Laptop replacement

Well I have had pretty good results for MY needs with HP laptops BUT anything to run Windows 11 seems very expensive. Like £400

Whereas a Windows ten capable refurbished is under £100

Try 'laptops direct'

Thanks Theo. Fat fingers and ageing eyes. :-(

Chris

Its not Lenovo that don't support Windows/11 on that machine, it simply does not meet the Microsoft minimum hardware requirements. The CPU is too old I5 Gen 5 and it only has TPM 1.2. To be supported on Windows/11 you need an I5 Gen 8 CPU and TPM 2.0. Microsoft has set the bar for Windows/11. There are many PCs from every manufacturer out there that in terms of CPU Speed and RAM would run Windows/11, but don't meet the security requirements above.

The oldest T-Series that supports Windows/11 is the T480 with the I5 Gen

Its supply and demand. I would say most laptops which still work will run Windows/10 laptops, but anything pre 2018 will probably have TPM 1.2 and/or non-supported CPUs so now have a fixed "end-of-life"...

Well yes , no one wants them.... .... you can get one for £330 with 1-year warrenty.

Also Tier-1, Newandusedlaptops4u, gigaRefurb, Morgan Computers

I usually buy via e-bay these days, but Amazon has them at similar prices. Do check the revues...

Dave G4UGM

Dave

That's a 4th or 5th gen Intel CPU (4th gen being Haswell). It has a TPM, but it might be the first generation one, not the TPM 2.0 that W11 calls up.

While your computer is perfectly good as a computer, it's not the best choice for the W11 thing. I have W11 running on

If you don't get one with an NPU on it (NPU being for Artificial Intelligence), then it could be close-to-reasonably priced. Since no significant software runs on the NPU yet, we don't really know whether the current NPUs are worth buying.

An RTX5090 is 1000 TOPS. The best laptop NPU at the moment, is 50 TOPS of AI performance. The Microsoft "minimum" is 40 TOPS. The NPU can have things like multiply-accumulate blocks, and have ten thousand of those. Some designs apparently are arranged like systolic arrays. The main problem with the current generation, is the memory bandwidth holds them back. One in design right now, may have additional memory and a "side connection" of some sort for it. (And just for the record, that has never worked well in the past. The ICs don't have sufficient electrical contacts for that method.)

This leaves a challenge for the customer. "Buy the compliance" and end up with a turkey, or "buy a computer" and deal with not having the logic block the OS company seeks to monetize. I would sooner have a computer with a decent CPU, than worry about anything else.

As a rule of thumb, if the software for a feature is not already shipping, it might well never be delivered. That's why you can only "buy what is in front of you". If there is no AI today, there might never be a compelling story later on. It's like Full Self Driving, or Flying Cars. It works the same way with your new laptop purchase. "Promises" are worth nothing.

AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 3,977 5.0GHz Turbo, 2.0 Base AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 3,935 5.1GHz Turbo, 2.0 Base

When they cluster closely like that, the pairs likely have the same peak clock (which you can check when you look them up). Some of the laptop benchmarks, could be affected by thermal issues (whereas desktops get monster coolers for these sorts of runs).

The multithreaded performance, is not as important (with exceptions of course). When I need to compress files with 7ZIP, the core count matters. If I'm running Cinebench (a perfect scaling benchmark for multi-thread) or Blender or something, these might use more of the cores. The Microsoft Flight Sim might run on eight cores (one of the cores does pre-fetch of graphical textures for the map). Taking ratios on the AMD ones, suggests eight cores are contributing to the total number.

AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 35,123 4P 8E, hyperthread (24 threads) AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375 32,453 4P 8E, hyperthread (24 threads)

NPUs do get benchmarked, but "standard" benchmarks or favored ones, don't seem to exist yet.

I suspect any of those four would be just fine. One pair, has more GPU and NPU than the other. So the "balance" of the designs is different, under the hood (that's if you were wondering why the CPU part seemed so skimpy on one pair). But that doesn't matter when you are editing MSWord. Which is why I did not dwell on that aspect.

You can spend hours and hours at this stuff.

Paul

Would you entrust mission-critical business operations to obsolete, unsupported software?

Guess why I buy the cheaper ones and run Linux.

I'd trust it to Linux. Actually that's MS bullshit. The greatest security risk from a laptop is leaving it on a train.

If its 'mission critical' it doesn't go on a laptop. Period. Or you get sacked This isn't Donald Trumps administration, this is real life

Official refurbishers are only shipping Windows 11 refurbs now. All the entries on the first page here, are for "Windows 11 Pro". And this has to do with the contract terms on the Refurb kit and when the cutoff date is. And the prices here reflect the corner the refurbisher is backed into, by the need to meet Win11 requirements.

Paul

I use Windows 8.1 on all my machines that will run it because it allows me to download updates and install them when convenient to me. Why this facility doesn't exit on Win 10 goodness knows.

I see you've been suckered by MSFT marketing bullshit :-)

Also note that if you build around the constraints of crappy hardware with technologies such as backups, clusters, active/active clusters etc. they can live very well on crappy hardware.

Of course this is just theoretical, and you collect your requirements, and SLA:s towards your customers, and then make an informed decision.

Since I have backups of my laptop, and could go to the store and buy a new one in about 60 minutes, and do a restore of my company documents within another 60 minutes, I in theory, have no problems with running my company on "crappy" hardware.

Due to convenience, I tend to run it on maximum 3-4 year old laptops, and my SaaS product runs on refurbished servers in the cloud.

You seem to be assuming that the only bad thing that might happen is the laptop loses your data, which as you identify a good backup regime will mitigate. However the bigger prise for many bad actors is persistent access to your device and data - something that becomes "easier" on unsupported platforms, and also something, if done well, you may not even notice.

Because giving you some control is not the new MS way. They must push their adware and spyware to keep their ad revenue stream up. If they gave you the choice to opt. out, too many would opt. out, harming their recurring revenue stream.

A great many are. Sadly, most, such as our local troll L.D., never see the light of how they are living in a MS bullshit world.

Yes, the important aspect of mission-critical business data is to keep backups, ideally with some form of versioning.

And I do mean plural of backup(s). Preferably with at least one copy in a different location.

Yes and no. As an IT Manager I described myself as custodian of the corporate paranoia. One of the options I had was to check that any machine connected had the right OS and had all of the patches I considered essential. If I had been managing financial or other critical data the patches might have been added to the critical list within a few days of release.

It takes about three days for miscreants to download a patch and reverse-engineer an exploit. So exploits by skript-kiddies are most likely three days after a patch. They get progressively less likely after that.

I've had a number of Dell laptops for my job and one HP laptop. My son has had a number of Dell laptops and he never managed to destroy any of them as a teenager.

I'm quite happy with them and currently have an i5 13th gen running Win11 for work but it's used just as a terminal to access the compute farms in our data centre. I've no idea what it's like as a computer.

Before that I had a Dell 7490 laptop. i7 8th gen 16GB / 256Gb, thin light, long battery life. It was a great workhorse and was used for lots of software development. Ran Win10Pro just fine. It was replaced by the i5 which I don't feel is as well made.

I so liked my 7490 that I bought one for myself from eBay refurbished. It was £189 for a 16GB/256GB i7 8th gen. This one was from 2019 and still the battery lasts a good 6hrs+ when browsing/emailing. It came with Win11 Pro installed which was quickly replaced with Debian. But there will be a Win11 licence in the BIOS if the one you buy doesn't have it installed.

It maybe 6 years old and *ONLY* an 8th gen i7 but laptops got more power and resources than most people need sometime around 2015. All they do now is wait faster for the user to do something. Maybe it's not quick enough for games. Buy a console for them!

There are plenty on eBay, just make sure you buy one without cracks etc. in the plastic and not too much wear on the keyboard. 32GB/1TB would be nice but if this is not to be a main machine, 16GB/256GB does me fine. Though I do run Debian Linux not Win11.

My wife has a Lenovo T480 with issues (keyboard legend wearing off keys, intermittent battery fault)... I think I'll pick up another 7490 for her as the prices are not much as they are perceived as "a bit old".

Of course, you mileage may vary.

Because the vast majority didn't install updates resulting in huge bot-nets. As 8.1 is unsupported Microsoft no longer confirms or acknowledge security bugs. As it shares code with 10 and 11 it probably contains many of the same vulnerabilities.

The scripts the script kiddies use target vulnerabilities not Windows versions so any use of an old OS is risky.

I had the same approach. At one point we deployed fixes to test machines for a week to check their impact on production machines. After a couple of incidents we swapped to deploying as soon as possible as we decided the impact of a bad patch was less than that of a security breach...

Dave

I took a look at my local computer store inventory, to see what selling tricks to look out for. While the 7th and 8th gen are "new old stock", they're not particularly good Windows 11 choices. Intel processors went up to 14th gen, before ditching the "gen" label.

There were still 7th and 8th gen laptops, for about $500 They ranged up to about 13th gen processors, getting up to $1000 Finally, I was seeing mention of the NPU equipped W11 material... for $1700

The staff at your computer store, might tell you about the caveats of the $500 items (not real W11 material, just older W10 stock). I'm sure the stock that is in-range (plus or minus the NPU) will be labeled as W11 materials. Leaving the more expensive kit to speak for itself.

There is not going to be much visible hardware inside the $1700 one, because the graphics are done by an iGPU tile inside the CPU. That price does not include an NVidia gaming graphics GPU (an actual gamer laptop).

There has even been a laptop where the RAM is fixed and is loaded inside the CPU package as well. Might be 16GB of stacked RAM die inside the CPU. This makes for some amount of air space underneath the keyboard. Since these are now slightly older stock, there is a price drop from the airy level.

(Example of highly integrated laptop with "fixed" RAM quantity)

That would be a software problem. I can run modern software on crappy hardware. Yet another benefit. And no, I'm not in the cloak and dagger business, so the threats I face are very, very mild.

I do have acquaintances in the cloak and dagger business though, and they are all about avoiding as much as possible, tracking supply chains, buying hw without mics and video etc.