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.

At work we buy workstation laptops for our engineers. From Dell, the exact same laptop cost $3,200 in January, $4,400 in April, and $5,900 as of mid-May.

We’re just not buying them and instead shopping different brands.

The AI bubble has absolutely fucked pricing for computers.

I picked up a loq over black Friday sales last year for $800. Very happy with it. Linux mint. A separate account that runs steam when connected to the living room entertainment center.

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

So, I bought something better spec than that shortly before they fucked up the ram and storage prices for about $400usd less. All told, you got a great deal, I think? It’s good hardware and I think lenovo isn’t putting backdoors in the hardware anymore.

Stay strong out there friends. Even in AUD, this shouldn’t be so expensive, right?

All of the comments below are relevant. Also being in Australia, school of distance is a thing. He only attends campus a few times a year for social activities and exams

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Overkill for the use case, great deal for the price. Also will last forever with 4 battery cells.

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

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.