New laptop!
My personal laptop is a wee bit long in the tooth - I got a spectacular deal on it, and it’s served me well, but there’s no denying it. Bought at Dick Smith’s when they still existed as a brick-and-mortar business and not a domain front for Kogan or whatever, it was the tail end of the third-gen Core i7s, with a discrete Nvidia GPU. Basically exactly what I wanted considering we spent most of our lives at the time living in a van and driving from place to place and I had a crippling World of Warcraft addiction to contend with.
Not long after that I bumped it up to 16GB of RAM and put a shiny new SSD in it (my first ever). Other than that, the occasional maintenance, and replacing the Wifi adapter in it, it really hasn’t seen much in the way of love, it’s just kept on chugging. At some point for Mumble development, I threw the Windows 10 developer preview on it to help chase down some bugs in Mumble. I had long forgotten about this, until I was prompted by the fact it’s expiring, but unfortunately I have some software on there which is a one-shot license (bullshit in it’s own right) that I plan on reverse engineering One Day.
So the plan is to shrink the Windows 10 preview disk down as small as I can get it, and then image it into a VM. I might then flash the laptop back to stock, and I might sell it, or just hang on to it in case a need ever arises, unsure yet.
I had tried, briefly, to run FreeBSD and later Linux on the old one, but due to the first generation “Optimus” graphics infrastructure (which allowed switching between the iGPU and the discrete one), which I’m told the first iteration was hilariously complicated, unsupported by Linux or BSD, and as subsequent versions got supported it’s growing ever more unlikely that the original one will ever see support. So it’ll be stuck on Windows 10 at the latest, and it came with Windows 8 which is… not great. So it might be that getting rid of it is for the best?
Anyway, the new machine! EOFY sales were upon us, and I was looking around for something to take on a work trip with me later this year. I’d thought about a Steam Deck, but a) I’m not really a fan of the form factor, what with having a Switch, and I know they’re not the same but they don’t differ enough to make me like it I think; and b) games aren’t the primary function. I’d like something which, while not necessarily good at games, doesn’t hamstring me (like the original plan of just lugging along a 17" 2011 Macbook Pro for personal stuff would), but the main thing is to be able to do personal shit while away from my desktop - and I refuse to do personal shit on a work machine, even though $WORK is pretty good about not being invasive with the creepware, it’s not a habit I intend to develop.
I ummed and ahhed over the cheapest of the MSI Katana line, when I found an EOFY deal on an Asus TUF. I’ve said about four times now I’m not going to give Asus any more of my money, and here we fucking are again… but it was tough to argue with the fully 35% off that the local retailer had on this one. I didn’t exhaustively shop around, but none of the places I found that did better were retailers I particularly trusted, so I threw it in the cart and it turned up on Thursday.
It’s an Asus TUF, specifically the FA507NUR (which I think might be last year’s? I don’t mind), so it’s got a Ryzen 7 7435HS and an RTX 4050 (it’s not clear to me whether that’s a mobile one, or the same as the desktop GPU but suffering under the weight of next to no cooling, but I guess that doesn’t really matter). Particularly nice is that Asus make a big deal out of not making it difficult to do upgrades - there’s about 8 plain phillips screws and then there’s two NVME slots and two DDR5 SODIMM slots right there, no fucking about.
Over the weekend I checked it worked correctly - excruciatingly, Windows 11 forces you to wait for the updates to download before it will let you do the first boot - then promptly threw Arch Linux on it to have a look. Everything seemed like it was doing to work rather well (I don’t even really have any complaints about the Realtek ethernet that’s in it, so far!), so after consulting with Avi on IRC I reformatted it and did it all up with full disk encryption, following the Wiki - specifically the section about using the TPM2 to unlock it.
I’m pretty stoked with that setup, my needs are not great, I don’t particularly care about nation state attackers - the sole purpose is to make it harder for someone to rob any data off it in the event it’s stolen. I can rotate some passwords + keys and then file an insurance claim, unless it’s stolen while it’s on and unlocked.
I was having trouble getting Battle.net to run under Lutris (we’ve come full-circle), but that’s really the only complaint. Fuck, even the common complaint about most of these cheap laptops - battery life - isn’t really something I have a problem with, it looks like with tuned, powerdevil, and a couple other tweaks I’m probably sitting around 3~4 hours of normal use (eg, YouTube) which is more than enough honestly.
It had crossed my mind to give FreeBSD a go, but I am inclined to leave well enough alone until it upsets me. But if I get anywhere close to 12 years out of it I’ll be pretty happy again.
fwagglePublished:
Modified:
Filed under:
Location:
Horsham, VIC, AustraliaNavigation: Older Entry Newer Entry