that order. If im not gaming and don't think this is powerful enough for game development I don't believe storage will ever be a concern.
It also has a backlit keyboard which I really like because I can write in the dark.