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[Frumple]

nono, quite on topic. And also on laptops: Batteries. If you try to use the laptop as a desktop, or just use it often enough, eventually you will need a replacement battery.

Not... really. The battery on this laptop has been dead for probably a year now. You just leave it plugged in. Thing dies the second it gets unplugged, but... so do desktops, so...

You do need a replacement battery if you want to use the laptop as a mobile laptop instead of a desktop you can comfortably fit in your lap, but... I just use it as a desktop I can fit in my lap. Have a kindle for mobile-y stuff.

[Aklyon]

I'd been assuming the people with laptops actually wanted to move it around occasionally, otherwise you'd get a desktop if you could, ya?

[Frumple]

I'd been assuming the people with laptops actually wanted to move it around occasionally, otherwise you'd get a desktop if you could, ya?

Depends a fair amount on available space, honestly. As isp notes, the tower and monitor are significantly more clumsy transit and space wise. It... it's not easy to get a tower in bed with you. Laptop can fit comfortably on a twin. No need for desks, chairs, etc., just wherever you can lay down or whatev'. And if you're moving regularly-ish between places, well...

My case, though, it's mostly just been a series of cost/availability coincidences. I don't really want a laptop, but it's what I've been able to get cheapest (second-hand, family leavings, etc.) for a while now. Still, "tiny desktop" does have some pretty significant advantages in terms of convenience, even if you can't move it any further from an outlet than you could a desktop. When I finally do get around to getting a new desktop, there's going to be shenanigans involving the monitor, a breakfast/lap table, and hinges. The tower will go under the bed or summat.

[Starver]

I'd been assuming the people with laptops actually wanted to move it around occasionally, otherwise you'd get a desktop if you could, ya?

That's how you think.  That's how I think.

I know for a fact that some people think that laptops are faster and in all others ways¹ better than desktops.  Because they've grown up with 'smaller is better', in some form or other (whether transistor radios being better than valve ones or something else, depending on their age...)

A good new laptop can be better (on performance) than a nearly-new recent refurbished desktop, in some circumstances, but a good new desktop (or sub-desk tower) would much more readily out-compete a refurbished laptop.  (Which is also more likely to have problems with keys about to come off, pressure marks on the screen, less than perfect battery capacity or a hard drive closer to failing; unless those aspects are specifically part of the refurbishment, which ultimately adds to the cost such that you sometimes might as well buy new...  taking us back to the "modularity of your computing device" argument, that we have strayed from.)  And, like-for-like in performance, it'll generally costs you far less for the desktop across the whole range of new to nearly-new to barely-rescued-from-the-skip...


(Fakeedit: As for using a laptop in bed...  Firstly, if you have a sleeping partner you might find that this is either a cause or a symptom of a rather dampened relationship.  If you don't (specifically, although possibly still also if you do... depends on the answer to the first point) there's a chance you'll drift asleep and at some point before you wake up you'll damage the laptop.  If you're really as asocial as I sometimes am, and/or have been given consent by your partner, I suggest you actually go for the SFF case beside or underneath the bed-side night-stand, keyboard (maybe wireless, perhaps with extension PS/2 or USB cable, but nothing too expensive because you will end up sleeping on it, or worse) and either a handy small monitor on the side-table, video cable to the large screen TV at the foot of the bed or perhaps a projector onto the wall... or ceiling, if that works better for you!  Depends on the circumstances.  Also, the peripheral webcam (if that's part of what you need in your bedside setup!) is going to be a better option than the one set into the rim of the laptop screen, for many reasons.  Inclusive of being unpluggable, so you don't need to assuage your paranoia by sticking a post-it or lump of blu-tak over the laptop camera when you'd rather not be visible to random hackers...  Also easier to wipe-clean.  After eating sticky food, in bed, at the same time as preparing the presentation the boss wants for tomorrow, that is..!)


¹ Vaguely... The difference between disc space (maybe Tb, was Gb, was Mb), memory (usually Gb, was Mb, was Kb) and chip-speed (GHz, was MHz... although not ever KHz for any PC) tends to be easily confused.  Although woefully inadequate in several respects, including the specifics of swapfile usage, "That's your short-term memory that you work with, that's your long-term memory that remembers things when the machine is off, and that's how fast it does what it does..." tends to work as an explanation.

[Frumple]

If you don't (specifically, although possibly still also if you do... depends on the answer to the first point) there's a chance you'll drift asleep and at some point before you wake up you'll damage the laptop.

I slept on the top bunk of a bunkbed with a laptop for... two, three years? I did end up knocking laptops off the things (all of two times, over multiple years... both times the laptop actually survived, ha, if with screen damage in one case), but never while asleep

That bit is fairly conditional to the person, but m'personally pretty much completely immobile when I sleep, so it's been a non-issue.

[Starver]

That bit is fairly conditional to the person, but m'personally pretty much completely immobile when I sleep, so it's been a non-issue.

Oh, I'm also (so far as I know/have been told) properly held in check by the expected sleep atonia.  Although I've woken up to find that the wireless headphones I had been wearing on the edge of consciousness (and never knowingly removed) have been carefully placed bed-side (though not switched off, so probably need recharging) when I wake in the morning...

But there's a chance.  And I can replace broken headphones (and have, from other circumstances) easier enough, doing without them temporarily, more than the possible fuss of replacing a laptop screen that gets rolled on (at best).  And keyboards are a dime a dozen; or less, as I've already got about a dozen keyboards at home already, paid for or otherwise obtained already...

(My mother would be horrified, though.  At one point I went through a phase of playing with string whilst in bed, as a child... I think I was even tried constructing some sort of looping thing that meant that when I fell asleep I'd pull one end of a string with a hand that would pull up my other hand thus waking me back up again¹...  anyway, she always had a morbid fear that I would wrap myself up in string (not far off, actually, given what I was sometimes deliberately doing!) and strangle myself.  Anyway, the keyboard cable would definitely scare her.)


¹ The logical and biomechanical problems with this setup do not escape me.  But did my younger self...

[Flying Dice]

There's days I wonder if people even know how to compare GPUs, anymore. I definitely don't, and they seem to have stopped using anything descriptive in the hardware names years ago. CPUs've kinda' been having the same problem, too. Just tell me it's a 3 ghz piece, damnit, not some weird name/model number BS. Even getting kinda' rough with hard drives and ram and junk. I distinctly remember it being easier to figure out what to upgrade to, a decade (or two) ago...

The layman still doesn't really have to care about HDD seek times, or RAM timings and all that stuff. Capacity and RPMs, the two advertised numbers, will still suit just fine for a basic HDD comparison. Likewise with RAM frequency and capacity.

CPUs do have a bit of newish extra baggage, because gigahertz became wildly useless as a benchmark when we started realizing that raw speed wasn't really the bottleneck (That was around a decade ago itself, though, with Smithdale/Presler).
3 GHz on a Sandy Bridge core isn't 3 GHz on a Haswell core isn't 3 GHz on a Skylake core.
3 GHz on your top of the line AMD series isn't 3 GHz on your top of the line Intel series.

The numbers that used to be advertised for GPUs, their RAM amount, also became useless as a performance indicator a decade ago, so, yes, they've mostly just stopped bothering.
They're basically just a smaller computer within your computer anymore, and are outright impossible to compare by any single number. And there are, then, so many different factors, that there's simply not an easy "this is the best one" without benchmarking and getting proper performance data. Even then, some can do better in certain situations but worse in others, leaving you with a decision based on your usage case.

And you're not gonna see them start advertising by raw performance data. Nobody in their right mind would outright say their product is inferior to their competitor's.

tl;dr: You can't pick the best component out of a crowd just by a quick glance at an advertised number, and there's not actually anything new about that.

That said, it's pretty easy to find information on GPUs. Wikipedia maintains lists of all NVidia and AMD cards with pretty in-depth specs, there are dozens of sites out there that offer assessments of cards and ranges of comparative benchmark tests, and you can always search something on Tom's Hardware and get back at least a couple useful threads.

[Graknorke]

Actually, how easy would it be to make a peasant box that is also reasonably customisable? The only way I can imagine it being done is with custom made very unusual MoBos with multiple CPU sockets that, along with PCI ports, are extended to reach the edge of the main case. When you won't let the user actually get into the guts of the machine you're heavily limiting what they can do with it (duh), and there's not many ways to work around it either.

[i2amroy]

That bit is fairly conditional to the person

This is a big thing. For example I always tend to make the active decision to close up whatever I'm using before I fall asleep anywhere, so the risk of me accidentally falling asleep and dropping something is fairly nonexistent. It's a side effect of wearing glasses; you train yourself to be able to take them off and put whatever you are using up while almost half conscious, because trying to find where your glasses fell off in the middle of the night when you have to get your face within about 8 inches of your glasses to actually see them is something you only need to do a couple of times before you start taking steps to ensure it never happens again.

[mainiac]

Maybe if you used liquid cooling instead of aircooling you could make CPUs swapable and near the edge?  I'm thinking the cooling would be attached to the motherboard instead of to the CPU.  But then there is the danger of having really delicate sockets exposed.  Even if you clamp the CPU in place, someone could knock them around.

[miauw62]

That bit is fairly conditional to the person

This is a big thing. For example I always tend to make the active decision to close up whatever I'm using before I fall asleep anywhere, so the risk of me accidentally falling asleep and dropping something is fairly nonexistent. It's a side effect of wearing glasses; you train yourself to be able to take them off and put whatever you are using up while almost half conscious, because trying to find where your glasses fell off in the middle of the night when you have to get your face within about 8 inches of your glasses to actually see them is something you only need to do a couple of times before you start taking steps to ensure it never happens again.

I always take my glasses off before I get in bed, just because lying on your side with your head on a pillow and glasses on isn't very comfortable.