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once_inc

I remember the laptop market from 20 years ago; lots of variability between laptops in terms of:

- hardware support (drivers),

- hardware quality,

- pricing,

- online knowledge availability

Those days, you had varying quality between laptops of different vendors, but also between laptops of the same vendor, and even between laptops of the exact same production line.

These days, So much has been improved in terms of smoothing the UX, from hardware support to quality assurance. It's a completely different experience.

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Acer laptops were super common back then at universities, at least here in Australia. I think they'd hit a sweet spot - they were affordable enough for students, and would probably not fall apart over the course of a three or four year degree, although the plastic case would be starting to get quite precarious by the end.

Hardware seems so much more reliable these days, especially accessories like power supply bricks.

Every single HP, Acer or Asus laptop from those days I saw in the wild had major issues.

I'm not sure what the cause was. Could have just been users.

Too cheap / uneducated to value extra ram or storage, then as a result of it being crappy and slow they didn't care about it and ended up tossing it around. Them on top of their other issues they would have problems like busted screen hinges, batteries that don't charge. Mouse pads that don't work etc.

Every ThinkPad I saw tended to be solid without any issues.

As long as you stayed away from the Aspire line and choose one from the Travelmate line they were good value for the money.

In germany we had the (in)famous brand "Gericom", that build thick, hot, loud Pentium 4 laptops, sold mainly by the large retailers like Media Markt. They inevitably broke down (often literally!) after the warrany expired.

Thinkpads were unreachable for most, though there were good discounts to be had for students.

I figured Gericom was an off-brand until reading it here. A friend of mine in high school had a Gericom Hummer - desktop P4 chip with some insane heat pipes and a large fan, and a single desktop DIMM slot for memory. The bottom came off in two pieces: one for the mainboard, one for the "other stuff" like the hard drive and battery. I'd never seen anything quite like it.

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