My existing work laptop was around 4 years old – so it was time to get another one…
I use my work laptop for writing documents, RDP’ing to other systems while at client sites, email, internet…. so pretty basic functionalities – and have always gone an appropriately basic laptop.
This time, I went a HP 250 G3 (because it was cheap, but still ok’ish specs) and swapped out the HDD with an SSD – as I think its a really cheap way to massively improve boot and response times.
While the laptop has generally been fine, the RALink 3290 “wireless N” card is completely useless and only connects at 72Mbps…. and googling around this seem to be a common issue with RALink cards. This makes copying a file of any reasonable size ludicrously slow.
I was previously unaware that wireless-N cards came in any other flavour than supporting 300mbs connections (but understand the throughput rates with different cards can vary significantly) – but now I have learnt that the wireless-N standard doesn’t necessarily define connection speed.
In short, this “feature” makes a laptop that would otherwise be reasonable for the price, quite unusable.