Topic: My new Lappy

[micah]

My current Dell XPS tower is over 10 years old.  Don't get me wrong, it is still a working power house. A first gen i7 it has held up pretty damn well. Over the years I've upgraded the ram (its at 12Gb), had to replace the graphics card and the harddrive..and had to add an external USB sound card to bypass the horrible latency of the once-premium audio setup built into the motherboard.

That said, I think it's time for an upgrade.  And a small splurge on myself.  Especially since, starting in June I'm going to be running all my major purchase expenses through my GF/Finance before I can pull the trigger so I'm considering this my last splurge of freedom. LOL

I got a bonus at work plus my parents gave me some cash for my birthday. I gave myself a $2000 budget and wanted a solid GPU, an 11th gen i7-k chip (or 10th gen i-9) and 32GB Ram.  So I found another dell XPS tower, got a 10% off coupon, and went to buy it online....and my debit card flagged the transaction as fraud.  So two days of dealing with my bank and Dell and I gave up on that one.  I thought you know what, 2 G's is a huge chunk of change, maybe I could go a little lower on the specs to save some money.  I ended up on the Dell Outlet site and found a really sweet NIB-overstock XPS for $400 less with almost the same specs AND that site lets you pay with Paypal so I could just bypass having to use my debit card.  I ordered it last night.  The website gave me a confirmation number but then never e-mailed any info. I called dell this morning and they said it was "on hold" with no reason code.  So I canceled that order too.

In the end I thought, you know what, if I'm willing to compromise to save money maybe I could do even better.  So I went to Costco and got this:

https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/Legion/Lenovo_Legion_5_15IMH05H?M=81Y6003YUS

Only 16GB Ram but can take it up to 32 when I'm ready to upgrade (only two channels though so I'd have to outright swap the 2x8GB for 2 16's) and only a 1/2-GB SSD M.2 but that's cool.  The Graphics card is right in line with what I need. I don't really game (like, at all on PC) but I'm excited to have a 6-GB dedicated ram for graphics.  Also, and this was probably the biggest concession.. its only 10th-gen I-7 AND its an "H" series which is only 6-cores.  But I'm happy.  Plus, I had assumed I was gonna get a tower but, honestly, I'm kinda excited to have a laptop that is all my own and not my jobs.  Its a really sturdy build (I'm totally ok with the heavy weight) but I hope it lasts a long time.  My old one is a HUGE tower and just sits in one place chugging away with a bunch of fans running.  Somehow I doubt I'll get 10-years out of this new one.

[ober]

From someone that just upgraded - god it feels good.  That laptop looks decent to me.  I can't imagine having a laptop but I also am a gamer on PC so my spec requirements are a little different.  When I upgraded in January I got a i7 10700K with 32GB RAM, a 500GB M.2 plus a 1.5 TB HDD and a Nvidia RTX 3070.  I'm loving it   It had been 7 years since I last fully upgraded so it was a pretty big jump for me.  I was running an i5 previously. 

I would have built my own but frankly I couldn't find the parts anywhere.  I ended up going through CyberPowerPC.  My budget was also 2K and I ended up coming in just under that.

[hans]

Looks pretty well spec'd. If you need more storage, I'd probably just get an external SSD anyways for backups and stuff. I only have a 500GB main disk in my desktop, but I have 2TB external and that seem to work well.

And I'm going to go on a little bit of an old man rant here, but what the hell are you doing with 32GB RAM? I've argued with devs in the past that insisted they "needed" 32GB in their laptop but even with all of their dev tools running they weren't even using 16GB in practice. I mean maybe 5 years from now when we keep bloating websites, or if you're using 3D modeling software or something I guess but do many games even require that much memory?

I'm going to guess you'll probably need a new laptop by the time you actually need 32GB.

I mean really, 16GB should be enough for anybody.

[micah]

I'm going to guess you'll probably need a new laptop by the time you actually need 32GB.
I mean really, 16GB should be enough for anybody.

ultimately, that was my reasoning behind caving and going with the 16 after all to save costs (still wish I'd got with a better processor but at least I saved the money).  I agree, I'll almost never need 16 in the course of usual work BUT... when I'm doing my music sequencing stuff and I have dozens of tracks, each with several plugins side-chained... it really does help to have all that memory available. Also, sometimes I need to render video and I hate waiting   But you are right, I'll probably stick with the 16.

[ober]

Looks pretty well spec'd. If you need more storage, I'd probably just get an external SSD anyways for backups and stuff. I only have a 500GB main disk in my desktop, but I have 2TB external and that seem to work well.

And I'm going to go on a little bit of an old man rant here, but what the hell are you doing with 32GB RAM? I've argued with devs in the past that insisted they "needed" 32GB in their laptop but even with all of their dev tools running they weren't even using 16GB in practice. I mean maybe 5 years from now when we keep bloating websites, or if you're using 3D modeling software or something I guess but do many games even require that much memory?

I'm going to guess you'll probably need a new laptop by the time you actually need 32GB.

I mean really, 16GB should be enough for anybody.

Gonna have to disagree with you on this rant.  My dev team is running anywhere from 3-6 apps locally, all in docker and some of them have multiple docker images (microservices) plus Visual Studio and other misc tools and they were capping out with 16GB.  Giving them new laptops with 32GB is breathing new life into their development.  A lot of them had started working on their own personal machines because their work laptops weren't enough.

When I built my latest desktop, I did 32GB.  Not that I expect to use all of that on the regular but I also only build about once every 5 years.

[hans]

OK, here's my rationale. If you "need" 32GB of RAM (for work), you probably should be doing that sort of work using cloud services. A few of the contracts I've worked on in the past allowed every developer their own sandboxed AWS/GCP environment so they could spin up all of their instances and stuff remotely. At some point your architecture is really too large and complicated to run on a single machine. Not to mention doing all of the containers or whatever in the cloud is way more flexible than running everything locally. Things like firewall issues and stuff was super easy to share your environment with other devs. There's an argument to be made about internet access but how often are developers without internet really?

[Mike]

Counter point: Not everyone is using cloud services.  And that shit can be expensive, much more so than the cost of the additional ram.

As for being without internet: Well, it occurred in my region just last week.  At least one of my developers was affected but was able to keep working since it was local.

[ober]

I get your point hans - and we've actually tried using that.  We used Microsoft's 'dev spaces' which was supposed to be essentially what you're describing.  The teams hated it.  The features weren't there and the spin up time made it somewhat difficult to manage.  And I agree with Mike that the cost of using that infrastructure is far beyond the 16GB of RAM. We obviously have our environments (dev/QA/staging/prod) to support everything beyond the local development.