My main "monitor" right now is an 85" 8K TV, that I absolutely love, but it would be nice to have something smaller for my upstairs desk.
So basically, YMMV. They make good stuff, and they make awful stuff.
I had an Asus laptop, but the frequent security firmware updates for one of the Dell laptop that I had makes me think it might make a good candidate in terms of keeping up with security updates.
Not sure for the current latest models for Asus/Dell/HP/etc., but I liked the fact that disassembly manuals are provided for older Dell and HP. I can hardly find disassembly manuals for Asus when I have to do maintenance such as swapping out thermal paste/pads and clearing out the heatsink fins.
Otherwise I had okay Dell or Lenovo laptops. Avoid HP, even the high end Zbook ones. A framework might be worth a try if you have a lot of money.
Did you choose the T line or X1 line of Thinkpad? What do you think of your current Thinkpad?
The P Thinkpads hardware looks great but is out of my budget, and I don't see how I'll use it at the moment.
Maybe I might need for local usage in the future, but currently I did most model training on Google Colab A100 and general purpose code editing are done remotely.
It was one of the few laptops I could find that wasn't absurdly expensive and had a 4k screen, so I was kind of pigeonholed into it, but I've been really happy. It was one of the easiest Linux installs I've ever done, and it's been holding up fine. The only thing I don't like about it is that the speakers are kind of shit, but for a laptop that doesn't bother me too much since if I want to listen to music I probably wouldn't use a laptop speaker regardless.
[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/outletus/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thi... I'm not sure they sell the 64GB model anymore.
The main problem was parts. She had a fan that was defective and noisy, and the Asus parts store didn't have it in stock, and there was one on ebay for $30.
But the replacement was easy, the construction was solid, and there have been no issues since.
>Asus when I have to do maintenance such as swapping out thermal paste/pads and clearing out the heatsink fins.
If you have to do this more than once or twice over a ten year lifespan of a laptop, you probably should invest in air cleaning systems. Mid range consumer laptops are way less thermally constrained than they used to be. Ryzen CPUs are essential for that, though I think Intel now has usable cool laptop CPUs
Very interesting, I might consider Asus laptops if repair manuals can be easily found.
Can you point me a direction to find it?
From my experience, Asus does not provide any official repair manuals on the specific laptop site. Googling for model keywords doesn't seem to provide any good sources, aside from the typical YouTube videos but these sometimes misses/skips specific instructions/techniques that are mentioned in official Dell/HP repair guides. Will be glad to finally have reliable sources to get Asus repair manuals.
---
> If you have to do this more than once or twice over a ten year lifespan of a laptop, you probably should invest in air cleaning systems.
If you're referring to home/work area air filters I don't think its possible since the mentioned laptops are not mine. Unless you mean there's a heatsink cleaning tool that cleans the exhaust fins without disassembly? I'll gladly consider this tool if it means I don't have to do a disassembly.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I'm the go-to repair guy in the family. Not unusual to find the fans spinning at high with clogged exhaust + likely old thermal paste (not sure for thermal pads helped much but I used new ones anywhare while the laptops disassembled anyway).
While typing this, I recalled one of the old Dells that had to have the bottom cover assembly replaced more than once, the plastic part of the bottom cover holding the metal hinge mechanism is absolutely terrible. Thankfully the specific part numbers in the repair manuals made it easy to order replacement parts.
Shit, I think I lied! I think I may have just found a youtube video that opened it up. Maybe I found a manual, but you are correct that ASUS does not seem to easily provide those manuals!
>If you're referring to home/work area air filters I don't think its possible since the mentioned laptops are not mine
Duh, that make sense. I once worked tech support at our college and the state some people would get their laptops in was crazy. I once pulled a baseball sized clump of fur out of a small laptop fan.
Really sorry for misleading you. Working there gave me some amount of confidence to just open up random computers.
If I were to use a TV, it would be an OLED. That being said, the subpixel layout is not great: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/qd-oled-and-woled-fringing-...
I really don't know why it's not more common. If you get a Samsung TV it even has a dedicated "PC Mode".
Then I bought a real display and realized oh my god there's a reason they cost so much more.
"Game mode" has no set meaning or standard, and in lots of cases can make things worse. On my TV, it made the display blurry in a way I never even noticed until I fixed it. It's like it was doing N64 style anti-aliasing. I actually had to use a different mode, and that may have had significant latency that I never realized.
Displays are tricky, because it can be hard to notice how good or bad one is without a comparison, which you can't do in the store because they cheat display modes and display content, and nobody is willing to buy six displays and run tests every time they want to buy a new display.
Televisions are also more prone to updates that can break things and often have user hostile 'smart' software.
Still, televisions can make a decent monitor and are definitely cheaper per inch.
Only electronic device I’ve ever returned.
Also they tend to have stronger than necessary backlights. It might be possible to calibrate around this issue, but the thing is designed to be viewed from the other side of a room. You are at the mercy of however low they decided to let it go.
Was this the case even after enabling the TVs "game mode" that disables a lot of the latency inducing image processing (e.g. frame interpolation).
you can think 'but thats inhumanly fast, you wont notice it' but in reality, this is _very_ noticeable in games like counter-strike where hand-eye coordination, speed and pinpoint accuracy are key. if you play such games a lot then you will feel it if the latency goes above 1ms.
It’s gotta be the most commonly mixed up things I’ve seen in the last twenty years as an enthusiast.
the part of feeling the difference in response times, that's true though, but I must say, the experience is a bit dated ^^ i see more high resolution monitors have generally quite slow response times.
<1ms was from CRT times :D which was my main counter-striker days. I do find noticable 'lag' still on TV vs. monitor though but i've only tested on HD (1080p) - own only 1 4k monitor and my own age-induced-latency by now far exceeds my display's latency :D
I still use CRTs :) However more than input lag, for me its motion. Which is driven by panel response times and I just cant stand even the best modern OLEDs for motion unless its 240hz and up.
> I do find noticable 'lag' still on TV vs. monitor though
Yeah you likely will to be honest. Most even average monitors will be single digit, 1-2ms maybe at most. Depending upon TV model, game mode may only get you to low double digits. High end panels should get you to pretty low single digits though, like 4-5ms.
Rtings basically gives you a number that represents average lag without screen tearing. If you measure at the top of your screen and/or tolerate tearing then the numbers get significantly smaller, and a lot of screens can in fact beat 1ms.
I have a couple of budget vertical Samsung TVs in my monitor stacks.
The quality isn't good enough for photo work, but they're more than fine for text.
I don’t play a lot of fast paced games and I am not good enough at any of them to where a frame of latency would drastically affect my performance in any game, and I don’t think two frames of latency is really noticeable when typing in Vim or something.
I hope you mean lower? An OLED pixel updates roughly instantly while liquid crystals take time to shift, with IPS in particular trading away speed for quality.
A bunch of TVs don't actually support 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, and at 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 text is bordering on unreadable.
And a bunch of OLEDs have weird sub-pixel layouts that break ClearType. This isn't the end of the world, but you end up needing to tweak the OS text rendering to clean up the result.