[Discuss] Think I need a new computer

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

My Dell XPS 13 7390 is getting old creaky, and at nearly 4-years, it 
isn't new, but how annoying, it has been a nice machine.

This morning it was dead, I had left it plugged in, running, with the 
lid closed. And this morning its battery was dead. It has been 
complaining about disconnects, so maybe there is an intermittent in my 
cables.

Reboot, look at log files, see nothing interesting before the messages 
from my powering it up. Then a while later, as I unlock it the dialog 
asking for my password went away, the background of the lockscreen 
refreshed, and the mouse pointer froze. Trying to switch consoles didn't 
do anything. I forced a powerdown.

Looking at logs it looks like it saw me plugging and unplugging power, 
closing the lid, and pressing power button.

I ran a memtest and it passed.

I installed an unrelated-looking Dell firmware update it has been 
wanting for a long time:

 ? FW 22001070 Device Update
 ? Dell 2200 NVMe SSD Firmware Update

 ? *Fix the "Drive not detected" issue reported by the Dell ePSA tool in 
some rare
 ? cases.

Reboot and things are slow: Login and my desktop sits dark for sometime 
before painting my background picture. That sites blank for sometime 
before drawing my desktop icons.

And now I think I am noticing funny delays here and there, hard to be 
certain.

I'd willing to be suspicious of my upgrade from Debian 11 to 12, but 
that was nearly a month ago, rebooted several times, and all seemed to 
be working well.


Grrr. I don't want to spend a bunch of money on a new computer right 
now. But the battery is supposedly only 57% of what it used to be. The 
trackpad doesn't like to click in the location where I like to click and 
is only slightly more agreeable in other places.? One of USB-C jacks 
seems grumpy (not noticing things I plug in) and the others are maybe a 
bit odd, not sure.

God I wish everything weren't so damn disposable.


Let me see what https://frame.work has in stock, their computers can be 
repaired, even upgraded.

Do I want an AMD Ryzon 7040 or an Intel i5-1340P? Is one better better 
supported for Linux for these days??


Grrr.

-kb, the Kent whose incremental backup just finished, time to do another 
on another disk.