laptop's blowing up and I must scream

[synthcrow]

my trusty old laptop started malfunctioning at a very unopportune time but at least it's broken in an interesting way!

last year it refused to boot and gave an error signal for "ram/memory fault". I hit it and it started working again, I assume that some wire was loose.
it started doing it again with no clear sign of improving, occasionally booting but the entire screen turns into a glitchy pixelated mess if you even look at it wrong.
the same occured when you unplug the charger cable, which has given me the theory that some memory bus in the motherboard has eroded with age/blunt damage/the aging battery, and it can lead to wild things if it is touched or a current is induced by plugging/unplugging the cable.

anyways I think I might need a new laptop and I'm not a huge fan of that

[synthcrow]

update on this: got it to remain stable enough to back up everything. must either be something in the motherboard or the SSD is dying, not really something that can be fixed on such an old laptop

had to find a replacement while abroad which wasn't great (foreign keyboard layout, at least very similar to my local one). since windows is an inconvenience for my line of work, I looked into getting either a mac or installing linux on a windows machine. the latter felt a bit risky in my situation so I went with the former.

the high price definitely stung but I've been enjoying the new laptop! definitely an improvement over that grongly six year old thing, so glad I don't have to deal with windows anymore either. ough I like unix/linux terminals much more than cmd.exe, how can it still not have full UTF-8 support...

[Neververy4]

RAM issues are annoying
If it's removable, you can at least replace the card, but if it's soldered then you'll have a wonderful time learning how to replace a BGA style chip

6 years isn't all that old tho, or at least to me. Only three years ago did I finally retire my Core2Duo laptop, and now I have a Desktop with a 6th Gen Pentium

[synthcrow]

yeah 6 years didn't feel that old and it was alright performance wise even though I run and compile some pretty heavy code on it (scientific computing), it just had a plastic case that started aging really badly. a couple years back it already started crashing of you pressed on it from the wrong place, making handling it real difficult. I guess I used it several hours daily for work and it wasn't that well built, should've maintained it sooner

but yeag most of my code ran pretty well on that old i5, never needed more than an hour of runtime for anything really (for heavier code you use a cluster anyways), the 8gb of ram was pretty limiting though. now I have a M1 pro with 16gb ram, gods things compile a lot faster now which is nice

[Neververy4]

I would LOVE to get one of those new apple computers, M1 or M2 doesn't matter. My current apple laptop is a late 2009 13" Pro, however it's currently running Linux Mint XCFE because that poor thing is ready to retire
How nice is that laptop treating you? Do you think that CPU perfermance is worth getting?

[synthcrow]

been really good so far! biggest positive is the move away from windows in general, the user experience is much smoother now. the trackpad is a plus

the performance boost is convenient for running normal code but then again, if I need something truly heavy I have access to a cluster. good for prototyping though. still haven't fully utilized the multi-thread performance, really excited to try parallelizing stuff now

for music production though it has been really worth it! ableton boots super quickly and I don't need to worry about running out of resources when running lots of plugins