Do I need a new computer?
Long time lurker, first time poster. I have a 7 year old lenovo y-40 running Ubuntu which has served me well, but I am starting to get concerned that it may be time to put it out to pasture. Nothing has broken, but I know it's getting a little old.
The way I see it, my options are to stick with this computer and upgrade the ram (currently 8gb, space for up to 16) and perhaps replace the hard drive (although replacing things makes me a little nervous, I have only replaced the battery thus far), or buy a new computer.
I kinda hate buying things but will throw down for a decent piece of gear if I need it. I have a budget of ~1000 (but if it can be cheaper that's better), want to run linux and use my computer mostly for programming and internet-stuff. I am also unsure if I need to stick with a laptop-I almost never take my computer anywhere and have it hooked up to a monitor anyway. I mostly have been looking at getting a T14 or something from System76 but they all seem a little pricey. Thoughts?
My personal opinion is that a 7 year old laptop has more than served it's purpose so you would be more than justified in buying a new one - there definitely comes a point where buying new parts for an old device is not only not cost effective, but also doesn't keep you up to date with modern tech. $1k is more than enough to get you another computer that will last you 7 more years. As for recommendations, I haven't gotten a new computer in 6 years so I'll wait for other to chime in ;).
I kind of agree with you, but at the same time I think it would be wasteful to buy a new computer if it's not actually causing them problems. Not only does it create more e-waste than necessary, it's much more money that could be invested elsewhere. This machine can be upgraded to an SSD for $100 instead of $1000, and it will be enough to make it perform far better than it does now.
It's kind of 6 of one, half dozen of the other. Eventually this system will die, either as a result of not being able to run the newest intensive software, or because non-replaceable parts die. At that point you will have to toss the whole system regardless. Technically you could strip out the functioning parts and buy a new laptop without those and use your old ones in the new device, but in practice it's hard to buy laptops like that. I definitely agree that upgrading is in general preferable to buying new, but there's also a point at which maintenance of an old system becomes a headache and I don't think it's unreasonable to look for a new device.
7 years old isn’t too bad. I have a 10 year old Mac Mini that I still use regularly. It isn’t my primary computer (I have a 2018 MacBook Pro) but I use it nearly every day for basic tasks.
If everything is still working and it does what you want at a reasonable speed, why upgrade? Adding more RAM and replacing the hard drive with a solid state drive can make a huge difference. Based on some cursory searching, it looks like the hard drive and RAM are extremely easy to replace and if you managed to replace the battery, you shouldn’t have a problem.
If it is a bit slow and you do feel like upgrading, you can get an excellent computer for less than $1,000. It doesn’t sound like you need something super high end, just a midrange laptop would be good enough for programming and web browsing.
The advantage of something like a System76-type integrator is that you don’t have to worry about getting it set up and running Linux/installing drivers, etc. It just comes ready to go out of the box. (You also don’t have to pay for a Windows license you don’t want).
In terms of big brands, ThinkPads and Dell XPS laptops are generally well supported by Linux. You can usually find those on sale at various retailers very frequently.
I've been looking at Lenovos (I have been happy with mine, even doing the transition to Linux was a little fiddly but way easier than I had been led to believe), but the newer ones are pricey!
Keep an eye on them, Lenovo has sales regularly (as do sites like Best Buy). They hardly ever go for the sticker price.
If you want something truly indestructible, there's always the Toughbooks. However, if you think Apple is pricey, you're in for some sticker shock. ;)
True, but those are almost exclusively for businesses where cost isn’t as important as it might be to an individual buyer.
I think they'd make for the ultimate survivalist laptop, as well. They'll likely last decades.
I tried looking at that site for a price and it just said to contact sales... Whatever the real price is, I'm guessing you could probably buy a car for that money
They usually run about five grand a pop, but since you can run them over, run them underwater, run them in Antarctica or The Sahara, they do at least justify their value.
If you decide to keep it, putting in an SSD rather than a hard drive will be a huge improvement, even more so than throwing more RAM at it (though that never hurts). The big downside is that you'll be constrained to a SATA SSD, whereas a newer laptop would support NVMe which is a huge leap forward in terms of SSD performance.
What CPU are you running? (
lscpu | grep Modelin a terminal will tell you, if you don't know offhand) From some quick googling I found Y40 models running Haswell-era Core i7s, and if you've got something like that, their performance is still fairly respectable.Do you have a proper 1080p screen, or one of those old 1366x768 monstrosities? That would be an excellent reason to upgrade (even if you also have an external monitor)
If you do decide to upgrade, you can definitely get a decent machine for less than $1000. Also consider going the used route - especially with Lenovos, you can get business models that get sold used after 3 years with their first owner, and tend to be entirely usable.
If you're not 100% sure of the specs, some more details that would help would be pasting terminal output from
sudo fdisk -l,lspci, andxrandr -q, as well as thatlscpucommand I mentioned above. With that info we could recommend upgrade parts that would be compatible with your existing laptop, or make sure you're getting your money's worth out of a new system and not taking a step backwards from your current hardware.Theoretically yes, but it really doesn't matter much unless they're moving giant files regularly; the biggest improvement you get from SSDs is the lookup speed.
Linus Tech Tips even did a video where they did a blind test to see if people could tell the difference between systems with NVME and SATA SSDs, and most people could not.
Found the video
Ehh...they have a sample size of 3 people, all playing games, all on Windows.
Maybe he covered the testing methodology, I may have missed it while fast-forwarding, but I'd be curious if they rebooted each machine in between testing iterations. Also if they did anything to suppress Windows Updates, virus scanning, or any other periodic background tasks that can consume IO.
I'm a sample size of 1, but on Linux, I can absolutely notice a night & day difference when I do anything IO-bound, after upgrading various machines to NVMe.
OP mentioned programming, and depending on the language, an NVMe drive could absolutely make a huge difference there. Try a large parallelized C++ build on both, for example, and the improvement in concurrent read/write access will make a huge difference (especially when using a filesystem like
xfsthat is designed to support concurrency).At the protocol level, the main difference is between one queue with up to 32 commands vs. 64k queues with up to 64k commands each. There are also other improvements with regards to interrupts and locking.
If you ran the same experiment, but rather than just playing games (which is IO-bound only in some parts), you had people trying to play games while installing Windows Updates in the background, I suspect the SATA SSD would stick out like a sore thumb. The difference between the last-gen NVMe and the shiny new PCIe 4.0 one would probably be tougher to spot.
Running linux, for day-to-day stuff, the only difference I really notice an improvement with NVME is boot time.
Fine-tuning my boot process, I easily got down to <10 sec to graphical taget, the limiting factor at this point is me typing in my password.
I've since disabled all forms of suspend. It's buggier and not really any faster these days.
Chips are-
Model: 69
Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz
I haven't noticed much of a performance issue other than it freezes when running slack, zoom and firefox all at once which I figured was a RAM issue. The fan does run pretty consistently, tho. It's good to know that a hardware upgrade is probably within my capability-I tend to prefer to modify/fix things if I can and avoid buying.
Oh also: any recommendations on where to buy used if I decide to go that route?
Hmm, so despite being marketed as an i7, that's got 2 cores and 4 threads, which is pretty meh by modern standards.
Running all of those simultaneously will definitely tax your 8 GB of RAM. Freezes like that are commonly indicative of swapping out to disk, which will be extra slow if your swap is on spinning rust (probably at 5400rpm, no less) and not an SSD. You can check on that using
free -mfor a snapshot view, or runtoporhtop(the latter you'll probably need to apt-get install, but it's much nicer UI than plain ol'top) for a continuous view of how much RAM and swap is in use.eBay is pretty good for used laptops, there are a lot of refurbishers who buy used laptops in bulk from corporations, spruce them up, then sell them one-by-one on eBay. Make sure you buy from someone with a high seller rating / lots of other laptops for sale and you're unlikely to have any issues.
You may also be able to find a local computer recycler that refurbishes and sells used laptops. Here in Seattle for example we've got Interconnection which takes donations of old hardware, recycles the stuff that's truly beyond use, but refurbishes the rest and either sells it to cover their operating costs or donates it for charitable use.
If you want to do the upgrades yourself, here's a video I found of someone doing an SSD upgrade on their Y40. It's from 2014 so I suspect it's the same old model you have. Looks like it's a standard 2.5" drive which is nice - that'd be the big question in an upgrade is whether you need an mSATA drive or a full-size SSD. You can also see the 2nd DIMM slot (yay unsoldered memory). That Intel link above states the maximum memory supported is 16gb so even though it's possible to find 32gb DDR3 SODIMMs that would physically fit, they likely wouldn't be recognized.
Dropping in a 2nd 8gb SODIMM will very likely work, though. There's a chance you'd run into dual-channel issues doing that, so I'd recommend popping open the laptop, finding the manufacturer and speed rating of your existing memory, and trying to match the speed and if possible the manufacturer. If you want to avoid that possible headache, you can always buy a dual-channel kit of 2x8gb SODIMMs and install both into your laptop (and either keep the old one as a spare, or donate it to an electronics recycling place like I mentioned).
Awesome. This was extremely helpful, thanks so much for the in-depth response!
In that case, why not get a desktop? Using a laptop like that just seems like burning through a lithium ion battery for no good reason (plus, more fan noise). Since you don't play games, render videos, etc. you can do just fine with integrated graphics, which gives you quite a bit of leeway in the budget.
In that vein, although AMD makes good CPUs, stock flies off the shelves and the high end chips as of yet do not come with any kind of integrated graphics and now is an incredibly shitty time to buy any kind of GPU, so I'd stick with something from Intel.
With $1000, you can probably grab an i7, a suitably sized M.2 SSD (512GB or 1 TB) for boot, 16 or 32 GB of RAM, a decentish $150ish motherboard, any random case, good PSU ($80ish) and you're good to go. Prebuilts would work fine too. The one catch is that for whatever reasons desktop PCs, unlike literally any other computing device, regularly do not come with any kind of wifi support - so you'll have to buy those separately, and make sure there's Linux compatibility.
I have been considering the desktop route more and more-it's just sometimes hard to invest that much money into an unknown (and a laptop works just fine). Thanks for mentioning the wifi issue-that's something I wouldn't have picked up on.
If you decide to go with the new laptop route, I got a Lemur from System76 not too long ago and have been extremely pleased. Apart from some weirdness around sleep mode it has done everything I've wanted it to without fuss or hassle, which is impressive for a Linux laptop.
Seconded.
I've got an Oryx Pro, and I've been very happy with it. I did have a problem with my motherboard, but they fixed it without issue. Their support has been consistently prompt and effective for me.
You do have to pay a pretty penny for what you're getting, but I think it's worth it to support a company that's supporting Linux as well as they do, and it's very nice to have a frictionless laptop where everything Just Works™. Pop!_OS is lovely, and the integration with the hardware is great. I love being able to switch between my internal and external graphics cards easily. Apparently this process is a nightmare on other builds/distros.
Personally, I'd just stick with what you have if it isn't really giving you problems. You might not need to buy anything at all. I have a 5-year-old Lenovo that is serving me just fine, and I have no plans to upgrade or replace it in the next 2 years, unless something about it horribly breaks. That said, I guess I'm in a different boat than you insofar as my laptop not being my main workhorse (I have a desktop PC for that).
If you go the desktop route, I found https://pcpartpicker.com/ to be a very valuable resource when building and buying my most recent desktop. As others have said: If you are not using the portability aspect of your laptop much at all, you'll get more bang for your buck building a desktop machine, especially if you plan to reuse your existing monitor. The only asterisk there is that I've heard that PC component prices have been a bit crazy during pandemic times, and parts may not be as affordable as I think they are, based on my pre-COVID notions. (I bought my PC in spring of 2020.)
Cool! Thanks for the tip on that website.
To give you an idea of where I'm coming from: I tend to buy the highest end machine I can afford and use it for about 8 to 10 years. I've currently got one of the cylindrical MacPro models from late 2013, and I don't plan on upgrading until they release an M1 replacement, and probably not until the 2nd generation.
The reason I do this is because I found that whenever I started upgrading a machine by parts, I end up buying a new one about a year later. There's always something that made it worth my while to just replace the whole machine. The partial upgrades always tended to be stop-gaps, and the newer machines (because I wait so long between full upgrades) are so much better that it ends up being a better idea. Now I don't even bother with part upgrades. (Well, I have added an external drive because I started doing some video-heavy projects, but that's only once in the last 20 years that I can think of.)
System76 do charge a bit more than others as you say, but to have a laptop designed for Linux rather than Windows might make it worth it. Alternatively... I found out about something called the Framework Laptop this morning and it looks quite promising. Designed with repairability and upgradibility in mind, and they say they won't charge a premium for it. It's not launched yet but it sounds like you can wait a little while for this if you're interested? https://frame.work
There's a huge problem right now where desktop graphics card prices are at ridiculous levels (card supply shortages, semiconductor shortages, shipping issues, etc.) with no end in sight. I don't know if it's driving up laptop prices at all too, but something to keep in mind, especially if you're considering a desktop replacement.
I've had good luck buying a few refurbished thinkpads that were former corporate laptops. As others have noted, refurbishers take corporate machines, refurbish them and sell them one-by-one on places like ebay, amazone, etc. About 3 years ago i purchased a couple of thinkpad t420 for between $200 ~ $225 each, and they were originally from circa 2011...so, by now they're both pretty close to decade old machines...but they run fine with linux. (I do not do heavy duty stuff lik edit movies, etc...but for every day use, they're fine.) For one of them i just added RAM (went from 8gb to 16gb)...and its performance improved a little. This machine by the way is my main personal computer. I figure i can squeeze out anoither year out of this machine. That being said, when i do get another machine i will likely go the used route again but maybe slightly higher specs than i did last time. However, if i ever raise enough funds for a new (not used) machine i would purchase something from companies like System76...because i use linux as my OS of choice and their machines are built for linux...but also on principle; as i wish for them to succeed in a world so dominated by Windows. (I don't hate windows, i just really love and support open source stuff with linux being my favorite!)
By the way, if/when you get another machine, do not throw that old machine away...what i'm going to do with my machine (when i get a new one), is "turn" it into a server for the home...Laptops - with their batteires that serve as UPS - make for neat little servers for the home...just load a linux distribution that doesn't have a heavy desktop environment, tweak the lid function, plug it in, and semi-hide it somewhere...and voila, you have a neat little server to play with. Alternatively, my day job receives donations of old Windows machines and we load lightweight linux distros on them and donate to kids that lack access to tech...so you might want to look at any orgs in your area that have similar programs...hey, no kid should go without tech...and even "old" tech can help someone!
Good luck, and don't be shy to reach out with questions!
I have two System76 laptops, a Darter and an Oryx, and they are great machines, and worth the price ... but yeah, they're not cheap.
OTOH, one of the really nice perks of many Linux distros is that they can run just fine on older hardware. A 2-year-old used laptop (or desktop) for $500 could serve you nicely for another 3-5 years. I just bet you could even find some decent 2ndhand business selling Linux-refurbished machines.