We are on Lemmy.

I am obligated to not only ask that you switch to Linux (please do), but I also must suggest a distribution (Mint).

I don't make the rules.

Remember to reinstall Windows, so you get rid of some of the bloat, if you aren’t gonna install Linux on it 😎

Idk how much Australian dollars are compared to pounds, but it seems like very good specs for the price. I got a fairly similar laptop (4080 vs 5060 would be the main difference) for about £3000 last year

At work we buy workstation laptops for our engineers. From Dell, the exact same laptop cost $3,200 in January, $4,400 in April, and $5,900 as of mid-May.

We're just not buying them and instead shopping different brands.

The AI bubble has absolutely fucked pricing for computers.

Great deal and it should last a while. Don’t listen to the people here recommending you uninstall windows, let your kid figure out what they want to do with it.

You can remove any 3rd party antivirus though, if it came installed. Defender is good enough.

Not sure on those specific specs but on ebay you can often comfortably find ex-corporate laptops in mint condition for just 2-300 quid. Il never buy a first hand laptop after i "discovered" this trick.

I picked up a loq over black Friday sales last year for $800. Very happy with it. Linux mint. A separate account that runs steam when connected to the living room entertainment center.

Oof. Glad I bought my rig off a friend and paid in drugs.

Are those prices in dollaridoos or did you already do a conversion?

Overkill for the use case, great deal for the price. Also will last forever with 4 battery cells.

I'm out of the loop on prices, but I can tell you Windows Home is a disaster. I've had the displeasure of having to interact with one and it was so anti-user, it still hurts to think about.

The bloatware is by default a scam. All the My Documents stuff is set to OneDrive by default, and i do mean all of it.

Copilot is on by default - that's browser, windows search and Office demos (you need a subscription to use them fully and they're all in the cloud, not really local). It will add itself to all texts created or edited with default Microsoft programs like notepad or Office. Any schoolwork done with Copilot active will possibly create problems for your kid at school.

Login is set to require an online connection by default. You literally have to set it manually so that you can login on your PC when the internet is down. Imagine my surprise when I had to reboot while offline and couldn't get past the welcome screen. We're not very welcome on our own PC anymore.

Files are encrypted by default, which sounds nice and safe, until something goes wrong. The access codes are kept in your Microsoft account, online, so if you don't have access there, you're screwed out of recovery.

File indexing is wonky, so Windows at times ends up keeping a cache or copy of everything, doubling occupied space for seemingly no reason. 100Gb gone missing for no reason, it's usually file indexing at work.

Every security-related* network request gets logged. It gets added to a specific file somewhere a Home user doesn't really have access to and needs to jump through hoops to find it. Windows 11 being telemetry hell full of spying bloatware makes a network request for location access every 5-15 minutes, which gets logged to that file. It will generate an encrypted log file that will eventually reach over 100Gb in size, similar to file indexing only more routinely, that's a bitch to get rid of. I would know.

Windows Home treats the user as a delinquent juvenile offender. It's not your PC when you have it on, but a heavily restricted and surveilled privilege that everyone but yourself can control. Get rid of it.

You are a good dad for getting your son something he can really use. Most people would just give their kids a tablet or cheap out and get something that just barely works. This is a good machine I would happily use myself (after putting Linux on it). A bit chunky for taking it on the road, but presumably he would just use it at home anyways.

That's a good deal for 1500 AUD. The Ryzen 7 250 might sound weak based on category alone ("two gens old", mid-midrange), but it's still a Zen4 Hawk Point 8C/16T little guy at 26-30W TDP, comes with a quite performant Radeon 780M (meaning you could game on it without the RTX, even!), and it easily goes toe to toe with the Apple M4 (regular base model, non-Pro/Max!).

What this means is that while the dedicated GPU is disabled, you should get pretty solid battery life - up to 5-6 hours I reckon - while also being able to game with slightly better performance than the Steam Deck, AND with the dedicated GPU - usually while connected to mains - you'll get proper performance around 90-120fps on high/est settings in most games.

Oh, and one more thing. You might've spent a bit more than you intended BUT you bought a more future-proof hardware at a steep discount (you spent 25% more than intended, the seller got 25% less than intended). That laptop will last you about as more in time as much more as you spent on it.

So, I bought something better spec than that shortly before they fucked up the ram and storage prices for about $400usd less. All told, you got a great deal, I think? It's good hardware and I think lenovo isn't putting backdoors in the hardware anymore.

Stay strong out there friends. Even in AUD, this shouldn't be so expensive, right?

if they cant/arent willing to move to linux, i recommend installing something like tiny11, a stripped-down version of windows 11, without ads, edge browser, copilot

Very fucking good deal. Well done mate.

That's about $1000 USD. I'm general pleased with the enterprise Lenovo laptops I deal with, and the few consumer ones I have touched have left good impressions on me. I think for the hardware you got a great deal.

As far as Windows goes, I suggest debloating it at the very least. If you are not tech savvy and don't feel like digging, this tool is great. Just don't uninstall Edge.

Also, there is no cost associated with downloading and installing Windows pro or Enterprise. You could purchase a key off kinguin if the activation message annoys you, or run the massgrave script to pirate it.

great price.

Genuinely curious, what do you even use a laptop for when doing maths and science? UK here and I did both at A-level which is year 12/13. I don't think we really touched a computer for it, maybe the occasional pdf of an old exam paper.

I had a laptop, but it was mostly used for running a minecraft server.