Hardware Follies - Late Summer 2024

It's been a few months since my last acquisitions. The 'storefront'
(read: skips, a.k.a. dumpsters) have been disturbingly empty recently.
Are people at long last behaving responsibly and taking all their
electronics to e-waste for proper disposal? I'm not sure how to feel
about that! On the one hand, good; less garbage in the system. On the
other hand, bad! How am I supposed to get free loot?

Although these more recent additions have been acquired more
'legitimately' than usual. Rather than scrounging from the curb, I was
gifted these from a friend who was moving house. For some reason they
didn't see the value in years old computers that they've long since
replaced.


The biggest haul was a brand new laptop which, I have to admit, was
somewhat welcome. I generally don't 'do' laptops. I much prefer to use
a big ol' desktop system, and that's what most of my energy (and
money) goes into. Thus, all my laptops are both fairly old and fairly
under-powered. I just don't want to pour cash into paying for
performance in a machine I'll so rarely use. So getting a 'new' (read:
only seven years old!) laptop was quite exciting. It can actually play
games!!! And not like games from twenty years ago either!



The device in question is a Samsung, a brand I've had little
experience with. It's disturbingly thin --I honestly feel like I'll
snap it in half if I'm even the slightest bit rough with it-- but
other than that, I've little complaint about it.

The laptop has  a 7th generation i7 processor, and a discrete GeForce
940MX GPU (as well as the usual integrated IntelHD chipset for
low-power stuff). This gives it the comparative grunt of my 2008
desktop PC (an early quad-core with a GeForce 285GTX GPU). It's never
going to run something like "Calisto Protocol" but it can --with
reduced settings and at 1280x1024 resolution-- handle a lot of other
games with aplomb.

[It runs American Truck Simulator just fine, and
         honestly, need I ask more from it than that?!]

It's got a gimmick too; it's a 'convertible', which was a fad amongst
laptops manufacturers in the 2015-2018 era. The screen can bend
backwards until it lies flat against the back of the laptop, turning
the whole thing into a sort of oversized (and uncomfortably heavy)
tablet. It's not very useful, but it's sort of nice being able to read
PDFs on its 15" screen.

[It also makes the whole thing feel a lot more sturdy,
         since it's no longer paper-thin.]

The laptop's biggest downside is it's _slow_ 5400rpm hard-drive. I'm
going to need to upgrade that to an SSD eventually. Other than that,
though, this is a very welcome addition to my herd of PCs, and I
actually foresee using this machine on a regular basis. Well, as
regular as I use any of my laptops, anyway.


Other than that, I scored a fairly cheap Canon scanner (lousy quality,
but about 1/3 the size of my current flatbed, and it runs better with
modern Windows), as well as a bag filled with thumb-drives. Honestly,
I don't really need this many, but they're small and it's always
useful to have some around in case I need to transfer files to
somebody and can't do it over the Internet for some reason.


I'm still hoping to convince my friend to give up that old desktop I
saw lying around (and the two monitors). I don't _need_ any of them...
but free hardware? I can't resist. ;-)


Anyway, a good haul over all, and a good end to the summer. But is it
wrong for me to hope that people start being more irresponsible with
their e-waste in the future? ;-)