@morbiuswilters said:
I got my current laptop in the fall of 2010. It's served me well: 8gb of ram, 2.67ghz dual core processor and it's chewed through a few SSDs in its life.
Sadly, it is falling apart. It's been sorta-dying for over a year now, with nice, random freeze-ups and memory corruption issues. Compiled apps run the best, but Java has a tendency to crash every tenth invocation or so. dmesg frequently shows the kernel bitching about some critical piece of software or hardware failing, but still the old girl trudges on.
Keys are literally falling off the keyboard. Just today I had to pry off the tilde key from the top and affix it to where the R key was because the R key just decided to crack its plastic brace thingy and no longer stick to the keyboard.
The sad thing is, I have it's replacement already. I bought it about nine months ago, but have been too fucking busy with a series of More Important Things to bother with moving to another laptop. It's sitting next to me now, its quad cores, 16gb of ram and its 500gb SSD sitting mournfully idle.
Part of the problem I had is that since I run Linux, actually getting the motherfucker to work was a bit of a nightmare. I also had this idea to put ZFS on there so I could create snapshots and stream constant incremental diffs to Amazon S3. And while that was a pretty good idea, it did add many, many hours of struggle to actually getting it working.
Oh, then there's the fact the entire block device ZFS sits on is encrypted, and then I had multiple fucking issues getting video drivers and audio to work, then getting it to play Flash videos. My last hurdle was getting it to suspend and come back to life without shitting itself. After a dozen hours of so of beating my head against the wall on that one, I found that if I ditched the Open Source nouveau drivers for my nvidia card and instead use the proprietary ones provided by nvidia, it will suspend and resume fine. Hoo-rah!
So I think this weekend is when I am going to migrate all my shit over to the laptop. It's going to be exciting.
I envy you - I work in a place where the salesmen have to have the latest technology but the actual guys that need the horsepower are given leftovers. The reception staff have 24" touchscreens, which serve them well when they are engaging in a game of solitaire... I'm still running a 17" monitor paired with my 15.4" laptop screen (it's HD res but on 15.4" that's some serious pixel density, and my eyes don't currently have a zoom function). Everywhere other office I've been in/seen has had decent kit for users and even nicer kit for devs, yet we are running 6 year old mid-spec laptops. Mines a Latitude D830 - yeah it's dual core... I had to whinge to get it upgraded to 4 gigs of ram, but the stock 4500RPM HD is still in there :(
On asking about the new machines we've been promised and specifying that I'd like an SSD to help get things moving, the response was "No we'll probably just stick a good half terabyte drive in instead". Yeah because that's what I need.. a nice slow fat drive where I can dump loads of crap. Might have to settle for a hybrid. Why are we not any sort of priority?