Buy a gaming laptop they said… It will be fun they said… To be honest now I regret every single penny I spent on my fancy Lenovo Y510p, but I thought it was a good deal back then. Here are some reflections about my choice.

For starters, here is full spec:

I’ve been using it since July 2014 and ever since that day it was pain in my very butt. I believe it had screen defect and it broke down even before I had a chance to use it. (and it costed my about 200$ to repair {screen itself is buyable at 60$}, because mechanical issues are not covered by warranty). I spent 3 months of going back and forth between services trying to fix…

After settling that I could finally use my death machine! Hell Yeah! Can you imagine being able to bring your powerfull setups and play your favorite games everywhere? For examle in shoping mall waiting in queue to Orange employee to fix your phone or smth? Yeah that’s the gratest feeling ever! Playing Witcher 3 in amazing 6 frames per second with blazing ball of fire on your laps… And battery lasted for about 30 minutes!

You can say that you can bring your power supply with you. And yes, you will. Otherwise you will cry because your battery is dying, every single phreaking time. On some of my School rooms there are only few power ports so we are carrying power strips with us. We chain them in hope that electric installation will hold that usage.

If you want check whether you’ll be able to carry one of those monsters just throw few bricks into your bag. Feeling should be quite similar. The weight is a real issue though and I’m not being sarcastic about it. After a month of carrying it everyday to Uni I got unpleasent back ache.

The next big issue is material that this laptop is made of. It barely resists anything. After 2 years of everyday use outside of home, laptop acompanied me in at least 40 000km of travel. Which to be honest is not that much. I’ve been carrying it with me on a bus, on a car seat etc and now almost every plastic element is broken. Literally. The graphics card radiator is just missing (I think it couldn’t resist heat from the card though), the backplate is broken in at least on place (near the sound ports, that doesn’t work properly now ofc…). It is also worth to mention that camera is not working and I doubt it ever did…

But of course there are also a lot of positive sides of having portable powerhorse. You can run almost as many of docker machines as you might ever want. You can learn and try Big Data frameworks that usually requires a lot of computational power. But is it worth the price? I don’t realy think so…

The sole possible purpose of this computer is work at home. But why would you buy laptop to work at home constantly connected to power grid?