Final update: See here.

Update: Thank you ALL for your valuable feedback. I'm definitely looking into refurbished models now and I have a lot better grasp on what what I should be considering. I'm going to do some digging and a ridiculous amount of overshopping over the next couple of days, and then I'll let you all know what my final pick is!

Hey techy Tildes! I'm back with another support request from you knowledgeable and helpful folks.

I need a laptop that does exactly three things: gets me online, displays PDFs, and runs office software. I have a large number of online courses that I have to take in the coming years, and I need something that I can just grab while on my couch or in bed to work on papers and assignments, hence the 13" size preference. Long battery life would be highly preferable.

I looked for options that come with Linux preinstalled, but there's really nothing available that hits what I'm looking for -- there isn't much of a market for 13". As such, my plan is to just buy a standard Windows laptop and then put Linux on it, but I have no idea which particular hardware will play nice with a Linux installation. Budget would be sub-$500 (if possible). I don't need the laptop to do anything other than stay on for a long time and let me type, so I have no need for a powerhouse.

Can anyone point me in the right direction with some recommendations?

Playdate announced on Twitter that they are beginning shipping today:

Oh! A new Playdate Update video is here!

It recaps the great developer things we've released this year, like Pulp and the Playdate SDK. Please enjoy it. https://youtu.be/BmrtkBmFSn4

There's one extra important bit in the update. Playdates in Group One will begin shipping…

…today.

The embargo on reviews also lifted:

• The Verge: All it’s cranked up to be
• Rock Paper Shotgun: A handheld indie curio that goes hand in hand with the spirit of PC
• Eurogamer: A fascinating puzzle in itself
• Video Games Chronicle: The Playdate is fun but its quirks may wind you up
• ArsTechnica: Playdate earns its $179 price tag with cute design, memorable games
• Engadget: Playdate is a magical indie game machine
• IGN: It's Crankin' Time
• Venture Beat: An alternate-history boutique handheld
• GamesRadar: Tiny, mighty, unfussy fun
• Destructoid: You’ve got a date
• Gizmodo: The Playdate Is Oozing With Charm and Potential

Also, ArsTechnica released reviews of all of the Playdate games. SPOILERS ahead:

• ArsTechnica: All 24 of Playdate’s included games, reviewed

Hi folks! I am, unfortunately, probably going to have to build a new PC soon; my beloved Thelio-r1 is slowly failing, and while my original plan was to buy a Ryzen 7 5800X and keep riding this PC for another three to five years, I don't know that I'll actually be able to make that work.

I like the NXT H510 I used for my boyfriend's gaming build, but the thermal performance isn't amazing and, most importantly, I hate tempered glass!

Yes, I understand that people want to show off their (ridiculously!) expensive components. I understand that lots of things have RGB. However, metal is cheaper, easier to work with, doesn't shatter, and I can modify it if I need to.

So, does anyone know of a good mid-tower PC case with decent airflow, up-to-date features (no 5 inch bays, good cable management hardpoints, a cable hiding bay, etc.), and no tempered glass or, preferably, acrylic?

Thank you!

Hello everyone,

I usually do my own research, and then I try to find multiple matching results and afterwards, read specifically in detail about each recommendation, but, I have to be honest that for UPS recommendations that I’ve seen, it seems to be a very personal recommendation depending on the wattage and connected devices.

First of all, most people recommend CyberPower or APC, but I’ve also seen some recommendations for Eaton. Is there any other brand that I should be looking into?

The devices I would like to connect to a UPS would be: desktop, TV, Apple TV, NAS, router and probably my Nintendo Switch.

There are some general things I've found out while searching that I think I would like some confirmation:

• I actually think I should buy two UPS's, or? I think just one for the desktop and another one just for the remaining devices, since the desktop uses a lot more wattage.
• Pure Sine Wave: It does not matter for smaller stuff (routers, etc) but it seems that anything above 70 W, it should use a UPS with this. So, that would mean I need pure sine wave, since my desktop and TV definitely use more than 70 W of power.
• Some people said to search for a UPS with line conditioning so that you always get a perfect sine wave. Would you agree?
• USB connection (not a faux USB!) so that the NAS detects the power failure and shuts down gracefully.
• It is important that the UPS has removable battery for better longevity.

How would I choose a UPS? Do I need to see the total wattage of all my devices and then pick the UPS accordingly? Anything I'm missing?

My budget would be up to €100 or €150 in case it is really worth it.

Thank you in advance for all replies.

I've seen a few posts about the Framework Laptop on Tildes and since I received mine, I thought I'd do a write up for it.

I've been using the Framework laptop for a few weeks now and it's been great so far. I was originally skeptical but I decided that I would take a shot at it as I've been growing increasingly unhappy with the design decisions that Apple has been making with MacOS.

I ordered the DIY kit, which was nice since I already had an NVMe SSD I could use with it, so I ended up saving about $150. It only took about 20 minutes to get the RAM, SSD and wifi card installed.

Specs:

• Intel i7-1165G7
• 32 GB of RAM
• Intel WiFi 6E card

Total cost: $1,422.03.

Unfortunately my first laptop arrived with a dead display. The Framework support team was pretty helpful and quickly sent out a new one, which works perfectly.

After toying around with Linux Mint and a few other distros, I ended up installing the Windows 11 beta. Getting the drivers installed was easy, since Framework offers a single download that runs one script to install all necessary drivers in unattended mode. Just hit one button and restart - all the drivers are installed. I wish all manufacturers offered something similar.

Overall construction is great. For something as modular as this, it feels extremely solid and well built. While the build quality isn't equal to something like a MacBook, I'd say it's on par with a Dell XPS or similar high end machine.

The screen is nice and bright, with accurate colors. I've always been a fan of 3:2 screens on laptops and moving from a MacBook Pro with a 16-inch 16:9 display to the 13.5-inch 3:2 display on the Framework doesn't feel like losing too much real estate. Having the taller display is great for sites like Tildes, where it can fit almost the same amount of content as a much larger screen.

The keyboard and trackpad are both great. The keys remind me of the older pre-2015 style MacBook keyboards before they switched to the butterfly mechanism. They are bouncy and responsive, with a nice feedback that doesn't feel too harsh like the butterfly keyboards do. The trackpad is pretty good and it uses the Windows Precision drivers, so it supports swiping and pinching if you like that. It does sound a bit louder than my MacBook Pro's trackpad.

The speakers are a bit disappointing. The max loudness is pretty anemic. Even in a normal acoustic environment (A/C running in a house), you have to actively listen to hear. Coming from a MacBook Pro 16-inch, I would say that the speakers are the biggest downgrade.

The main draw of the Framework is the expandability and upgradability.

The Framework modules are a fantastic idea and I love them. While they don't save you from having to carry around adapters, it is really nice to have those adapters slot in to your machine and feel more integrated. I purchased 2 USB-C, 2 full-sized USB, a DisplayPort, and an HDMI adapter. Being able to just slot in a USB A port and swap it for a display out one on the rare occasion that I need it has been great. I love being able to adapt the ports on my laptop to a situation without having to have dongles coming out of the side of my laptop.

The adapters are tiny and easily fit in any backpack or carrying case. I'm really curious to see what new adapters they offer in the future and what crazy niche ones third parties come up with. I'd love to see a cellular modem jammed into one of these things. Or maybe one that can hide a dongle for my wireless keyboard and mouse?

Battery life is...fine. It's an all day machine, but you'll definitely need to charge it every day if you're using it a good deal. The battery is on the smaller side, but it gets me through a normal work day so that's good enough. But when the battery goes bad (as all Lithium-Ion batteries do), it's an easy fix.

In terms of upgradability, getting into the laptop is dead simple. There's five screws on the bottom and then entire top deck (keyboard and trackpad) comes off. Everything is easily accessible and sensibly laid out. It's also all labeled with QR codes that take you to specific guides on how to install/upgrade those components. I think the educational component is great. It really shows people who would have never thought to upgrade their RAM or storage how easy it can be.

That's the big selling point for me. If I decide in a year or two that I need more than 1TB of storage, I can just buy a larger drive and stick it in there. Or if my display dies, I can get a one for a lot less than the cost of replacing the laptop. Or if the keyboard or trackpad dies, then I can easily replace just that component. On my MacBook Pro, replacing the keyboard is an $800+ repair, since it involves replacing the entire top case, which includes the motherboard and other expensive components.

For years we've been hearing from manufacturers that they can't make a laptop thin, light and upgradable. This laptop proves them wrong.

My biggest concern is the long term viability of the company. It's nice that they made an upgradable laptop, but if they aren't around in a year or two to keep selling replacement parts, then it doesn't matter much.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the Framework and I plan on keeping it and making it my daily driver.

EDIT: I forgot to mention my absolute favorite feature, one that I've missed ever since Apple went all USB-C on their laptops: It has a light on the side to tell you if it is currently charging or fully charged!

I've got a 2TB Toshiba drive (formatted as NTFS) that has become very slow and I was wondering if anyone here as any ideas what the problem could be and how I could fix it. All the data I'd need off the drive is backed up, but I would at least like a drive to put it back on to!

In short, it became slow after I had to force power-off the system it was connected to (Pop OS installed on another external drive which I unplugged by mistake) and I haven't bothered to try to fix it in the six months since.

I've tested it on Pop and it takes about 10-20 minutes to mount, and 2 minutes to unmount and safely remove. The data itself seems fine but performance is slow, accessing a 20MB image takes several seconds and selecting the drive in GNOME Disks caused it to freeze.

The drive sounded louder than normal, especially after plugging in.

On Windows, the drive was recognised and browsable immediately, but browsing through folders was very slow - opening some folders causes Windows Explorer to freeze for a while. Some of my double-clicks were mis-recognised as click-to-rename, which took several seconds to activate and during which time Task Manager reported the average response time between 5000 and 11000 ms.

Attempting to load an audio file resulted in lots of buffering. Task Manager reports an active time of 100% (even when not loading files or folders) and the activity never exceeded 100 KB/s (and doesn't sustain it for more than a second). Ejecting the drive takes forever - after ejecting it using the tray icon, the tray icon is not removed (even though there are no other drives connected or listed) and the active time is still 100% with the indicator LED blinking non-stop. The system did not enter sleep right away after me asking it to either.

All of that to say, does anyone know what the issue could be, or how I could find and fix it? Thanks!

Edit: fixed and normal functionality restored (at least so I can check the drive a bit easier) using Scan & Repair in Windows (see my comment).

This is a total longshot. I moved away from a WD My Cloud EX4100 w/ 3x WD Reds to a new box. I bought two more drives for the new one to make the move easier.

After the move I took the drives out to format them only to find that each 4TB drive shows a partition of 1.8TB on any other system (diskpart with W10 LTSC, Disk Utility MacOS, and GParted with Ubuntu.) Inside the EX4100 the drives show their full capacity.. and I just don't get it.

I reached out to their support, but I don't expect much of a response.

Anybody have any idea why the heck this could be happening? This seems crazy. I don't mind buying more drives, but it seems like a waste when I've got 12TB just sitting there.

Right now I've got a shitty WD EX4100 and everything was sort of running along nicely with docker and all, but today it rebooted and decided that it didn't want to do anything with docker anymore. I got the thing before I got into Linux and its time to move on.

Someone locally is selling the following for $250CAD

• Quad core Celeron @ 2Ghz
• 8GB RAM
• Fractal Node 304 case
• 2x WD 2TB Red 3.5" hard drives
• 120GB Kingston SSD
• 700 watt semi-modular power supply

All I run are the following:

• nzbget
• sonarr
• qbittorrent (but I'll switch to a better one)
• serve up content to my HTPC (running Kodi, so no transcoding or anything)

I don't need the drives that come with it. I'll be putting in 4x 4TB WD Reds. Right now the box is running Open Media Vault 6, so I'll give that a swing, otherwise it'll just be Ubuntu server.

How does this sound? I'm not opposed to spending some money on a new NAS, I just want something simple that I don't have to fuck around with too much.

I ended up going with the HP Proliant

OS: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS x86_64
Host: ProLiant ML310e Gen8
Kernel: 5.11.0-43-generic
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 (8) @ 3.700GHz
GPU: 01:00.1 Matrox Electronics Systems Ltd. MGA G200EH
Memory: 32GB

It's pretty good so far. Thanks everybody!

There was a very brief period of time in the late 90s early 00s when the word “webcam” had just started existing and entering the popular discourse; and where that word was practically synonymous with “sex show”.

I think around the time I first heard that word, having a webcam usually meant you would use it to do nude shows with.

They weren’t integrated with computers back then (laptops were super expensive and not popular yet, and they weren’t a mainstream laptop accessory until way later). So if you had a webcam, you had to really seek it out and pay quite a bit of money for it. It made little sense for people to buy them just to use them for personal reasons and most jobs didn’t have a utility for them.

… except sex work. Live, paid access cam shows immediately caught on. And people would see those in ads (ads tended to be trashy with zero quality control back then, even automated. Worse than now, I swear), and associate “webcam” with “webcam show”.

There was no reason to otherwise hook up a camera to a computer if not to stream its contents to the web, anyway. The first webcam, that famous coffee pot, was just that: a web-connected camera. Web cam. Wikipedia talks about “Jenni cam” — I wasn’t on the anglosphere’s internet at the time so this escaped me, but it does seem to agree that the concept entered the mainstream not via videoconferencing, but via cam girls.

Edit: Formatting by the generous PetitPrince.

† shared between CPU and GPU; exact memory access scheme unspecified
†† ~2.5 hrs at rated 15W APU power draw; also consider SSD, screen, controls, WiFi, etc.

7nm process

This APU is probably on the exact same TSMC process node as the Ryzen 7 4800U.

CPU cores

Half the cores; worse multithreading performance. More power for the GPU†.

† power management features probably do this in practice.

Overall this shouldn't matter much. Maybe impacts people who compress game files or want to use the Steam Deck for things other than gaming.

CPU clock speeds

A somewhat low max boost. Probably from power and thermal considerations. Is it the sustained max boost? With just the CPU? How about max GPU? Can it clock higher when docked?

A surprisingly high minimum clock. I hope it can clock lower than 2.4GHz.

Overall, this is subject to power and thermal limitations and management. Needs to be tested by a trusted third party. I am hopeful that as a handheld PC, we can adjust clocks and boosting behavior. These behaviors may be different on Linux compared to Windows.

CPU cache

Unspecified, I expect 8MB from AMD but we could see 4-6 as a cost and power saving measure.

GPU

Docked performance will likely be held back by the 8 CUs.

The clock speeds look good, about what was expected. Same goes for sustained boost as for the CPU boost.

By implementing the Radeon RX Vega 8 on 7nm, the process improvement gains have already been realized. Additionally, I speculate that AMD has had ample opportunity for some under the hood improvements to the aging microarchitecture. Some benchmarks found it to be 30-40% faster than an RX Vega 10 (a larger GPU) on the older process node. However, the clock speeds were twice as high compared to the RX Vega 10. Consider also that the 15W laptop was pulling ~48 watts.

Since it becomes difficult for me to speculate on GPU microarchitectural improvements, I will consider the APU's 8 CU RDNA 2 GPU to have comparable performance to the Ryzen 7 4800U's Radeon RX Vega 8.

This is mostly for convenience. It may be realistic to expect somewhat lower performance because the handheld Steam Deck APU is unlikely to be allowed to pull more than 20~25 watts. More on this in the battery life section.

By far the most significant improvements from the RDNA 2 GPU, in my mind, stem from the latest GPU features; modern video decoding, Vulkan features, mesh shading, and more. Also, being the same microarchitecture that console developers will be targeting.

Feel free to substitute your own speculative performance, but please don't let hype bias your expectations, and be careful when seeking out benchmarks.

APU power draw

4 watts is pretty clearly the minimum idling draw seen in windows laptops with Zen 2 CPUs.

Unfortunately this is high compared to ARM CPUs. It may also be subject to the level of optimizations done on the firmware and the custom Linux distribution. People willing to roll their own might be able to get this lower? It would require getting your hands dirty, and don't bank on it. I'll be happy if Valve actually gets idling consistently down to 4 watts.

As for 15 watts, it is pretty clear that commonly shared expectations of the hardware are not tailored for this rated power draw. People are expecting performance that comes with 40-80 watts. I expect the APU to draw as high as 20~25 watts in certain circumstances, but this is speculation, and cannot be verified until Steam Decks are in the hands of trusted third party reviewers such as Gamer's Nexus.

And make no mistake, drawing anything over 15 watts in the APU will have battery life implications, which I will cover later.

RAM

If there is anything I am allowing to build my expectations, it is probably this. To my knowledge, we haven't much seen LPDDR5 in devices yet, so there is some novelty and some unknowns.

Compared to DDR4/LPDDR4, even this reduced speed (saving more power btw) LPDDR5 memory will be faster, finally reaching something similar to dedicated GDDR memory speeds on older budget discrete mobile graphics cards. It has plenty of new power saving features, and should generally draw less power anyway.

But let me be clear on what it isn't; it is not GDDR5, and it is not GDDR6 as seen in the Xbox Series X or S. Please do not confuse these. I have seen people refer to it as all kinds of things. IT IS NOT GDDR, IT IS NOT LPDDR4, IT IS NOT LPDDR6.

Okay. With that out of the way, the other half of this that has me tentatively hopeful is the listed 128-bit quad channel memory. I am not qualified to speak on the nature of memory accesses and on memory channels, but generally, this should be responsible for the memory bus bandwidth to approach that of budget discrete graphics cards.

Hopefully this improves the GPU performance significantly.

Also, while I initially assumed 16 GB of RAM was such overkill for the target resolutions that it could only be to pander to the PC gaming crowd which would identify the gratuitous RAM with a premium product, I speculate it was just a byproduct of having four memory packages for quad channel. I'm guessing the smallest packages LPDDR5 came in was 4 GB. Anyway, I might be wrong on this account, and it doesn't much matter; there is more than enough RAM, faster I believe than any older APU already on the market (we aren't counting the consoles okay), and it should save power all the while.

Considering people would still be buying the Steam Deck regardless, I say well done Valve, even if it was required to hit performance targets or actually a financial boon behind the curtain.

Storage

At first I was upset the base model was eMMC rather than an NVMe SSD, given how cheap 64/128 GB SSDs are in bulk. On second consideration, it makes a lot of sense.

I speculate that at best, the base model has an extremely narrow profit margin. Even a cheap SSD might eat into that. But even more, eMMC should be more than enough for anyone intending to use the Steam Deck primarily for 2D games and emulation, which is historically a staple segment of the handheld market. These are the games that will also be happy on a microSD.

In this way, there is some product segmentation for the mid and high tier models, which are making money on the storage.

I personally have placed a reservation for the base model, although I intend to upgrade the storage myself. However, it is difficult to obtain benchmarks of power draw for m.2 SSDs of this size beyond "less than bigger NVMe drives because fewer chips and no DDR4 cache probably", so it might not be an advisable tradeoff to anyone but the budget conscious and those seeking a full 1TB fast NVMe storage.

Speaking of power, my limited findings are suggesting ~3.5W power draw from appropriate m.2 NVMe SSDs, meaning the eMMC model may also deliver the best battery life (even before accounting for less demanding titles). That is probably the listed 8 hours.

Keep in mind I don't know much about the power draw of eMMC, and the power management differences between eMMC and NVMe.

One last thing; Microsoft promised optimized games for the Series S that would have reduced asset sizes for the reduced storage. A promise it appears they haven't been able to deliver on. However, this is a very good idea and I would be THRILLED if Valve was able to wrangle a user selection of asset quality when downloading games. Some PC games have higher quality assets as DLC, and generally as a handheld PC we have some ability to do this manually. Compressing game files might also be an avenue?

Battery life

Everyone looks for different things in a product. So far I've tried to provide a relatively practical, unbiased take on the Steam Deck's listed specs, leaving it up to readers to decide what they care about.

But if you saw the Steam Deck and a short battery life never once crossed your mind, it probably isn't a concern for you. I don't know what your usecase is; maybe permanently docked, perhaps just keeping it around the house. It doesn't really matter, and I think the Steam Deck is a particularly solid value for you in particular.

It is pretty easy to do a battery life calculation. So everyone should do so with their own speculations on the total system power draw, when gaming, idling, etc. Things to account for are the APU, screen, WiFi, SSD, RAM, and so on.

I figure something like 1.5 < x < 2.5 hours for full fat gaming. I probably should have watched the video (holy cow can you believe I'm going to post this whole essay without watching the video!?) but I believe 6 hours 30 fps was thrown around, so that should be the upper limit possible for general gaming and optimized titles. I'm pretty confident the 8 hours is a best case scenario only on the eMMC model running 2D or generally less demanding games.

The math here is simple so make up your own mind!

Lastly, with a PC we have some wiggle room to optimize settings and we can also destroy battery life I'm sure. So remember, frame limits are your friend on a 60 hz screen, and on mobile devices in general. Also, reducing settings possibly. It really goes against my nature as a PC gamer though, considering I play Skyrim with an ENB on a GTX 660M. At a stuttery 10~15 fps. Yeah, sometimes a stable 30 fps is the way to go, but I'm a hypocrite who just can't wait to run 1080p and downscale to remove jaggies!

Weight

I wasn't sure if I should include this, as I am skipping other things like the microSD card slot (other than that I genuinely would have preferred a regular SD card slot so I could emulate having game cartridges; actually, I need to look up splitting game files across onboard and removable storage).

Still, it deserves a mention; I have no clue if it will be too heavy for me. I suspect going from the Switch to the Steck will be frustrating, although some have pointed out that the placement of buttons and joysticks will make it easier to rest it while playing. Also I'mma just call it the Steck from now on, my apologies.

Overall, it looks bulky and heavy and might be a pain to tote around. But modding makes this worth it for me personally.

Actual Performance Numbers Please, or APNP

I am now realizing this is way too long, and I'm spiraling out of control; there's no way I can edit all this! How long has it been since I've slept? Did I eat yet today? I will be downvoted to Oblivion for posting something this unwieldy and unreadable!

Oh well. Before I loose consciousness, I pretty much expect 1280x800 30fps on all titles. Doesn't that seem too low? But there are overheads that go into running unoptimized PC ports of games on Linux, and frankly while Proton does great things, I'm mostly familiar with it on a desktop. What is the experience with a power budget? The Radeon RX 8 struggles with 1080p on some titles; will the Steck be able to hit 1080p 30fps on all titles, let alone 60fps?

Anyway, I've made my base expectations. I personally anticipate for 1280x800 60fps for all titles, albiet at a limited battery life, but I don't think we can take it for granted. Docked performance, remains to be seen. 1080p 30fps seems realistic. Basically my clunky 11lb gaming laptop from 2012 with the GTX 660M, but with waaay more RAM and a tenth of the power draw. In a handheld.

Freesync

I don't think the display supports freesync or, as I've seen some people say, Valve would advertise that. Seems strange given the market, and if expertly implemented could potentially let the display downclock way down when appropriate. To tired to check, but possibly could be implemented down the line? That means NOT a feature, unless it is on the box when you are paying BTW.

Wow, I Can't Believe FlippantGod Won't Shut Up

The price is right, folks, but please don't pretend that this will double as a serious VR rig. That isn't the sort of thing you speculate on before a console is even released and benchmarked by trusted third parties.

What do y'all think of my expectations? Too low? Too high? Any interesting morsels I may have missed? And lastly, will Reddit eat me alive if I post this there? Willing to take any and all criticisms when I wake up! And hey, if someone high up on the Tildes social ladder wants to tag this "Steck", I will forever be in your debt. I am much too scared to do so myself.