New laptop

30 April 2024

I bought a new laptop because my existing one got its keyboard owned by water damage and instead of buying a ~$150 keyboard for a laptop that may have more water damage beyond the keyboard, I upgraded to an Intel 12th generation laptop with an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU in it.

It's pretty based so far, with 64gb of ram, 2tb of SSD, and a 144hz 1080p screen.

Of course, I don't use Windows 11 at all so I installed Windows 10 LTSC on it. Obviously, some things like the audio and network functionalities didn't work so I had to install some drivers. The built-in microphone still doesn't work with my existing Windows 10 LTSC installation, so I just use a USB sound-card whenever I feel like recording stuff.

I would recommend you to upgrade to new hardware if you're primarily a Windows laptop user who games and does power user shit. The reason I use a laptop as my primary "computer" instead of a desktop is because I'm not always in one spot and it's extremely convenient to have my computer with me.

Some considerations for the laptop lifestyle that many people have though include whether or not your laptop will get stolen, if the data should be encrypted, etc. Relying on a laptop as my daily computer is sometimes cumbersome and all my productivity being bottlenecked through one device means if just three keys on my previous, still fully functioning laptop get water damaged, I'm certainly fucked out of a few hundred dollars if I'm not prepared. Luckily, I was prepared for this bullshit and had the Ryzen APU laptop I had bought in 2022 for $180, with the intent of running Cities:Skylines and Minecraft on it. It was, and still is, a decent low-end gaming experience but I wholly recommend you to just spend the extra $1,000 on an astronomically better gaming and workstation experience.

I think that since I spent nearly $1,300 on a laptop, some insurance needs to be put in place that the water-damage bullshit won't happen again. A protocol has been put in place so that neither myself or my girlfriend can ruin the laptop with drinks, which cannot be put anywhere at the same elevation of the laptop nor above the laptop, and liquid cannot be put anywhere near the laptop, and liquids are absolutely not tolerated anywhere near the laptop. This prevents this water-damage bullshit from happening again, at least from human error and accidents.