My Dell Dimension 15 is six years old and has been having a lot of trouble. It would become unusably slow and I am not sure why. I had reformatted and started over a few times, but learned never to let it sleep or it might not come back without forcing a restart which would just make things worse. I almost bought a new computer four months ago, but got it working again. Then this week it went back to super slow and I started shopping around. I have been able to find decent laptops for $300-$400. These have regular hard drives 15″ screen and probably an i3 or AMD Ryzen processor. But I found a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 for $430 that had some nice extras like a 512 GB solid state hard drive (most computers with solid state drives are 128 or 256 GB), a backlit keyboard, an i5 processor, and a fingerprint reader to allow logging in with a touch. It also has a higher resolution screen of 1920×1080 pixels versus the usual 1366×768 pixels of budget laptops. One worry was that would mean it just shrinks everything down, which would be hard to read.
I decided to spend the extra money and get it, but when I went to order it from Staples it was marked in-store only and not available at any stores within 100 miles. The next day I checked back again and it was available for shipping, so I went ahead and ordered it.
It arived this week via UPS in an amazing small box and I didn’t even have to sign for it. The computer is very lightweight and thin, almost like a toy. I was able to get my old copy of Office 2013 to load on it plus all of my other necessities: Chrome, Acrobat Reader, FastStone Image Viewer, Filezilla, and VLC Media Player. With the solid state drive and the much improved processor, it is pretty speedy. The fingerprint reader is a nice touch. The only bad thing is the power cord which has a big brick at the end instead of in the middle, which kind of messed up having the powerstrip under the sofa, but I got it worked out. It has 2 USB 3 ports of the A size and 1 of the C size. No ethernet port and no DVD drive. It features wi-fi 802.11ax which I guess is the next thing, but my router is just 802.11ac. The higher screen resolution seems to have worked out fine by making the fonts and icons bigger, so you nothing really looks smaller.
My other laptop is an HP I bought 4 years ago which now takes the Dell’s place as a desktop replacement, connected to external monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers.
You did get a great deal on that. Good for you. Maybe I’ll get one in a few months if you still recommend it.
Well, this laptop did not last very long. Today the hinge started making a cracking noise and felt loose as I opened it and closed. Pretty soon, the left hinge had given way completely. Looking online a lot of other people are having the same problem with the hinge. So now the Lenovo is being relegated to duty as my “desktop” laptop where it will be closed all the time with external keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The cool backlit keyboard and fingerprint reader are useless now, but the computer is out of warranty and from what people are saying Lenovo doesn’t cover this anyway because they say it is abuse. Still, I should have used on of my credit cards that doubles the warranty and instead I used my Best Buy card to get additional points. We’ll see how my old HP does going back to duty as my primary laptop. I had to get a new wifi adapter for it, but otherwise I think it should work okay.
I fixed the broken hinge. Really it isn’t the metal hinge that breaks, but the plastic that it screws into. I used epoxy to fill the holes left by the cracked plastic anchorages and then drilled a hole through the top part of the laptop (this is below the screen). I got three tiny M2x6 bolts with nuts and washers and through bolted it, which hopefully will hold. I only did the left side since the right side didn’t seem to be broken yet and if it isn’t broken it would be hard to remove the brass inserts in the plastic that the original bolts screw into.