Is This thing On?

This is going to be a fairly short post, in part because it's kind of a proof of concept. I'm writing it on my new laptop, instead of my desktop, to see how comfortable it feels. 

So far? It feels pretty good.

When I say "new laptop" I mean, of course, new to me. Have you seen the price if new laptops these days? I have and I was shocked. Shocked, I tell you! 

Refurbished ones, on the other hand... They're really cheap. I paid a little under £200 for this one to get a much higher spec than anything brand-new in a similar price range. To get a similar spec on a new machine would have cost around three times as much. Maybe more.

And this machine is probably about as low-spec as I wanted to go. I don't need a laptop that can run new, AAA games but I would at least like one that play some of the older games in my Steam library. The model I bought is meant mainly for business users, I think. It only has integrated graphics but it should be able to run quite a few of the games I want to play. It's going to be interesting, finding out which ones are playable and which aren't.

Oh, I suppose I ought to say what it is. It's a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T480. The model came out in 2018 and was discontinued in 2021 so it's three-to-six years old, I guess. Somewhere in there. That might not sound great but it's replacing my Dell XPS PP28l, which I bought pretty much when it first came out - in 2008.

And it still works, kinda. Dells do go on and on. I had to replace the Hard Drive a few years back and for about a year now the B,N and Space keys haven't worked, which makes typing fun, but it's fine for web-browsing and watching YouTube and Netflix, which is what I've been using it for. 

Beyond that though, it's so old and feeble it can't even reliably operate as a remote terminal for my desktop. I used to use Splashtop to play games on it but now it just cries if I try. The new one can, though. Perfectly. All part of my cunning plan. 

Because our house is old, the upstairs front room, where I have my P.C., is too cold in the winter while my other hideout, downstairs and also at the front, gets too hot in the summer. Consequently, I've been in the habit of moving up and down with the seasons. 

This year it hasn't really gotten cold enough to force me to shift my PC and associated clutter downstairs but January is predicted to be bitter so I either have to deal with higher heating bills to keep myself warm upstairs or make the effort and move down, even though by now it will only be for about three months. I really don't want the hassle, which is why I've been putting it off.

I was thinking about replacing the ancient Dell anyway, for obvious reasons, and it occurred to me that if I had a laptop that was good enough to write blog posts on and also play some less-taxing games, I ought to be able to "work" and play in any room of the house, all year round.  I could even sit out in the garden in the summer, now I also bought a more powerful router last year. 

If I felt like it I could probably play newer titles, like Wuthering Waves or Once Human, on the laptop using Splashtop, like I used to before the Dell rolled over and begged for mercy. GeForce Now and Luna are possibilities, too.

I spent a good while pondering on which laptop to get. I didn't have a specific budget but I didn't want to spend more than I needed. In the end it was more a matter of deciding what I didn't want than the other way round. 

I didn't want any kind of Chromebook for a start. I didn't want anything running on a processor too weedy to do much more than my Dell, either. I did a lot of research on that and it's amazing how feeble some of the CPUs in brand-new laptops. I guess if you just watch stuff, look stuff up and do your admin, you wouldn't really notice. Some people seem to prefer it that way. If you read the reviews on Amazon, you'll see people almost boasting about how the new machine they just bought can't play any games at all as if somehow that makes them better people.

I also quite liked the idea of being able to open the thing up and swap some components if I wanted, or needed to, later on. Even repair it, within my limited capacity. Not that there's much I can do but I can at least change a battery or swap out a disk drive. Not an option with most of the machines I looked at.

Finally, given the imminent demise of Windows 10, I wanted something Microsoft wouldn't be able to wash their hands of in a few months. Neither my desktop nor Mrs Bhagpuss's meet the criteria for Win11 upgrades (Although they would if I put better CPUs in them, which I might when the time comes.) so in that sense, if in no other, the new laptop would actually be the most up-to-date computer in the house. Always excluding Mrs Bhagpuss's new iPhone 15, I guess...

The T480 I chose came with Windows 11 Pro installed. It has 16GB Ram and an i5 CPU. 8th Gen, whatever that's worth. It also has what's reckoned to be a very good keyboard and after writing this I can confirm it's well above what I'm used to on a laptop, although it's still going to take some getting used to after my mechanical one. Definitely good enough to blog with, anyway, which is the important thing.

Apart from the lack of a dedicated graphics chip, pretty much unavoidable unless I wanted to pay a fortune, the only real thing I don't like is the size of the SSD, which is only 256GB. That seems to be standard for laptops in this price range and some way  above, though. Easy enough to upgrade if I feel it's necessary.

In fact, I've already ordered a 1TB SSD as an add-on but I'm in two minds whether to use it to replace the current one or to put it in an enclosure and use it as an external drive instead. I actually think that might be better for my purposes, given my seeming inability to resist downloading every damn game I see. It'd be nice to keep the drive with the operating system on nice and clean for once.

So much for hardware. Software is another issue altogether. One thing I never remember is just how long it takes to get a new PC set up in the particular way I like it. The Lenovo worked perfectly straight out of the box or at least it did once I'd jumped through Microsoft's hoops, but then came the hours of installing all my favorite apps and changing  endless Windows defaults to eliminate as much of Microsoft's malign influence as possible.

To be fair to MS, it's not so much that there's anything wrong with Edge or Media Player and the rest per se. It's just that other options are so much better. I guess one day I'll have to give up using Firefox, since already there are well-known websites that refuse to recognize it, but until that dark day comes I will keep the faith.

That said, it's ironic that the single biggest problem I've had so far, getting Splashtop running on the laptop, turned out to be precisely because I was using Firefox. Or, more specifically, because the first add-on I always install is No Script. It's an essential protection in my estimation but you do have to remember to whitelist stuff sometimes, or at least toggle it off when you need to. That's how I came to waste those two hours this morning - I forgot I had it installed.

Splashtop is working now and I've tested it with Wuthering Waves and Cloudpunk. Both run perfectly through the remote connection to my PC upstairs with no lag or delay that I can tell. 

Unfortunately, while Wuthering Waves is perfectly playable when my character is stationary or I move her using the keyboard, something is making the point of view spin wildly whenever I use mouselook, which is unfortunate because that's how I move all the time. I'm looking into that but I won't be exploring the new continent on the laptop until I figure out a fix.

Cloudpunk has no such problems. In fact, if anything, I find driving the HOVA a little easier on the laptop, for some reason. Maybe it's the smaller screen or because I have it closer to me. Or maybe I'm just getting the feel of it. 

I played for over an hour this afternoon and had an excellent time. It's a very good game and my suspicions of a deeper, darker narrative beneath the surface are already proving to be well-founded. More on that another day, I'm sure.

Quite possibly more on the new laptop, too. It's going to be a while before I get to grips with all its idiosyncrasies. For example, I couldn't figure out how to take screenshots in Cloudpunk because the default Steam screenshot key, F12, didn't seem to be doing anything. Turns out Lenovo assigns specific functions to the F keys and you have to turn the feature off if you want to use them as God intended. 

All things considered, though, I'm very happy with my new toy. Fingers crossed it carries on behaving itself. It has a year's warranty but I could still do without any problems cropping up that need more of a fix than looking something upon Google or watching a YouTube video.