[Discuss] Think I need a new computer

[Kent Borg]

On 6/16/24 20:04, Steve Litt wrote:
> Yeah, don't spend $1200. I know it memchecked OK, but did you do a
> smart tools check on your disks?

The only "disk" is the internal Micron 2200S NVMe 512GB SSD, and 
"smartctl -a /dev/nvme…" (of each its five devices) seems completely 
happy. Though for a 4-year-old notebook that I use a lot, almost never 
power down, and mostly don't even suspend, the "power on hours" seems 
low at 7,062. (Can Linux power down an SSD when things are mostly idle? 
Cool.)


>   Also, just for fun, reseat all your
> daughtercards and ramsticks and cables, internal and external. Elapsed
> time: Maybe an hour.

An hour? No way. This is the smallest reasonable notebook computer I 
could find, taking it apart and unplugging all those tiny connectors is 
a lot of work, and reassembling it is worse. A dangerous round-trip 
operation. I long ago would have upgraded the SSD to a much more 
capacious part (much simpler than unplugging everything) were to 
consider that a "just for fun" task. I'm usually fearless about such 
things, but I disassembled this machine's predecessor, I know…


> Maybe a different distribution would help. Try Void Linux, which is
> about as different from Debian as you can get without going Slackware
> or BSD.

No. I have hardware problems, and I like Debian.


> I HATE intermittents!

Yup. And in the last few days things have gotten better, good in fact. 
It was just a day or so that was flaky.


I suspect the video hardware because have seen occasional funny video 
glitches, basically from the start. II assumed driver problems, GPUs are 
not well documented and probably full debt. It has otherwise been a 
reliable machine, the glitches come and go, but with age they are 
getting worse and, alas, no longer just cosmetic.

I'll keep bumping along until it gets too bad, the limited battery gets 
too limiting, or I have more money.

And next time I buy a notebook computer I will get one that is 
upgradeable (!) and repairable (!). A 13-inch model from 
http://frame.work being the current strawman. As long as I don't want 
one of the new pre-order machines they ship within 5-days…


-kb, the Kent who wishes Framework had had a computer for sale 4-years ago.