Background
So my other bare metal couldn’t keep up with what I was doing. That thing was a potato, quite in the literal meaning of 2025, check this out:
- a N2840 Celeron, usually found in netbooks,
- a single RAM stick of 8GB DDR3L,
- a pretty mid display of 1280x720@60Hz,
- and a smaller weight, I removed DVD.
I don’t even remember the model name, but it was an ASUS. Since I’m just an average linguistics undergraduate, I didn’t really need something that’s super powerful, but this is beyond cooked. There are works of my hobbies that I’ll want a better lappy.
The lore
I was thinking about switching a year before I noticed a couple of stability issues I met on this thing. However though I play games released in the mid 2000s and use just a couple of text editors, so I didn’t think about it until I started to get into graphics design.
The pain of not being able to do things quick enough really got me that year.
Entering the 2nd semester of first year college, I asked my dad if I could think about one. He agreed, so I started searching around internet forums and stuff. The lappy I wanted was a little specific, as I want to both open that thing up randomly to tinker around and have it fixed by myself to avoid labor costs in the eventual future.
It’s 2025, and it’s the time people begin to mention a Framework. But obviously Framework doesn’t ship here, so another obvious choice was a ThinkPad before or on T14. Initially I wanted a T14, but I couldn’t find any local vendor with this model (which was an actual shame, I have zero idea why there weren’t any here). Then I found the T480.
This one vendor said they have one and they could lend me that for a straight month, no fees. I dare you to go find one like that.
Anyway, here’s the things I care about:
- i7-8550U, as far as I know it’s the high-end of this product line
- 16GB of DDR4
- FHD display @ 60Hz
- Weigh about the same as the old lappy I had
Pretty solid, considering what I do. A little caveat that its display color range was awful, but I could care less and get a better screen later when I feel like it.
What have I done after
I started to look into doing some oomfs that I otherwise couldn’t have done on the older lappy. I can now record stuff and stream stuff, various other “perks” granted moving forward. I’m happy with this choice.
The old lappy I passed it to my younger brother so he can stay AFK in a Minecraft server or something. Initially I wanted to turn it into a little server since it was a netbook and had an actually decent power consumption, but since I don’t want to spend more time to maintain it against my parents I would eventually come to the decision not to do it. For now, though.
I’m off to work.