[dcminter]

0. Developer

1. Dell Latitude 7490

2. As long as I can.

I think I've been on the Latutude for about 4 years now, but it's a second-hand device coming up on seven or eight years old. I generally don't need much oomph for the stuff I like to do at home (I don't game for example).

I had a series of XPS laptops, but the battery life in use was poor and they tended to need the battery replacing quite quickly (puffy batteries - possibly because they run quite hot).

Prior to that I'd been on second hand Thinkpads, with the X220s still kicking around somewhere in case the main device dies.

I reckon the current Dell has at least a couple more years in it for my purposes. It has 64Gb ram so until website bloat gets out of control I'm good I think.

I have a fairly fast mini-pc with oodles of ram on the network that I use as a sacrificial yolo machine for Claude, and an elderly desktop machine with a decent GPU for local running of LLMs. The latter is noisy and in practice it hasn't been turned on for months.

I hate Macs, but envy you the battery life and spiffy Arm CPU (yes, I know about Asahi, but until one can safely entirely wipe MacOS from the Mac I'm not interested).

[thallavajhula]

8 years and still kicking? and with more life left? For a Dell, that's amazing.

[dcminter]

I was issued an equivalent Latitude 7490 at a gig in 2019 and enjoyed using it (under Linux). It's robust and easily upgraded, but a little heavier than I would like. I replaced the battery a year or two ago.

I generally haven't had much trouble with second hand Dell and Thinkpad machines; perhaps buying second hand means that the real lemons are already ewaste? Though the XPS machines bought new were fine aside from the annoyingly brief battery life.

Currently using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 under Linux for work stuff and I like that (much lighter) so if I can get one second hand with enough memory I might choose that when/if the Dell eventually feels too slow.