Consider a second-hand Thinkpad Laptop if you need processing power and reliability on the cheap.
Technology keeps marching on and I suppose we've got to keep buying.
But there's no reason we have to buy the latest thing.
The Wife has been producing some seriously huge digital paintings for sharing on Society6, and none of the computers we had in the house were up to the task.
She uses Corel Painter with a tablet. The strange thing about Corel Painter is that it actually forces you to watch paint dry. When she uses a watercolor brush, the behavior of every pixel of paint has to be calculated for every stroke. And when she works with canvasses that are 12,000 by 10,000 pixels (that's 120 million pixels, if you're counting) it's no wonder that our aging laptops come crashing (or rather wheezing) to a halt.
A little research showed that we needed a gaming rig - something with a dedicated graphics card that could render all those dots. I suggested a desktop tower. But with plans for stretches of time overseas, she really wasn't willing to give up on portability. Unfortunately, high-performance laptops tend to be four times as expensive as their laptop counterparts.
So second-hand it was, then. I was thrilled to discover a Lenovo Thinkpad W530 on eBay for under $400.
The build quality of these old Thinkpads is phenomenal. They're built for corporate customers who are expected to travel a lot. They have a rigid magnesium frame, a keyboard that doesn't flex in the middle no matter how hard you pound on it, and a little red mouse-nub in the middle which is surprisingly handy for navigation once you get used to it (since you don't have to move your hands from the keys every time you want to move the cursor). Supposedly they even have a drainage system in place so any fluids you spill on the keyboard will just flow right through. I've never tested this.
Maybe size does matter. But can you guess which is hers and which is his?
They're surprisingly modular, so that swapping out batteries, RAM, and hard drives is a piece of cake. And they're Linux-friendly for those who want to try out the wonders of free and open-source software.
It's been my experience that a five year old used Thinkpad will perform better than a brand new budget laptop at the same price. I've been loving my little X220 since I grabbed it a couple of years ago. (It even has a built in Wacom tablet screen for my own amateur doodles.)
So when I found the listing for this W530 and discovered that it had a dedicated graphics processor with 2 GB of graphics memory, I was pretty confident it would stand up to The Wife's demands. It also had an i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM - good all round! We placed our order and had it within a week.
I couldn't believe the pristine condition this laptop arrived in. Either the seller had mastered some kind of magical cleaning process, or this was a surplus unit that had never been used. I set about tarnishing it by drooling all over the back-lit keyboard.
Windows 7 Updates Are A Blast From The Past
The seller had restored this Thinkpad to a fresh install of Windows 7. As much as we both love Linux, The Wife's creative tools (Corel Painter and Photoshop) require the market-standard OS.
It's been so long since I've used Windows 7 that I'd begun to look back at it with rose-colored glasses. Back before the obnoxious interface of Windows 8! Back before baked in spyware and NSA toolkits! But I'd forgotten what an onerous process updating and maintaining Windows 7 was. It took about two hours to get Windows up to date, then another two to install Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter and update those. Then there was the challenge of getting the Wacom Cintiq tablet to play nice with the computer - more drivers and calibrations. (All of this probably would have gone faster if the unit was loaded with a speedy solid-state drive.)
Of course, we needed to put The Sims and Minecraft on there while we were at it. Might as well make use of all that 3D graphics power! And we had to make sure it would interface with the living room TV when it was plugged in there.
In all I think I invested about 10 hours of head-scratching configuration before I could hand it off to The Wife and say "Have fun!" It's a good thing I love tinkering with computers! (To be honest, I was in hog heaven.) We probably could have avoided some of the aggravating bits if we'd ordered a unit with Windows 10 installed, but then we'd be sacrificing more processing power to the spyware. "No thanks" to that. (And before anyone preaches the "It just works" philosophy that Apple is selling - try finding a five year old MacBook with up-gradable components. The only way to participate in the cult of Apple is to go new and spend a fortune.)
Brilliant Results
I'm glad to report that this thing works wonderfully. It handles the most massive paintings with just a hint of hesitation. It lets The Wife play The Sims with a dozen expansion packs running at the same time. And for the first time ever I'm able to experience Minecraft with one of those shader packs that cast realistic shadows and make the water ripple.
Not bad for a machine built in 2012.
The biggest bottleneck with the system is the clunky old mechanical hard drive. It'll be fun at some point to switch it out for a solid state drive and really watch the system fly. But we'll have to wait until larger SSD's come down in price. Those paintings take up a lot of storage.
With it's solid build quality, performance, and upgrade-ability, I suspect The Wife will be using this computer for many years to come.
Unless I buy her a slightly faster computer at Christmas so I can have this one!
My Previous Computer & Technology Posts on Steemit
Working on a Vertical Monitor - Why Hasn't This Caught On?
Will Moore's Law Become Irrelevant Before it Breaks Down?
Is Your Cell Phone Snitching On You? How Much Does It Know?
Why Are We Relying So Heavily On Companies That Censor Us? The Peril of the Cloud
Why I Use Linux Despite The Occasional Frustration And Inconvenience
Try Linux For Free By Creating A Bootable Thumb Drive - For Absolute Beginners
Running A Linux Live Session From A Thumb Drive - A No-Fear Tutorial For Absolute Beginners
I Made Crappy Paintings with Krita To Show You Can Make Art And Have Fun With Linux
What Doggy Diapers Revealed About Facebook's Marketing Algorithms