I just bought this yesterday for my 16 year old son. He is in year 11, doing subjects heavy in maths and science.
His old laptop was 8 years old and falling. I had a budget of $1200, reluctantly, as I knew that DDR prices and storage prices had gone through the roof recently.
Typically, I have spent $700-800 on laptops for my kids.

I walked into a local retailer and this was presented as a laptop that had been ordered and not collected or paid for. Price was $1,999 firm.

After some negotiation, I walked out with it for $1,500.
Way more than I was comfortable spending but it seems to be a good deal, unless I am missing something?

Idk how much Australian dollars are compared to pounds, but it seems like very good specs for the price. I got a fairly similar laptop (4080 vs 5060 would be the main difference) for about £3000 last year

Not sure on those specific specs but on ebay you can often comfortably find ex-corporate laptops in mint condition for just 2-300 quid. Il never buy a first hand laptop after i "discovered" this trick.

£3000 is about $AUD5,600. Feeling a bit better about spending the money now

Are those prices in dollaridoos or did you already do a conversion?

In dollaridoos

Fair point. I like warranties when buy for school

Seems like a good deal.

I have a similar Lenovo Legion 5 and paid about $1500 for it. Loved it so much I bought one for my husband and daughter, lol.

Their customer service is amazing, we had a fan die in mine and they contacted me and within a week they had a guy AT MY HOUSE fixing it right there.

Amazing.

Also upgrading the RAM is easy peasy should you need to.

I'm out of the loop on prices, but I can tell you Windows Home is a disaster.
I've had the displeasure of having to interact with one and it was so anti-user, it still hurts to think about.

The bloatware is by default a scam. All the My Documents stuff is set to OneDrive by default, and i do mean all of it.

Copilot is on by default - that's browser, windows search and Office demos (you need a subscription to use them fully and they're all in the cloud, not really local). It will add itself to all texts created or edited with default Microsoft programs like notepad or Office. Any schoolwork done with Copilot active will possibly create problems for your kid at school.

Login is set to require an online connection by default. You literally have to set it manually so that you can login on your PC when the internet is down. Imagine my surprise when I had to reboot while offline and couldn't get past the welcome screen. We're not very welcome on our own PC anymore.

Files are encrypted by default, which sounds nice and safe, until something goes wrong. The access codes are kept in your Microsoft account, online, so if you don't have access there, you're screwed out of recovery.

File indexing is wonky, so Windows at times ends up keeping a cache or copy of everything, doubling occupied space for seemingly no reason. 100Gb gone missing for no reason, it's usually file indexing at work.

Every security-related* network request gets logged. It gets added to a specific file somewhere a Home user doesn't really have access to and needs to jump through hoops to find it. Windows 11 being telemetry hell full of spying bloatware makes a network request for location access every 5-15 minutes, which gets logged to that file.
It will generate an encrypted log file that will eventually reach over 100Gb in size, similar to file indexing only more routinely, that's a bitch to get rid of. I would know.

Windows Home treats the user as a delinquent juvenile offender. It's not your PC when you have it on, but a heavily restricted and surveilled privilege that everyone but yourself can control. Get rid of it.

That's a good deal for 1500 AUD. The Ryzen 7 250 might sound weak based on category alone ("two gens old", mid-midrange), but it's still a Zen4 Hawk Point 8C/16T little guy at 26-30W TDP, comes with a quite performant Radeon 780M (meaning you could game on it without the RTX, even!), and it easily goes toe to toe with the Apple M4 (regular base model, non-Pro/Max!).

What this means is that while the dedicated GPU is disabled, you should get pretty solid battery life - up to 5-6 hours I reckon - while also being able to game with slightly better performance than the Steam Deck, AND with the dedicated GPU - usually while connected to mains - you'll get proper performance around 90-120fps on high/est settings in most games.

Oh, and one more thing. You might've spent a bit more than you intended BUT you bought a more future-proof hardware at a steep discount (you spent 25% more than intended, the seller got 25% less than intended). That laptop will last you about as more in time as much more as you spent on it.

That's about $1000 USD. I'm general pleased with the enterprise Lenovo laptops I deal with, and the few consumer ones I have touched have left good impressions on me. I think for the hardware you got a great deal.

As far as Windows goes, I suggest debloating it at the very least. If you are not tech savvy and don't feel like digging, this tool is great. Just don't uninstall Edge.

Also, there is no cost associated with downloading and installing Windows pro or Enterprise. You could purchase a key off kinguin if the activation message annoys you, or run the massgrave script to pirate it.

Oof. Glad I bought my rig off a friend and paid in drugs.

We are on Lemmy.

I am obligated to not only ask that you switch to Linux (please do), but I also must suggest a distribution (Mint).

I don't make the rules.

I second both of Adulated_Aspersion's suggestions.

I think you mean Manjaro

I've loved my Lenovo Legion.

Sounds like the best deal, honestly

for school the specs are waaaaay too overkill. You can easily get away with much much lower and cheaper specs.

But had a quick browse for similar specs on ebay, and it looks like you can get second hand for roughly a little bit more (for your specs), so overall its a reasonably good deal for the specs

They guys who keep getting their domain cert expire over and over... and over... and over?

Praise be to our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds!

I heard CachyOS is the new hotness now. Mine is still running Mint though, because I like it and it just works.

What tool?

Yes, though I would endorse Fedora or an atomic variant e.g. Aurora or Bazzite

I use Arch btw, so it's my job to say you should totally use Arch.

You are a good dad for getting your son something he can really use. Most people would just give their kids a tablet or cheap out and get something that just barely works. This is a good machine I would happily use myself (after putting Linux on it). A bit chunky for taking it on the road, but presumably he would just use it at home anyways.

I mean that seems like a pretty good deal in USD... and possibly I need to go shopping for computers in Australia if that was AUD.

Genuinely curious, what do you even use a laptop for when doing maths and science? UK here and I did both at A-level which is year 12/13. I don't think we really touched a computer for it, maybe the occasional pdf of an old exam paper.

I had a laptop, but it was mostly used for running a minecraft server.

I use Nyarch, because I’m an arch user of exquisite taste, so it’s my job to say you should totally use Nyarch while I tip my fedora

I’ve been using Manjaro for a couple years, and of course didn’t see any of the hate for it when trying to pick a distro, or for the first like 6 months of using it. But tbh the only part of my manjaro experience that isn’t fine is that they disable hardware acceleration for h.264 and h.265, with no easy way to enable it. Which is very annoying since I run a Jellyfin server on my desktop. But overall it’s been trouble-free for me.

But along with the seemingly constant power struggles over there, makes it hard to recommend. I hear endeavor OS is the new “easy” arch

Okay so not sure why you posted this AFTER buying it and not asking before but here are my 5 cents:

1500 AUD are roughly $1000. I think this price is overall ok for the specs that you got, however I'm not sure about the specs themselfs.

Due to current RAM and GPU prices I would have bought a laptop with no dedicated GPU.
The integrated GPU is usually enough for watching videos, doing basic work and as long as you don't play any games (if you do so you shouldn't buy a laptop in the first place).

I'm not sure how it is in your case but most laptops I had have extendable/switchable RAM. I would have bought a laptop that has a single 8-16GB RAM stick pre-installed and has one extension slot so that you can upgrade once the RAM prices go down again.

Also get rid of this preinstalled Windows 11 Home that has likely a ton of bloatware preinstalled. I recommend a full clean Linux or Windows 10/11 Pro installation (btw here's a possibility how to activate it once installed).

Tips my fedora as a sign of respect, whilst secretly studying the blade.

Very fucking good deal. Well done mate.

typing up some essays, thats what i used family pc back a few decades ago

Great deal and it should last a while. Don’t listen to the people here recommending you uninstall windows, let your kid figure out what they want to do with it.

You can remove any 3rd party antivirus though, if it came installed. Defender is good enough.

The x50 hasn't seen any removed cores. Both 250 and 450 come with 8C/16T config, but the 450 has ~50% more raw performance based on benchmarks.

Problem sets in college are done in LaTeX. Lots of python and R in STEM. Not to mention essays, watching lectures, and taking notes.

Yeah honestly, not really knowing price trends in Australia, from the US this looks like a steal.

What're we taking here? This thing worth like 2 or 3 rocks of crack, or like 5 Marijuanas? Or what?

the hardest part of using Arch is the obligation to tell anyone that you use Arch. if you forget it won't boot anymore.

Remember to reinstall Windows, so you get rid of some of the bloat, if you aren’t gonna install Linux on it 😎

I think I just scooped speed paste into a baggy until we both felt it was about enough lol

if they cant/arent willing to move to linux, i recommend installing something like tiny11, a stripped-down version of windows 11, without ads, edge browser, copilot

OpenSUSE here. I dont recommend or condemn any actions unless you are comfortable and happy to do so.

YAST QUEEN.

https://github.com/christitustech/winutil

Chris Titus' debloating utility. Professionally, I perform much of the same.

I had a Yoga running morning Mint for a bit. It was quite solid.

dad got a deal tho

The only problem in this is the microslop, otherwise it looks all fine to me.

maybe MATLAB too?