[anandhsub]

Originally Posted by vasudeva

Processor ends with an H are older ones. Actually they are usually not older but higher end ones from AMD (Ryzen 7 5800H and Intel (eg i7-11800H). Google yourself. What is even more suspect is the advisor saying go with ones ending with a digit. Like Intels (ending with G7). They are decent processors but comparable to an 4-5 year older ..H processor. H processors are not old, and in fact higher end, and higher price. I do hope you did your own research rather than rely on bad advice.

Actually what I have seen is that 10th generation normal Intel processor is usually available at the same time a 9th generation H processor is. So in a way it is true that H processors are the older gen but obviously in terms of performance you can't even compare the two and the H would be way more expensive as well.

[vasudeva]

Originally Posted by mobike008

My bad. I think what I meant was a processor name that ends with an alphabet (not sure which one) is older gen than a digit one. And this advice was given by a fellow desi (works for Microsoft in Hardware Engineering ) as he too was browsing for laptops for his wife at Costco.

Anyways, I do my research for everything that I buy and never rely solely on anybody's advice but, appreciate your inputs

Welcome. I think the 11th gen Intel must be available in US. Definitely some stuff in India. Even the 12th gen is coming. But also AMD's H series is for mobile CPUs and they are supposed to give better price-performance than Intel. In fact, after 22 years of using Intel CPU, in 2020, I switched my desktop and laptop to AMD CPU. Not regretting.

PS: I am sure that desi MS guy may be giving honest advice. But doubtful if he knew much. Or for that matter, even a lot of people at MS. No wonder they try to experiment with a new win 11 leaving a lot of headaches and crashes for everyone.

[mobike008]

Originally Posted by vasudeva

Welcome. I think the 11th gen Intel must be available in US. Definitely some stuff in India. Even the 12th gen is coming. But also AMD's H series is for mobile CPUs and they are supposed to give better price-performance than Intel. In fact, after 22 years of using Intel CPU, in 2020, I switched my desktop and laptop to AMD CPU. Not regretting.

Being a non-techie, I always had an impression in the past that AMD processors are inferior to Intel processors. You know one of those mindsets/impressions you form for some reason. But, glad to know that AMD has broken away and are making superior processions with their Ryzen models.

Btw, the laptop we picked up has a 11th gen Intel processor. So we are good there.

Originally Posted by vasudeva

PS: I am sure that desi MS guy may be giving honest advice. But doubtful if he knew much. Or for that matter, even a lot of people at MS. No wonder they try to experiment with a new win 11 leaving a lot of headaches and crashes for everyone

Haha! We have been doing testing and triaging for Win OS for last 2 decades (apart from all other major MS products including Teams). I will certainly give this feedback to my team and let them know how poorly end-users think of our testing.

[Agarwal_Aayush]

Does anybody have any idea where can I procure the battery for my Lenovo IP330S laptop. It is currently out of warranty and battery is dead, any outage leads to its restart which has started taking toll on its motherboard. Lenovo service center does not have the battery nor do they have any idea when will it be available.
Also tried many shops but none have the stock giving the chinese ban the reason for the same.

[vasudeva]

Originally Posted by mobike008

Being a non-techie, I always had an impression in the past that AMD processors are inferior to Intel processors. You know one of those mindsets/impressions you form for some reason. But, glad to know that AMD has broken away and are making superior processions with their Ryzen models.

Btw, the laptop we picked up has a 11th gen Intel processor. So we are good there.



Haha! We have been doing testing and triaging for Win OS for last 2 decades (apart from all other major MS products including Teams). I will certainly give this feedback to my team and let them know how poorly end-users think of our testing.

Welcome and hope they have an ear to the ground. Sure they do. Just that MS has to deal with pleasing thousands specs of cpu, motherboard, GPU, rams, and then overclocking. By contrast, apple has to deal with only a fraction of different combinations.

Anyway 11 is not that headache causing and crash inducing as that sinofsky turkey called 8. To be fair, MS or for that matter most tech support teams at various companies know as much about customer service as a cat knows about calculus.

[Vitruvius]

Originally Posted by mobike008

My bad. I think what I meant was a processor name that ends with an alphabet (not sure which one) is older gen than a digit one.

Not always true. The K series intel processors are over clock versions of the same model without the K in the end. For eg in an i5 6400 vs i5 6400K, the k series is unlocked for someone who needs to over clock his cpu. Overclocking means forcing the cpu to run at a higher clock speed, consuming more power for better performance. These are usually desktop grade.

Whereas U and Y in the end are added to laptop processors. These are usually low power cpus weaker than their desktop counterparts

Generation of cpu is determined by its number: an 11th gen processor would always start with 11 in its model nomenclature

Having said that, I have noticed people asking for laptop advice. Unless you're an active Gamer, buying a mac makes sense.

You cannot future proof a windows laptop enough. With time something will break and you won't get a replacement because "this model is not in production now". Happened to all my windows laptops. They're all gathering dust now because I cannot source a new battery. They're otherwise in perfect condition.
A mac on the other hand will get good service support, and you really can use a mac for many years to come, and enjoy good support.

[sukhoi]

Originally Posted by sukhoi

Hello,

Need help with laptop issue. I suspect that mostly it would be because of the HDD that the laptop is performing slowly and hence have thought of following options:

1. Option I: Assuming that HDD is the culprit, get it replaced with an SSD. Spoke with a laptop repair guy and he said that if we have to replace HDD with SSD then it has to be SATA type only and a 512 GB one would cost me around 6500/- and additional 600 /- for the swap. Brand of SSD was Kingston.
   
2. Option II: Sell this laptop and get a brand new one with SSD and maybe better config if that serves our requirements better (detailed below). In this case, how much can we expect to get from the second hand market for this model and what are the best options to list it on, OLX etc. or some other sites. I tried on cashify and it was giving a quote of approximately 18K which I felt was pretty less.

Originally Posted by Akshay6988

Go for option 1, you can later upgrade to high end laptop once things (read computer peripherals prices) return to normal. Just a question, does your laptop gives you BSOD error ? If it does then you should consider option 2 .

Originally Posted by sunilch

Option 1 is more economical and should be the priority. Selling this one will not fetch much value as electronic items suffer much worse depreciation than cars.

Originally Posted by mvadg

Stick with Samsung SSD. I think there's not much of a price difference between Samsung and Kingston. It's pretty simple to swap out the HDD and replace it with the SSD. Plenty of Youtube videos.

Originally Posted by girishv

I suggest either mint or monjero. If you want to give benefit of doubt to Chinese, you can try Deepin Linux.
Jokes apart, it's really a beautiful distribution though.

Originally Posted by tbppjpr

Safest choice will be Linux Mint Cinnamon for a first time user. Its the most reliable and simple-to-use distro for the people migrating from Windows ecosystem. I have had used it for very long time. Once you get familiar with the Linux ecosystem and can manage the routine troubleshooting, you can start trying different distors.

Thank you all for your inputs. Apologies for the very late update but this was parked for some time. Got a Samsung 870 EVO SSD at a good deal in the sale.

Had checked with vendors in the local laptop market but since many people mentioned that it is something which can be done at home, decided to give it a shot and do at home itself. Turns out is not that difficult to swap the HDD with SSD and there are a lot of videos on YouTube to help as well.

There was one anxious moment doing it when the back panel would not open up and I thought the exercise was a failure till I noticed that I had not unscrewed one of the screws and hence it was not opening

Post that it was relatively simple to replace. Installing fresh windows was also not very difficult, followed the guide in the video which I had shared earlier.

Must say that the laptop feels like a different machine now. Boot up time is under 10 seconds from 30 odd seconds, chrome or any other application opens up very fast and the whole user experience is very good. Thank you for all your suggestions and inputs.

The Linux install has been parked for now, will take it up later, one step at a time

Anyone in a similar situation, slow laptop with an HDD, please consider upgrading to an SSD and you would notice substantial difference.

So far the laptop has been working well and no issues in whatever day to day usage we have done. Was not required to install any drivers separately, I guess Windows did all that internally.

one more point though, Office licence was not working at first. Searching on the internet gave the solution which was to go to office.com and sign in with the same e-mail id which was used to register the license on the original OS (which came with the laptop). That seems to be working fine now, no issues reported.

Will update as and when Linux happens.

EDIT: I still do not like the keyboard on this laptop, maybe because I am used to the keyboard on my work laptop (Dell Latitude 5400). Maybe next upgrade would be to get a good laptop stand to get the screen on eye level and an external keyboard (time to head to the keyboard thread I guess)

Regards,
S

[fordday]

Being a IT guy I am fairly literate for using laptop.

Bought a Dell laptop for my kid's online classes. Specs are okay for his usage, like 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Integrated graphics Details here.

But the issue is the camera freezes every time it is used, whether in Teams, Google Meet or Zoom calls. It freezes after a few mins of working. This seemed to be somewhat familiar problem reported by many.

Following the tips in the net, I uninstalled McAfee. Tried various other settings and tricks. But it is still the same.

This is really frustrating.

If anyone faced this an overcame please suggest what you did.

[tbppjpr]

Originally Posted by fordday

But the issue is the camera freezes every time it is used, whether in Teams, Google Meet or Zoom calls. It freezes after a few mins of working. This seemed to be somewhat familiar problem reported by many.

Boot the laptop using Linux bootable USB and use the camera in the above apps to verify if the issue is hardware related or not.

[rayjaycleoful]

Originally Posted by Cyborg

Suggest you go for the 16GB memory option to future proof the MacBook.

Cheers

I've also been a life long windows user and finally have decided to switch.
I've been pondering on the 16GB extension for a while now - most YouTube videos say 8GB is enough but I want to hold on to this purchase as long as possible. That said, 20K extra is quite a sum.

What made you choose the 16GB variant?

[GandalfTheGrey]

Originally Posted by rayjaycleoful

I've also been a life long windows user and finally have decided to switch.
I've been pondering on the 16GB extension for a while now - most YouTube videos say 8GB is enough but I want to hold on to this purchase as long as possible. That said, 20K extra is quite a sum.

What made you choose the 16GB variant?

Depends on your usage mostly. One use case for 16GB RAM I can think of is extensive video editing. For most of the other cases, 8 GB should be more than enough on the M1. I suggest you invest in storage than on RAM. I have the M1 MBP, 8GB, 512GB, and I do a bit of graphic design and some coding as well. Everything is a breeze with multiple apps running in parallel.

Cheers!

[libranof1987]

Originally Posted by GandalfTheGrey

Depends on your usage mostly. One use case for 16GB RAM I can think of is extensive video editing. For most of the other cases, 8 GB should be more than enough on the M1. I suggest you invest in storage than on RAM.

Don't agree. 8GB RAM is the norm now, if you want to future proof your laptop, 16GB is a better choice. You can easily (and cheaply) increase storage (external HDD, cloud) but not so much with RAM.

[Cyborg]

Originally Posted by rayjaycleoful

I've also been a life long windows user and finally have decided to switch. I've been pondering on the 16GB extension for a while now - most YouTube videos say 8GB is enough but I want to hold on to this purchase as long as possible. That said, 20K extra is quite a sum.
What made you choose the 16GB variant?

Make the switch to a MacBook, you won’t regret it. Only kind of regret I have is why I didn’t switch earlier.

I believe the random access memory (RAM) or unified memory as Apple calls it, affects performance and especially long term performance, since the machine is bound to slow down with time/age, updates and what not. Since I want to keep the laptop for as long as possible, I purchased the 16GB RAM and 1TB option.

I feel it would be wise to spend an additional amount on the RAM and storage option while purchasing rather than regret later. Since you too want to keep the MacBook for as long as possible I would suggest taking the 16GB option on the safe side. The twenty thousand extra will not be felt over the 5-7 year life of the laptop. I believe people have used a MacBook even for 10 years.

All the best, happy shopping

Cheers

[rayjaycleoful]

Originally Posted by GandalfTheGrey

Depends on your usage mostly. One use case for 16GB RAM I can think of is extensive video editing. For most of the other cases, 8 GB should be more than enough on the M1. I suggest you invest in storage than on RAM. I have the M1 MBP, 8GB, 512GB, and I do a bit of graphic design and some coding as well. Everything is a breeze with multiple apps running in parallel.

Cheers!

Originally Posted by libranof1987

Don't agree. 8GB RAM is the norm now, if you want to future proof your laptop, 16GB is a better choice. You can easily (and cheaply) increase storage (external HDD, cloud) but not so much with RAM.

Thanks, both! Not into any sort of coding or editing at the moment but who knows usage requirements few months or years down the line. Even though RAM in Mac is used optimally, assuming I keep this at least three years, it'll be hard for be me to digest 8GB in 2025

Looks like it'll be the MBA 16 + 512 afterall.

Originally Posted by Cyborg

Make the switch to a MacBook, you won’t regret it. Only kind of regret I have is why I didn’t switch earlier.

I believe the random access memory (RAM) or unified memory as Apple calls it, affects performance and especially long term performance, since the machine is bound to slow down with time/age, updates and what not.

I feel it would be wise to spend an additional amount on the RAM and storage option while purchasing rather than regret later.

All the best, happy shopping

Cheers

Thanks
I've been using a top of the line ThinkPad (X1 Carbon) for a over a year now and sometimes it just hangs for minutes!
Hope to post a short happy review of my first mac by end of this year.

[Aroy]

Software is getting more and more complicated, and the current trend is to use a lot of RAM. So 8GB may suffice today, but may be too little a few years hence.

My sons have 3 Apple laptops between them, and the last two were bought with 32GB RAM. It may sound excessive but increasing RAM in Apple products is not that easy (they are generally soldered now days), so it is better to invest in a model with 32GB rather than 8GB, today.