My Dell Dimension 15 is six years old and has been having a lot of trouble. It would become unusably slow and I am not sure why. I had reformatted and started over a few times, but learned never to let it sleep or it might not come back without forcing a restart which would just make things worse. I almost bought a new computer four months ago, but got it working again. Then this week it went back to super slow and I started shopping around. I have been able to find decent laptops for $300-$400. These have regular hard drives 15″ screen and probably an i3 or AMD Ryzen processor. But I found a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 for $430 that had some nice extras like a 512 GB solid state hard drive (most computers with solid state drives are 128 or 256 GB), a backlit keyboard, an i5 processor, and a fingerprint reader to allow logging in with a touch. It also has a higher resolution screen of 1920×1080 pixels versus the usual 1366×768 pixels of budget laptops. One worry was that would mean it just shrinks everything down, which would be hard to read.<\/p>\n
I decided to spend the extra money and get it, but when I went to order it from Staples it was marked in-store only and not available at any stores within 100 miles. The next day I checked back again and it was available for shipping, so I went ahead and ordered it.
\n<\/p>\n
It arived this week via UPS in an amazing small box and I didn’t even have to sign for it. The computer is very lightweight and thin, almost like a toy. I was able to get my old copy of Office 2013 to load on it plus all of my other necessities: Chrome, Acrobat Reader, FastStone Image Viewer, Filezilla, and VLC Media Player. With the solid state drive and the much improved processor, it is pretty speedy. The fingerprint reader is a nice touch. The only bad thing is the power cord which has a big brick at the end instead of in the middle, which kind of messed up having the powerstrip under the sofa, but I got it worked out. It has 2 USB 3 ports of the A size and 1 of the C size. No ethernet port and no DVD drive. It features wi-fi 802.11ax which I guess is the next thing, but my router is just 802.11ac. The higher screen resolution seems to have worked out fine by making the fonts and icons bigger, so you nothing really looks smaller.<\/p>\n
My other laptop is an HP I bought 4 years ago which now takes the Dell’s place as a desktop replacement, connected to external monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Dell Dimension 15 is six years old and has been having a lot of trouble. It would become unusably slow and I am not sure why. I had reformatted and started over a few times, but learned never to let it sleep or it might not come back without forcing a restart which would … Continue reading “Lenovo IdeaPad 5”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4124,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123\/revisions\/4124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}