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> Who buys a laptop with only 30 GB of storage? I didn’t even know that was possible these days.

Ultra-cheap computers with MMC flash drives with pathetic read-write speeds. And pathetic other parts. Such as this charmer from Walmart. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Teqnio-ELL1103T-11-6-Laptop-Touch...




I don't understand the thought process behind cheaping out as much as possible on a terrible PC, then paying for many hours of work from a tech to try to get a pathetic machine to be usable. The correct course of action is to return the faulty machine and buy a better one, rather than throwing away the money on a tech who can really only do so much with such inferior hardware.

It also boggles my mind how, still to this day, it's so hard to get a lower cost desktop or laptop that ships with an SSD, despite the fact that SSDs offer up such a performance improvement that many people consider them mandatory. The average consumer will have a much better experience with a computer that ships with a 128 GB SSD than a 1 TB HDD, yet every manufacturer is offering plenty of the latter (at 5400 rpm no less) and none of the former at sane price points. The two components even have similar costs now. In this era of streaming everything, the average person really isn't using much hard drive space. I know that my non-technical family members certainly aren't.

I just got my mom a $450 refurbished 2012 Dell workstation for common desktop use (mostly email and word processing). She loves it. It's night-and-day faster than the machine it replaced. And the single biggest performance improvement in it comes from, you guessed it, the SSD. A $450 five-year-old used workstation is trouncing any modern desktop in the sub-$1,000 range in practical performance. I would've gotten her a new one, but couldn't find anything in the price range that has an SSD, and the kinds of computers that do ship with SSDs also tend to have unnecessarily upgraded (and costly) processors and graphics cards, which are only useful for gaming.

(Oh, and the used workstation has a Core i7 in it too, so it's not exactly a slouch along any dimension except for 3D graphics performance.)


I don't think that people understand what they are buying. There is an expectation that Walmart wouldn't sell something that cannot work at all, but they do.

Don't buy 5 years old hardware second hands, it's poor investment and I speak from experience. Hardware has a limited lifespan then it just dies. The hard drive, the motherboard or the screen fail without notice and you're screwed.


You're right that people don't understand what they're buying. $200 new, modern Windows laptop is a market segment that cannot exist -- it's like a $5K new automobile in the US. Except there are standards in the automotive market in the US, so no one is allowed to sell the kind of trash that would be a $5K car. You can buy such a thing in, e.g., India, but it's exactly as bad as you'd think it would be, with terrible emissions and crash performance.

As for hardware endurance, I don't think you're giving quality hardware enough credit. I've owned a lot of computing hardware in my lifetime, and the only failures I've ever experienced have been fans going bad (which is easy to fix) and spinning hard drives crapping out. Oh, and I dropped a laptop really badly one time and broke it that way, but that's not really the hardware's fault. Solid state components last quite a long time.


It's funny you say that because I was already writing that there are cars in Indian selling for much less than $5k before finishing to read your first sentence.

Entry cars in Europe are in the range $5k to $10k. Not sure closer to which ends. They are certified for regulations and safety.

I certainly had some hardware and I've seen everything die sooner or later. My order would be rotating hard drive, then gaming GPU, then display, then motherboard.

Never seen any computer reach 10 years without any replacement. You're significantly past half life when buying 5 years old.


The cheapest car in Europe appears to be the Dacio Sandero, which works out to around USD 8,500. There's several problems with the base trim level that would render it unacceptable on the US market: No A/C, no radio, no automatic transmission, and a truly anemic engine that takes 13 seconds to go from 0-100 km/h. That engine might be acceptable on a city car in Europe, but most US drivers are going farther (and faster). But hey, at least it's certified for collisions and emissions; you can't say the same for the Indian cars we're referring to.

I've seen plenty of computers last >10 years. So, we'll see how this one goes. Even if one component does need replacing at some point, it'll likely still have been the best choice. Nothing else offers that kind of performance at a remotely comparable price point unless you're willing to build a PC from scratch.


The low end Dacia are a demonstration of making affordable cars by abandoning options like motorized windows, A/C and radios. They are very successful. I think you can pay a bit more to have all options, which is still a good deal for a brand new car.

Yes, Europeans generally speaking have smaller cars than Americans. All cars have manual transmission.

Not 10 years with all original components.


Ugh. That looks pretty miserable. Also, why is that running 64-bit with only 2 GB of RAM?




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