I had one and it was a lemon. It was so bad that I gave it away and got a second-hand laptop to work for almost a year, it made me so much more productive.
If you've never used one it's hard to describe just how awful this machine was. The keyboard, the screen, the processor and worst of all the software. And I say that as someone who really wanted it to work and really wanted to use it with children to help them understand computing.
My company issued me one when I started a few months ago. I tried really hard to make it work, but the thing was too buggy in too many different ways. I finally gave up and grabbed a random old Lenovo out of storage, put an SSD, 16GB of RAM, and a new battery in it and it works great.
I regret mine. Keyboard is missing so many keys, speakers are garbage, getting Debian to support the hardware was nontrivial and stuff continues to break. So few ports. And if it's plugged in when the battery gets to full charge, it will often emit a high-pitched whine until I unplug it, meaning I can't leave it sitting plugged-in with full battery (perhaps a defective unit? but who knows if that's due to running Linux instead of ChromeOS?).
I'm shopping around for a new laptop to replace it, that will be more linux-hacker friendly (more keyboard keys, touchpad with real buttons, etc.)
haha, I remember doing the same thing with various garbage laptops I got years ago at work, it was worth it to just spend like $50 of my own money to not have headaches and finish my work much faster...
Mine has been relegated to the bin of forgotten hardware at my house. The plastic where your wrists rest keep breaking off and stabbing me. Battery doesn't hold a charge even after being replaced. Slow as a dog and can't get the latest OS updates.
I bought one of the first gen zenbooks. The trackpad was completely unusable due to terrible windows drivers (dragging didn't work right). I vaguely remember failing to install linux on it.
They had two models of ssd, but one laptop sku. One model went to review websites, the other's performance degraded to actually be noticably slower than a hard disk. You could replace the ssd, but it was a non-standard form factor, so you needed to buy an expensive m.2 converter.
The keyboard dropped keystrokes.
The screen was meh for the time.
This was their flagship laptop that year.
After it has been a full decade, I might consider buying another asus laptop.
Laptop quality is wildly all over the place. From 'that thing is a tank' to 'the ink on the keys is coming off, and the trackpad does not work right'. QA is garbage for most of these laptops. They should be fairly dialed in at this point how to make decent ones. But not really. The ergonomics of most is junk. From poor flex on the screen and keyboard, junk keys, touchpads that are too big and impossible to not rest your palm on, to weird hot spots from poor thermal management. Most of the screens are decent though now. For a long time they were fairly crappy. But yeah if you are using a laptop older than 5-8 years. It is time to start thinking about a new one. I just recently updated my 10 year old one to something fairly new. It was night and day on performance.
Have the exact same experience with my mothers laptop. Some acer shit.
Within a few months of her using it she complained it’s slow, takes ages to turn on etc. After removing almost everything from the manufacturer it was usable. But even now she barely uses the machine and never installs anything and it’s unusable slow with essentially zero usage after a couple of years. She’s not even ran any updates. It wouldn’t surprise me if these machines are built to die.
1. Battery puked out pretty quickly, so that's $100 (AUD) to fix on a $500 second hand laptop.
2. Some keys stopped working, could be bad luck as laptops have shite keyboards normally.
Both are not necessarily concealed issues BUT this is the kind of shit you are dealing with with second hand laptops and the savings don't seem to justify it, for me anyway. Plus less NSAWare.
The main benefit of buying second hand is the 'good for the environment' feeling it gave me.
Anecdata here, but I owned an HP Spectre 360 laptop a few years ago and I would never buy another HP laptop again. It cost almost as much as a Macbook, and within ~2 years of gentle use, mostly around the house, it blew a speaker, the webcam developed a purple tint, the rubber strips on the base peeled off, and when I tried to open the case to check for a second M.2 slot, one of the Torx screws stripped and remains stuck.
I was given an OLPC laptop as a gift, and learned that their CMOS battery (If I remember correctly) was hardwired, and when the battery died the laptop was useless. I sent my OLPC to someone on a forum who claimed to fix them, along with a fee, and never heard back. The only time I’ve been screwed by someone on a niche forum like that.
Still, it was a fun thing to play with. The form factor was like a durable OG iBook, and it worked well for basic tasks.
I bought a framework laptop (13in, intel, 13th gen) at the end of 2023 and have had nothing but problems with it. Mostly stability issues. It freezes entirely without warning after about 3-5min of use, regardless of whether I'm booting into a linux kernel or windows machine, from the ssd or the usb. very unhappy that I spent money on it. support has been unhelpful.
the idea of a DIY laptop that I could upgrade, et cetera, was something I could really get behind. but in practice it just feels like a waste of time and money. The machine does have to actually work.
I got one when I bought my new laptop, and between SSDs and Windows Seven it has been the greatest productivity boost I've ever gotten out of a hardware upgrade in literally a decade. My machine now screams -- going from a cold boot I can get Chrome open before wireless handshakes are complete.
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