[redpoint5]

I've got my finger back on the pulse of the market again now that I've decided I want to replace my insane 16 core Xeon tower that idles at 100 watts.

Black Friday 2019 was the last time I purchased a laptop. Costco always has an insane deal on a consumer grade HP. Paid $280 for a 10th gen Intel i5 14" display.

I replaced the battery last weekend with a compatible part on Amazon for $27. I was getting 20 minutes of run time on the original battery.

You should be able to replace the WiFi card fairly easily. Pro tip, lay the screws out in the same pattern they are installed in so you're sure the right size screw goes back in when you put it back together. I told my friend this once, and he immediately proceeds to pile them all together. Then he drove a too-long screw through his keyboard when he assembled it, so he got more practice when he had to take it all apart again to replace the keyboard.

It's been years since I've owned AMD, and I only bought it because there was a hack where you buy a cheaper 2-core CPU and unlock the other 2 cores in software. Quad core for the price of dual core.

Intel CPUs are more energy efficient, which is why I always prefer them. Their product lines containing 'F' means it has no built in video processing, meaning a discrete GPU is required.

My graphics needs are modest, so my preference is for the integrated graphics, which have massively improved in performance in recent years. Gen 12 and 13 (most recent Intel generations) are way more power efficient than prior generations and the integrated graphics are much better.

For a laptop, 14" is the largest I would go with, otherwise portability tanks. 13.3 might even be better. If the laptop is to go everywhere, then consumer grade is too fragile. Dell's Inspiron line is an example of fragile consumer grade. At minimum, I would be looking at entry level business product lines like the Dell Vostro, Lenovo Thinkpad or HP Elite.

My wife's ThinkPad X1 Carbon purchased for school back in 2015 is still flawless and on the original battery. She has used it every day and abuses the battery, but it's still going. Probably get a decade of use out of it.

Finally, I would never game on a laptop. Too noisy, too expensive, to hot, to confining... better to have a tower where individual components can be upgraded at will. This is precisely why I'm in the market again to build a mid-sized tower. It's going to house 3x 3.5" hard drives and 1x SSD. I'll have the option to add a GPU if I want to game. It will be a Plex server, NVR, and NAS.