Comment by wharvle
2 years ago
Most of the people I know who run Windows personally (not at/for work) either do it only because gaming's easiest/best there, or because it's easy to get free or extremely-cheap used Windows machines that'll hold up for a year or so (then get another when they break) [EDIT] And actually that last category's a single person I know who's a writer, so wants a laptop with a keyboard but only uses an old word processor on it, and email, nothing else.
Exceptions are my relatives over age 60, who barely do anything with their computers and should probably just have Chromebooks or iPads + keyboard (god, they could really use the accessibility features...), but are used to computer = walk into Costco or Best Buy and buy a desktop tower.
Most non-gamers who also aren't computer nerds, whom I know, "compute" mainly on their phone anyway. Shit, so do I, and I'm both of those—my Windows machine is just for gaming, nothing else whatsoever. 95+% of everything important that needs some kind of computer, happens on my phone. I bought my last house on it, entirely, LOL.
Break? What fantasy is that? I'm running five machines of different ages for years now, every day. Nothing is breaking; certainly not because of the OS. What does that even mean?
Hand-me-down or used Windows laptops that were $300 to begin with [EDIT: when purchased new, I mean] don't tend to last a super long time. Maybe, if you're lucky.
[EDIT] What I've seen break on mine and my wife's, back when I used Windows/"PC" hardware on mobile computers, and these were all lot more than $300, even 15+ years ago:
- Display controller board just... dies, barely outside the very-short warranty period. (I repaired this one)
- Display cable frays at hinge.
- Thermal paste on insufficient-to-begin-with cooling for discrete video chip goes bad after a couple years (discrete video cards in laptops: just a bad idea, they're historically the source of a solid half of the problems on MacBooks, even)
- Something shakes loose inside. Several times. I've self-repaired (open, screw with anything that has a socket or port until it's good) but it's not worth taking it in to a shop on a very, very cheap machine, if you're not comfortable doing this yourself.
- Battery goes bad.
Ah. I buy bespoke machines put together by my business partner, who's into these things. Spend enough so it lasts essentially forever. So I'm not a good measure.