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Comment Writing this on a 2019 Dell XPS (Score 2) 77

This is my third XPS laptop and it's by far the least impressive. The first two were two of the best computers I've ever owned. I'm not a laptop guy but they were really great, reliable machines.

This one has been fine but I've had a bunch of issues:
- the power management and hybrid sleep stuff is just crazy. You have to power it down fully before putting it in a bag because you can't rely on it staying asleep. It will sometimes just power up randomly and if in a bag will overheat. I feel lucky it hasn't burnt my house down.
- the keyboard is almost useless, many keys have stopped working. I have an almost 10 year old XPS on the shelf behind me on which the keyboard still works flawlessly (battery is dead though).
- Bluetooth doesn't work when it comes back from sleep. Needs to go back to sleep and wake up again before Bluetooth comes back.
- Performance is weirdly average for such a high spec machine - i7 with 32GB. I have an 11yo desktop with only 16GB and a much older CPU and SSD and it feels so much nicer to use.

Some of these are possibly Windows problems? Either way I'm not surprised this line is ending. It felt like they just started putting average hardware together but trying to position it as a more premium offering. By comparison the Latitude laptops we get at work seem way more solid, if not as "cool-looking".

Comment Re:Solar power your home (Score 1) 94

Residential solar is proving to be amazing for people that actually install it themselves. Even though it's not price competitive with grid scale it is still being deployed massively here in Australia and shows no sign of slowing down, as it's one of the few things people can do to actually help control their costs of energy and contribute to reducing fossil fuel use.

Just looked at yesterday's data and rooftop solar contributed almost half of the power generated in my state at peak. Grid solar is about 15%.

Given the spike in housing prices, installing solar (and battery) is increasingly a trivial proportion of the cost of a home.

Comment Re:Little late to the game here (Score 1) 72

> If even those options are "too hard", there's also VirtualBox. True, it's from Oracle, and that's a great reason not to use it, but it "just works" and the licensing isn't as awful as it once was.

Maybe it's changed recently but last I looked if you wanted to use the Extension Pack, which has a lot of pretty useful functionality, you needed to buy a license, which as far as I could tell was basically impossible for a single user. I could only find ways to buy it in volume - I think it was 50 minimum. Would be great to know if that is not the case!

Comment I think this is good but too late (Score 1) 95

Maybe H popular but: this is good for most people I know. But also it's too fucking late now because Microsoft have been saying Windows 10 is EOL and shoving Windows 11 in their faces non-stop for over a year now (years?), including using dark pattern to basically trick people into upgrading.

My dad held off upgrading his office PCs until literally last week before finally caving, concerned it was getting too close because of all the nagging Windows does. If he'd known this was an option he absolutely would have gone this route.

I will probably avail myself of it at my workplace to save having to replace several machines that are incompatible for whatever reason.

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