Laptop time?

[sedrosken]

Consumer notebooks are hard. My Ideapad 1s came from visiting a Walmart and a Best Buy to see what's acceptable at less than $350, because so very often, that's as much as people are willing to spend. I have a prejudice against 17" models and their breaky, breaky screens, and the moment I bring up anything more than $600, I know I'm probably talking to a wall unless the customer wants a gaming notebook... which are also terrible.

I usually steer people toward Asus Vivobooks as a mainstream option. I don't trust Asus service at all ever, but I've never seen a BAD Asus notebook, either. They all have good screens and good input and solid construction. At around $600, it's possible to buy something with a Strix Point APU and 16GB RAM and that's a very good place to be if it's at all within your budget.

I'm not buying her anything consumer-ish, to be honest. I want it to last her and she's not terribly good about babying electronics, so I'm very sure if I get her another consumer grade laptop it'll be broken in a year or two.

I'm okay with it being a bit slower than strictly optimal (trying to swing a 7840U, but I'll settle for a 7540U if I have to) if it means I won't be right back in this spot Christmas 2027.

 

[sedrosken]

I'm kind of playing with the idea of grabbing a 7840U machine for myself before things get utterly ridiculous, and Walmart even had a Zenbook with an 8840HS and 16/512 for an actually fairly reasonable $599 when I happened to be in for something else yesterday. I want the superior build quality of an EliteBook but I'm tempted to buy something where I'm not the warranty.

I looked up a teardown of the Zenbook and I'm disappointed that the RAM's soldered, so I'm not really sold on it, but its screen is really nice. For a new laptop I really want 32GB of RAM. I'm making 16 work right now, and it being soldered means it runs very quick, but I'm just not sold on the longterm viability of a 16GB machine where it's sharing with the iGP and I'm running newer, more intensive games that can easily need 16GB of RAM alone, much less with VRAM.

If I hadn't just bought this Surface Laptop Go 2 a couple months ago it'd be a much easier sell to my sense of reason, though... and if the Surface wasn't a completely competent machine in its own right for what I actually do day-to-day. I really don't need it. The Surface is compact for traveling, and my Precision is still plenty capable of handling actual performance needs.

But I will say the 7840U EliteBook I prepped for my sister (I did end up getting it, but it didn't get to her until after christmas) was the first time I've had hands on a machine I was giving to someone else and I was sorely tempted to keep it. That thing was FAST. It was outright faster than my desktop with the 5700X in general use and put simply, it can run my entire library with no issues...

 

[Mercutio]

I actually used an 8GB Ideapad 1 7520u (these are Zen 2 chips since AMD can't be bothered to name things clearly across product lines) quite a bit over December. I found it entirely tolerable for running Office and Firefox. I spent a lot of time updating documentation and deliberately limited myself to a modest PC just to check the overall sanity of using an 8GB PC in 2026. I still think it's OK; 10 browser tabs and a half dozen open documents between Word and GDocs and I felt comfortable switching between everything. I could always remote into faster systems, but I did most of my daily browsing and emailing on it as well.

I did cheat a tiny bit, since I'm using one with a Ryzen 5 rather than a Ryzen 3; it was shipped to me as part of an order that was supposed to be all Ryzen 3s, but I kept it when I realized they gave me a nicer one. This is the laptop I use for building and testing installation images now, but given the DRAM crisis, some people are probably going to be stuck on a less than ideal amount of RAM regardless, even on new hardware.

 

[sedrosken]

Oh, no doubt. If it were a work machine or if I wasn't planning to make use of the big IGP in the x840 SKU, I'd be fine with it, but if I'm putting in the money and it's going to be soldered, it needs to be 32. I'm making 16 work right now in the SLGO2, but it can't run some of the stuff that needs gobs of both kinds of RAM by virtue of it just being too slow, so while 16 works for this, I'm skeptical of the long-term viability and won't have the ability to upgrade it later in that.