I’ve been using an aged Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu as my main desk machine at home. I’d bobbed in an extra 4GB of RAM to keep ‘The Dinosaur’ functioning at a suitable level. With a fun desktop wallpaper, no-one would know what was going on, except for the occasional death rattle of its fan.
I impulse bought a Lenovo 330S some time ago and placed it close by so that I could allow it to extract the maximum amount of guilt from its relative lack of use. I had half thought of putting Ubuntu on it, but a trackpad compatibility issue prevented anything hasty, even though I could find a way round it.
Enter stage left the Affinity Publisher desktop publishing Beta, available on Windows and Mac, which I quickly joined and enjoyed using. At last the laptop was getting some use. This gave me a reason to use Windows and my eye strayed to the fact I had a nice laptop which I could use more frequently at my desk. The standard Google Drive integration in Ubuntu seems to be really slow. I’m not sure how it works but it frequently loses connection and is far from a seamless experience, especially when it compares with the clever and purposefully engineered Chromebook that I use most of the rest of the time.
My 330 had come with 4GB RAM and a meager 128GB SSD. My Google Drive synch is already at about 90+ GB, so had been using a 128 GB Micro SD to act as the local synch file store. Dammit, I’m upgrading and switching to using Windows as my desk OS. I got an amazing deal on a 500GB SSD (sub £50) and bobbed in an extra 8GB of RAM, for a laugh.
Well, everything sings along and I am happy. The final detriment to the 330S is a slightly lamentable battery life. As I see it I mitigate this by using it as a desktop mostly machine close to power.
With Dom and Tom jumping at the Affinity suite too we are compatible for book production.
I had very few excuses before, and now I have none. Keyboard on, book text up, start creating…