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Hardware price surge drives student demand for refurbished laptops (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
submitted 7 hours ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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it's true in the usa and it's true in india, exact same response to the exact same stressors. that's interesting.

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[–] 22 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (3 children)

Most of the new devices I see are using the hard to find components (DDR5) while refurbished devices from a few years ago have more than enough RAM for school. Also capacity matters more than generation for RAM, assuming we're talking DDR4 vs DDR5

I wish I learned this sooner, but the best device for school is a generic laptop that you can easily find guides and replacement parts for. That way you can fix things quickly in the middle of a term instead of needing to wait months for the manufacturer to deal with it

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  • [–] 15 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

    the best device for school is a generic laptop that you can easily find guides and replacement parts for. That way you can fix things

    This is the right idea. The qualifier is unnecessary. Repairability is always valuable. The more generic a device is, the more spare parts for it there will be on the market, and the longer those spare parts will be continue to be available on the market.

    Buy common refurb/resale tech. Keep it for years, or decades.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 hours ago

    My company recently switched out all of it's older Dell for newer ones that are capable of running Win11 (because existence is pain). As a result, I now have three Dell micro PCs two of which are on DDR4, one is DDR3. All of which cost me nothing.

    I've already put Proxmox and OpenWRT on one and shitcanned the crappy Linksys my ISP gave me, and am about to put another into service as my home server. The third one has yet to reveal its use to me, but it'll come.

    I currently have eight computers of various specs, sizes and configurations, and am happy to rehouse a bunch more.

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  • [–] 10 points 6 hours ago

    You want a business laptop. Most of them are designed to be repairable and have parts readily available. They are also a lot more durable than the junk you find in the stores. The only downside is they are not good for gaming, but you can always pick one with Thunderbolt/USB 4 and use an eGPU. Just make sure the port has all 4 PCIe lanes connected.

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