Re: Laptop replacement

On Thu, 27 Mar 2025, John Rumm wrote:

On 27/03/2025 09:49, D wrote:

  On Thu, 27 Mar 2025, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

On 27/03/2025 06:06, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 26 Mar 2025 19:02:39 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

Well I have had pretty good results for MY needs with HP laptops BUT
anything to run Windows 11 seems very expensive. Like £400
 Whereas a Windows ten capable refurbished is under £100

 Would you entrust mission-critical business operations to obsolete,
unsupported software?

 I'd trust it to Linux.
Actually that's MS bullshit.
The greatest security risk from a laptop is leaving it on a train.
 If its 'mission critical' it doesn't go on a laptop. Period. Or you get sacked
This isn't Donald Trumps administration, this is real life

 Also note that if you build around the constraints of crappy hardware with technologies such as backups, clusters, active/active clusters etc. they can live very well on crappy hardware.
 Of course this is just theoretical, and you collect your requirements, and SLA:s towards your customers, and then make an informed decision.
 Since I have backups of my laptop, and could go to the store and buy a new one in about 60 minutes, and do a restore of my company documents within another 60 minutes, I in theory, have no problems with running my company on "crappy" hardware.
 Due to convenience, I tend to run it on maximum 3-4 year old laptops, and my SaaS product runs on refurbished servers in the cloud.

>
You seem to be assuming that the only bad thing that might happen is the laptop loses your data, which as you identify a good backup regime will mitigate. However the bigger prise for many bad actors is persistent access to your device and data - something that becomes "easier" on unsupported platforms, and also something, if done well, you may not even notice.

That would be a software problem. I can run modern software on crappy hardware. Yet another benefit. And no, I'm not in the cloak and dagger business, so the threats I face are very, very mild.
I do have acquaintances in the cloak and dagger business though, and they are all about avoiding as much as possible, tracking supply chains, buying hw without mics and video etc.