The majority of people I know who have major computer problems solve them by buying another computer
I’m not even that tech illiterate, but I almost did that… My laptop was being slow, and I still had like 4k€ in overtime hours that I could buy Hardware from at work (it’s a great deal because I neither have to pay VAT on the hardware nor income taxes on the money from the overtime), so I was like, eh, might as well get a new laptop.
So then I read up on what laptop brands are out there, found out about Framework, and when I excitedly told my electrical engineer husband about it he was like “You knooow that you can easily replace parts in any laptop, right?”
Well, I didn’t know that (just kinda assumed laptops were more like phones than they are like desktop PCs), so I ended up just ordering a new SSD and new RAM for my laptop. It’s back to being butter smooth, but I have a hunch that cleaning the dust from the fans while I was in there was a very large factor in that haha
I used to work at a locally run computer store, and one of the biggest upgrades for most people was going from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD. Made a night and day difference.
Ooh, totally! I did have an SSD in there before, but it was only 256GB, so I had to store most files on the HDD and be extremely selective about what to install to C:. Going up to 8TB felt very liberating, I no longer have to fear that an npm install might crash my whole machine! (at least not due to space constraints, npm will figure out how to crash it for other reasons)
If the crashing stopped by replacing the SSD probably the SSD is end-of-life. SSDs basically wear down with each write action and when they reach their terabytes written limit they can start crashing the system during read and write actions. Also the smaller the SSD the lower the terabytes written limit is. 256GB drives are on the low end, so not surprising that you reached that limit.
That might be the case too! I do believe it was more of a skill issue in my case because I was booting Linux Mint from a 40GB partition (couldn’t free any more space than that on the old SSD) and enabled too many system backups (they recommended 2 daily and 2 on boot, and I just followed the recommendation without thinking about the space implications). Those alone put me at around 35-38GB of used space, and an npm install is usually around 1 GB, but log and temp files can sometimes balloon up when things go wrong. So it wasn’t really a crash per say, just Mint’s “shut down the system when you run out of storage space” protection triggering haha
I see you used to have an HDD in there. That alone would’ve made it painfully slow in Windows especially, but even with Linux.
Now it should stay fast for longer.
I mean, asterisk. Most laptops let you swap the storage and RAM and many let you swap the battery. Beyond that it usually gets difficult.
Framework let you swap everything, which is a major difference. But of course you pay for that privilege; modular design has its costs.
Still, good on you for getting a cheap upgrade. No need to throw away a perfectly good laptop if you can make it work fast again with a new SSD.
Framework let you swap everything
I think there’s still a pretty big asterisk on that, because laptop parts are generally not built to be swappable… So I don’t think you can swap the CPU without the rest of the mainboard, and some parts like the CPU cooler are probably tied to the specific variant of mainboard and need to be swapped together if you want to switch CPUs.
They do let you swap out parts that are reasonably swappable, so it’s pretty much a guarantee you’ll be able to upgrade storage and memory, and even where you can’t swap to different parts they make sure you can replace broken parts more granularly, so it still seems like a good deal.
The logic board has the CPU built in, that’s true. However, the Framework 16 has a swappable GPU and all models make the ports independent of the logic board through a USB-C-based expansion module system. So that’s even a few parts other manufacturer might consider unreasonable.
(Also, to be fair, I forgot one other thing most laptops let you swap: The WiFi/BT card, if only because it’s cheaper to have that on a swappable module.)
Wow that’s an amazing amount of dust. I think that’s the most I have seen in a computer and my only source of laptop used to be old things from recycling centers
Could be explained by the fact that my favorite position to program is on my bed, like a teenage girl from a mediocre 2000’s movie writing in her diary. The laptop fans get a taste of all that good good bed sheet fiber.
My back hurts thinking about this.
I use mine on a sofa (for gaming, even!), but I get around the issue a bit by having a pad under the laptop. It’s literally just a hard plastic board with a beanbag attached underneath, I think I got it from IKEA. It isolates the laptop a bit from dust and improves airflow + lets it heat up without burning my knees + the one I have is just large enough that I can also use my wireless mouse on it when I push my laptop to the left.
Ah I see you keep your laptop well fed. I try to keep mine anorexic lol
If you’re a half-decent person you doged a bullet there:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/framework_linux_controversy/
I’ve told those kind of people about how easily I could format/reinstall the OS, and they looked at me like some kind of lunatic witch doctor.
That’s why I will nab computers out of the trash if I see 'em. Most of them still have perfectly functional modern parts. A lot of the time, the only thing that even needs replacing is the PSU.
I think the issue is not having a desktop-type computer at all and having a tablet/phone that’s so locked down the kid isn’t given the opportunity to explore or troubleshoot.
Tinkering is how you learn to solve problems, which requires having something tinker-able without having to go down a hacky rabbithole.
I know a bit about teaching about computers/programming to kids in the first years of high school. Their understanding of anything computer is abysmal. They have grown up with smartphones and maybe tablet, never were able to tinker with anything. Even just what internet is was confusing to them. It had to be reframed as “when can you watch youtube” for it to make sense…
Anytime this topic comes up, I reshare this blog post. With things being “that bad” over a decade ago, I can’t imagine how much worse it’s gotten.
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/
Great read, exactly what I experienced. On the other hand, we also really want to think about what knowledge is really important. Is knowing the difference between Internet and World Wide Web necessary? Or is programming in a random language? Knowledge is power, but there is just so much you can learn. Starting knowing that you don’t know and it’s not magic is, to me, already a great step, because from there you can learn. Expecting everything to be prepackaged is instead a very passive approach, and that should be discouraged.
Yeah, that “what to absolutely learn” line needs to be established. Basic knowledge of fixing and troubleshooting absolutely should be taught, while scripting and programming is probably not a high priority for many people. Maybe financial/business interested students could learn some scripting, but art and literature students won’t really care.
I’m Gen Z, and I cringe at both my classmates and alpha-cusp cousins, my millennial aunts, my xillenial dad, and my boomer grandparents, one of which taught college classes on how to use computers back in the 80s, so idk what happened there…
In the case of my classmates, I can understand that if you’re too poor to have a home computer with Windows or Mac, then you won’t have many opportunities for computer literacy, cause we used heavily locked-down Chromebooks from 5-12th grade, and while my college library has Windows desktops, I’m not sure if the rental laptops are Windows or Chrome. But grown adults had computer lab, so what happened there?
But still, I’ve seen mind numbing shit like using the caps key instead of shift when typing (ON PURPOSE, by the way), not using any kind of ad block, not knowing where shit is in phone settings, hell, asking for chargers is “iPhone or Android charger” or “round or flat charger” instead of USB C or lightning.
Troubleshooting is such a big one! Like, you should be able to distinguish between a “I can fix it” issue, a “somebody can fix it” issue and a “my computer burned to the ground” situation… and act accordingly. I’m also okay with the first option being very limited! But please Google your problem until you vaguely understand what’s wrong.
Like kids back in the 1980s ☺️ many couldn’t even read a floppy on the C64!
I wonder if they, I mean today’s kids, learn other things we miss out on.
From the educators perspective, they get a lot more brain rot. They dropped in in-person socialization, long and medium term concentration and literacy of any type. I haven’t heard any positives yet… but I also fear that with every year, I am getting closer to the trope of “back in my days”-shake walking cane. So, hopefully someone comes to tell me I’m missing something
Witnessed a radiology resident typing her password into a computer and for each uppercase letter she would press shift-lock, type the letter, then press shift-lock again.
I couldn’t figure it out until my mom pointed out she probably only ever used a phone or tablet.
Which is crazy, because I can’t imagine getting through high school, college, and medical school without ever working on a desktop computer.
the iphone was the beginning of the downfall
striping menue options down for usability and “natural gestures” like swiping caused a whole generation to be able to partake in internet discourse without having a basic understanding of how they got there
*Reads comments in thread*
I started with a pair of matchsticks and a trenchcoat that I got at Galipoli in WW1, using the Phosphorus I found in the Bosphorus to craft makeshift TI calculator based on specs I got via Fax from a Samurai. I ran slackware on my slacks until we defeated the Ottomans, but they unleashed their puppy linuxes on us, and we stood no chance.
Meanwhile…
At the Hall of Justice, we join our heroes enjoying a celebratory game of Tuxkart on their PopOS devices after their latest defeat of Lex Luthor’s DOS army.
“That was a great buffer underflow, Batman” said Superman, piping his Krypto into a GPG wallet.
“Thank you, Superman. Evil shall think twice before compiling on a non GCC system without warnings enabled!”
It’s all that musl he has.
Good grief! The word is excluded. Holy shit.
Shit was making my eye twitch.
probably a Windows user
If you’re using Lemmy there’s a good chance you’ll be excluded from the study. Some of the largest Lemmy communities are Linux related.
Upvoted from my iPhone
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Vic-20 here. What a time to be alive.
TRS-80 then IBM PCjr here. Both hand-me-downs though.
Mom wouldn’t let me on the 386 until I could touch-type and write a program in BASIC. She was a Cobol and IBM RPG programmer.
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I started on an Antikythera mechanism, you kids that started on a modern machine were coddled.
I had a GUI - windows 3.11
But it was so slow. So I made my own gui/menu system that ran in dos. I was between 9-11 I reckon.
Not sure where that lands me on the spectrum of coddledness
I can technically claim I started with a hand me down C64 from my grandmother in the early 90s. But I was like 6 years old, and I didn’t really get into computers until we got a Windows 95 machine a couple of years later. Though by 99-2000 I was regularly playing around with the C64 for the novelty of what felt like ancient tech.
I remember using dialup internet on windows 98 in the late 90s to look up how to use the C64.
I know you’re joking but this is how a lot replies here feel. Kids don’t even know how to program using punch cards anymore smh.
40 years from now the newest generation will be saying “Grandpa doesn’t even know know what a Cyber Tibulator Strip is let alone how to use it. If you need him he’s out back yelling at clouds.”
Don’t get me wrong here, tech literacy is low but when has it not been?
Yeah, it was just MSDOS. I saw “Abort, retry, fail” so many times, and I didn’t even know what it meant because I was four and I just wanted to play Family Feud with my brother.
Are you joking? C64 was the bomb back in the day! My Atari and Amiga mates were enjoying colors and music and games while I had sat there on my colourless, mute PC. All I had was Flight Simulator 2 in black and white. And DrBrush for drawing in Hercules “graphics” mode.
Apple ][e was my first. We also had an XP machine for internet (Neopets) but I didn’t have to fight for turns on the Apple.
I had an Apple ][e I could use at school. It was preferable to the ][c for the same reason.
I started on Mac (the Macintosh Plus), then went to Windows, and now Linux (for about two decades by now). 🤷♂️ Work as a software engineer… Nothing to see here, folks.
I started on Mac, went to Windows, then Linux, then ChromeOS, and now back to Linux and Mac for work. I work as a web dev and my contribution to my team is my extreme ADHD
You guys are contributing to your team?
Try it sometime! It really hits them endorphins.
I do, occasionally. I came from a team where I was the top contributor and am now on a team where I’m just trying to keep up. I’m learning a lot, but it’s definitely been a blow to the ego.
Hang in there! I believe in you!
Very kind.
Technically started on Apple II at school, at home we first got a 286 PC compatible running Windows 3.1 and some version of DOS, then in 5th/6th grade had a little exposure to Macs at school before switching to schools where everything was Windows. Didn’t touch a Mac again until college and it was another 8 years or so before I got comfortable with them. Now I barely touch Windows and am starting to get into Linux and have my eye on potentially trying some variants of BSD also.
I started with a Macintosh Plus when I was 2 years old. 😅 Didn’t do much else than move the mouse around and played a clicking game where you clicked balls with numbers in sequence.
Hot take: macOS, being Unix like, fosters more tech literacy than Windows.
It’s much better now with windows terminal and winget, but a decade or so ago even basic things like installing python and adding it to PATH were infinitely easier on Unix-like environments.
For those privileged to have programming classes, the first 2-3 sessions were the teachers going round doing tech support just to install python on shitty locked down Windows laptops.
Windows being terrible makes you learn a lot of stuff, but so much of it is untransferrable.
I started with DOS. then windows. I didn’t use Linux until I was in my 20s, and not heavily use it until my 30s.
I just started using a Mac for work because it’s “Unix like”.
Mac’s are fucked up man. I don’t know how anyone gets shit done on them. the UX is developed like it’s for stroke victims with permanent brain damage.
I would rather use W11 than a Mac and I fucking loathe Microsoft and their horrible AI bullshit.
The 1000 little interface stupidities is what gets me on Mac, like making “cut” part of the “paste” action. I’d get it if they had different terms (Ctrl+c=select, Ctrl+v =duplicate, Ctrl+optV=move) but they’re still called copy paste. Or the delete button on my keyboard being interpreted as page down. Or the enter key being used to rename a file. Or how every action just has to have an animation. It adds up to being just such a mess.
This. So freaking much this.
Mac is unix in the same way that Android is unix or my car’s infotainment system is Unix.
Yes, there’s unix under the hood, but there’s such a bunch of garbage on top that the unixity really doesn’t help much at all.
I am still using windows 10.
Jokes on you i started on system 7
There are dozens of us!
My trajectory was win 3.11, then macos 7 & 8, then windows 98… Windows 7 > macOS again as a dev > Linux when I finally got to pick my own software and IT wasn’t what paid the bills.
Windows was always broken so you had to learn to fix shit
Mac never did quite what you needed so you had to work around stuff and try harder
… Next/Mac got me very literate with Unix
… Linux is just kinda what I know.
But Unix based macos really is an excellent os. It’s just a shame its so locked to their hardware.
In a previous relationship I gave my partner a small tour of the terminal application preinstalled in her Macbook. She had no idea it was even a thing in her computer. The list of commands used was ls, cd, and on a whim I was surprized to find Emacs was preinstalled as well. Her parents saw literally everything I did and still told her I hacked her computer. 🙄
There was a fairy large era of macs that were way more open to customization then windows. Probably still true because Microsoft has gotten a lot more aggressive about locking down their os and the average gamer has no clue how to install mods if it isn’t from the Steam workshop.
I think this is pretty reasonable and shouldn’t be a hot take. IMO, what macOS does better is to provide a simple UI that protects less experienced users well enough from themselves while keeping developer tools accessible and close enough to standard Unix stuff. It’s easy to get into but not too hard to move past the basics once you need to. In Windows, I often feel like the opposite is true. The UI is a complicated mess of three different UIs that doesn’t even protect users all that well, and developer tools are often separate products with their own learning curve that are aggressively Windows-specific.
Tech “literacy” is one thing. Let’s also compare productivity between users.
The command line is not the end all and be all of tech literacy. It’s one access point which doesn’t get used that much outside of copy-pasting sudo commands from the internet.
Oops, looks like some Linux guys got triggered by my post. Poor babies.
I think that being forced to learn about WINE at a young age may have been beneficial actually (if extremely unpleasant)
So unpleasant.
There are dozens of us
I remember when Wine was in alpha for twelve years (and then beta for three more). Was surprised to learn that it finally exited that stage, some time ago already.
I’d take macOS over Windows anyday if those were my only choices. It’s UNIX so a ton of Linux knowledge is transferrable.
(At least starting in 1999, prior Mac OSes weren’t Unix based but still IMO pretty neat)
As always, this is a relatively tech-knowledgeable platform. 99% of people didn’t know shit about computers before or after the advent of the iphone, and even before that, building a PC wasn’t on the radar for most.
OTOH fixing issues with computers, PC users would know way more than a Apple user because PCs had way more issues. Not really a flex, but certainly relevant to the discussion.
PCs had way more options, as it was an open hardware system sort of (any company could make the hardware). If your apple broke, there was just nothing you could do too.
Sure. That was the pro and con for PCs. You could do whatever with them, but it meant that in doing whatever there was plenty of opportunity to break things or discover incompatibilities. Apple otoh was fuck you, you’re only doing what we let you do. I despised the walled garden, so I’ve been PC/Windows/Linux forever.
Exactly, and I can’t stand the walled garden either ☺️👍🏻
If someone has a PC they may be more likely to use it to game and also to pirate games and mod games. That can actually lead to learning quite a bit about computers when it comes to the file system which lot of people don’t understand these days, and also following instructions when it comes to completing computer tasks. That sets a pretty good basic starting point. It can also lead to wanting to build their own PC and watch more tech related content.
So can push people from just a simple media consumption device to wanting to tinker.
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I hate Apple with all my guts, but in all fairness:
problem-solving skills surely don’t correlate. Tech-illiteracy though…very likely does. By anectodal knowledge at least.
What about people who started on DOS?
Or AmigaOS?
Ummm how do kids turn out if you install Linux Mint on a cheap laptop and give it to them to screw around with? Asking for a friend.
It leads the kid to Arch. I hope you prepared to always hear “I use Arch, btw.”
I’ll let you know in 10 years.
My cousin became an IT tech. I set her up with Ubuntu on a cheap desktop when she was about 12.
One of us.
