August 1st, 2025

A New Laptop: Lenovo No More.

Of all the laptops I could pick…

My New Laptop.

Last year, I got into the world of desktops. I had ended up with a couple X58-based PCs, and I had spent some of my savings on upgrading them, with things such as a RX570 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and front panel I/O (SD card slot). That was money well spent. I learned a lot about PCs. Before that, I knew little about desktops. PCIe slots and how those work, where you should put RAM sticks (different depending on the board), the best ports for a SSD, things like that. I don’t plan on wasting any of these PCs. I’ll eventually find a way to upgrade them (further) and put them to good use, especially because the hardware is still great. But I needed something that was small, portable, could handle my normal loads and a bit more, and wouldn’t sound like a half the volume of a loud hair dryer all day.

I had a small budget around $230 (I’d saved this up over time). I could go a bit over, but I really didn’t want to. Problem being, I had no idea what to start looking at. I made a list of what I needed.

One, the laptop had to be from at least 2020 or newer. This ensures Windows 11 compatibility and hopefully a longer lifespan with Linux than Windows will ever give it.

Two, it needed 16GB of RAM right out of the box. DDR4 RAM modules are expensive and out of my budget for buying right now.

Third, it needed a good display, good keyboard, and good trackpad.

Fourth, it needed to be a better build quality than my ThinkPad X260 (it felt like it was going to fall apart at times).

And, as a important note, since I was buying used, it NEEDS an unlocked BIOS. Otherwise it’s not going to work for me at all.

My Dad suggested I get a laptop just like his work-issued work laptop: The HP ZBook Firefly 15 G8 (what a mouthful). He said it had a great screen, great keyboard, and great touchpad. Going off of that, I tried to see if there was a smaller model. There was a 14 inch model, and it did fit my criteria, along with being just a wee bit over budget. I looked at similar offerings from Dell, but none of them looked as good or as promising. I had also considered VAIO laptops and Fujitsu laptops with the same CPU (Intel Core i7-1185G7), but either they were overpriced ($100 VAIO tax) or only in other countries (Fujistu doesn’t seem to really do US anymore with laptops). I ended up getting the ZBook, albeit the 14 G8 instead of the 15 G8.

Finding a good deal was a pain. I used ebay in this case. Most sellers wanted $230 or more, without free shipping, and sometimes in subpar condition. I messaged a few of them. One of them took some time to get back, and the other only gave me an offer instead of answering my questions. Oh well. I ended up finding a listing for auction, but with the make offer button active as well. I messaged them and got a very fast reply, confirming the laptop did meet my BIOS requirements. The list price was exactly $230, but with tax and shipping, it would be more. I figured I’d make an offer of $195 and see if they’d take it. The next morning they had accepted it, and it came out to exactly $231.01 counting shipping and tax, one dollar and a penny over budget. Perfect.

They didn’t ship the laptop for the next couple days. It was, after all, the 4th of July weekend (American holiday), and so I was expecting to wait. It still didn’t ship Monday, so I messaged the seller. They said they’d ship my parcel, and sent the tracking. I waited until Saturday (I think), but USPS was STILL awaiting my package. I sent them another message, asking if they could check if my parcel was stuck at the post office. Magically, USPS received the item and I heard nothing more, other than the normal USPS tracking updates.

In the meantime, I had been praying that I didn’t get scammed. One week later, the laptop arrived, well-packed, and with a charger (albeit a Lenovo USB-C one), unlike all the other listings. I powered it on, checked it out, and made sure it was exactly what I paid for. It was, and therefore was worth the wait for the seller to ship it.

I was concerned that I would hate it. I have traditionally had a bias against HP products. They’ve never been super fantastic in my experience, especially their printers. I hate their ink prices and their proprietary trash (we bought an EcoTank and it’s saved money). I have three HP laptops, all from the early early 21st century. One of them is dead, one is a Celeron PC from a trash can, and the other is a chunky Core 2 Duo laptop. I like all of them for their unique design, but the build quality wasn’t great. As it turns out, HP’s corporate/business laptops are much better. This laptop was sturdy, it didn’t flex a lot (unlike my ThinkPad), and everything felt great on it. The keyboard was fantastic, the trackpad clicked better than an Apple trackpad (I have two 2010 era MacBook Pro 13s and one MacBook Air 2014 11 inch. All have worse trackpads), and the display was fantastic. Not to mention it booted so much faster than my other laptop. NVMe makes a huge difference.

I ended up putting a 2TB NVMe we had that wasn’t used in it, installing Windows 10 and Kubuntu 25.04 on the drive. Windows 10, of course, got only 256GB of that storage. It doesn’t need more. Kubuntu got the rest. Linux was great on this laptop. It was SUPER fast, very snappy, and had practically no issues at all.

I had also set up a Thunderbolt dock thing for the laptop, since this laptop supports Thunderbolt. Dad had one, but he didn’t use it since it had issues with his laptop. I decided to use it to handle my dual-display setup and all of my peripherals and it’s worked well. The only issues being KDE’s bad habit of opening windows on the wrong screen, and the fact that if the laptop is in sleep mode and you unplug the dock, the computer has to be powered-off by force and restarted.

I’ve been using it for a couple weeks, and it’s mostly perfect.. Writing this post, the fan is either off or super quiet, and watching 1080p30 video doesn’t get the fans to ramp up either. I’ve noticed 1080p60 is what usually does it. The fan sound isn’t fantastic when they’re on. They can be high pitched, and since my ears are sensitive to that, they’re also annoying at times. Power efficiency is good too, only using around 10 watts or so with an average load for me. Temperatures are decent too, but it can burn your lap if it’s doing something intense, in classic Intel fashion. ARM laptops are too expensive for what they are right now.

I did run Cinebench, and it scored better than any of my computers. However, I do want to come up with better benchmarking tests than just Cinebench. I’m thinking of adding some transcoding, compression, and compiling benchmarks to my list. As a result, I haven’t put benchmark scores in this post. I plan to make a 6-month-in post, much like I did with my Pixel 6.

The HP ZBook Firefly 14 G8. Sorry about the poor focus.

More Laptop

Ditto.

Ditto X2.

In Other News

Agathae hath gone broody yet again. She is on my lap as of this comment being made, and is livid she can’t go hatch her tennis balls and wooden eggs. We’ve also had some nice rainstorms, so all of the desert plants seem to be happier.

Broody Agathae

Lightning