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yoyohello13yesterday at 5:32 PM3 repliesview on HN

My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware.

It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better.

The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.


Replies

Telaneoyesterday at 7:23 PM

> a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core

Yeah, those things are born e-waste. I'm surprised Intel even bothers. Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. A dual core from several years ago, assuming it's a proper i5 or i7, will do a lot better.

Windows 11 doesn't make things any better.

show 1 reply
TacticalCoderyesterday at 10:02 PM

> I may just try to load ChromeOS on it.

If you wife would be OK with ChromeOS, basically all she needs is a browser. I just installed Linux on the computer my wife is using. For a while she was on Ubuntu and then once she got used to it, I replaced Ubuntu with Debian (because I use Debian everywhere: NUCs, laptop, dekstops, servers, hypervisor (Proxmox, which is debian), etc.). It's easier for me to just slap Debian everywhere but YMMV.

People have no idea the amount of people who nowadays only need a browser (and working sound/microphone: but that nowadays Just Works [TM] on Linux).

It's never been easier to switch people to Linux than it is today.

TrackerFFyesterday at 8:56 PM

Me and my fiancé both bought Lenovo laptops with 16GB RAM and 5000-series Ryzen, 500 GB SSD. They were on sale, and the price seemed nice.

Some of the Windows 11 features are laughably, hilariously slow. If I enter anything in the taskbar search, it will take a solid 6-7 seconds for the app to appear in the result. The result window will just be blank. If I press enter after having typed in, the app will start - but still, it is so, so laggy.

And some weird flicker when running certain applications. It was like that out of the box, and I feared I had gotten a defective screen - nope, only certain apps.