(Price is in € EUR)
For context, six months ago I bought a renewed Thinkpad X395 for exactly this price and I got: An actually decent CPU and not something as powerful as a Wii, 16 GB of RAM, 256 GB of actual M.2 SSD, a really nice 1080p Touchscreen, really nice build quality with metal and a nice backlit keyboard. Heck, even when I bought a cheap laptop in May 2020 it was much better than this and it even was brand new for the same price.
I know this CPU very well, for this price you are getting something that has trouble playing a Youtube video in 1080p at 60 FPS and can’t even run the latest version of Minecraft at above 10 FPS. Now imagine this combined with Windows 11 and only 4 GB of RAM…
No, this is not because of the current hardware crysis, this is pure greed. But hey, 1 year of Microslop 365 is included!
“but it has the numbers ‘4000’, must be better than Intel Core i3!”
Ooh, a Celeron N4000. I will see you, and raise you this piece of shit we have at work:
My boss bought this as one of those Black Friday “deals” for about $99 USD. The sticker on the bottom doesn’t seem to reveal its manufacturing date but I believe this model was released in 2018. Really, it’s just a netbook in all but name.
We use this specifically to drive a walk-around barcode scanner in our warehouse and the software we have to use on it is Windows only. It’s tiny and still somehow gets stellar battery life, and it’s deliberately so cheap as to be disposable so when the day inevitably comes that it gets smashed, no one will care.
With Win10 IoT on it the thing actually runs tolerably for our intended use case, which is the aforementioned barcode bleeping and nothing else. And at least yours there has a 1080p display; this one is only 1366 x 768 so doing practically anything else on it is excruciating anyway. What amuses me the most about it is that with only 29 gigs of usable storage there literally isn’t enough left over to run Windows updates. I have this thing as ruthlessly pared down as I can get without creating a custom Windows installation or something and for the big updates, you have to attach an external USB drive to it.
I can’t fathom trying to run Windows 11 on it. Fuck all that noise.
The license to run win 10 iot cost more than the laptop. I would love to get our IT to run win 10 iot but it’s a pain to even get licenses and expensive to get them legitimately
If you have to do it legitimately for corporate liability purposes then yes, actually buying licenses will not be cost effective. But activating the LTSC versions is otherwise trivially easy.
Yeah, I mean when I have to use windows personally, I use win 10 iot. However, at work, we can’t risk that and we’re broke so were still on win 10
I guess as long as the laptop isn’t connecting to anything else and you are transferring data via USB, there is no issue. The fact that it is using special software makes me think it is directly connected to your database, making that a loose cannon if there is any kind of compromise.
W10 IOT dropped support last year, so it will not receive security patches UNLESS you are using W10 IOT Enterprise LTSC. I doubt it because the license is twice the cost of the laptop. It’s available from CDW, but I think there are stipulations.
Your boss would have been better off buying a used enterprise laptop from Amazon.
I am explicitly using LTSC.
You don’t need a license if you know about massgrave.dev. I’m only using this because our warehouse software requires Windows and the latter is already bought and paid for. Otherwise, Microsoft can bite me.
And again someone will buy that crap and be completely OK with that. Because its “cheap”
My grandfather always said: I’m not rich enough to buy cheap stuff.
And that applies to this situation as well
I’m stealing your grandfather’s saying
Yeah Intel Celeron+4gb ram is a total slogfest on Windows, Linux makes it a bit more bearable.
If they are made to be as cheap as possible, why don’t they just drop the Windows license and preload them with Linux Mint or something?
Because then 97% of the public wouldn’t buy it.
In 2020 I had a laptop with that same Celeron N4000 but with 8GB of RAM and an M.2 SSD. It wasn’t that bad on Linux, maybe this was best case scenario, but still doing anything took forever
Don’t buy consumer laptops, especially not ones that are this cheap. Buy used business laptops; Dell Latitude, Lenovo ThinkPad, even used HP EliteBooks are better are better value than most stuff you get under 1000€ new.
Even a dual-core Haswell CPU is gonna be better than a Celeron. Plus you’ll be able to upgrade storage and RAM.
Not even a real hard drive, but an eMMC with a horrendous I/O speed, plus that low performance CPU paired with 4 GB Ram and the windows 11… I’m sure that thing needs 30 minutes get to the desktop - if you keep your autostart clean
Also got a nice Dell 7390 for a similar price a year ago. Though you really can’t compare a laptop bought in 2019 with a laptop bought 6 years in the future. You’d need to compare it to a refurbished one available for a similar price in 2019 and then factor in how that turned out for you a few years later. I mean technology always progresses and you’ll always get more a few years later. But yes, I’ve always been a fan of refurbished enterprise-grade laptops instead of the super-cheap consumer ones which include as much cost-cuttings as possible and a legacy CPU which is upmarketed because it’s cheap. I think my old desktop Celeron N4500(?) was like 40€ when it was new, because it was leftovers in production. At that point you can always buy a used processor for the same price with double the processor cores.
