My perfectly rebuilt $165 laptop - Windows 10 tweaks for productivity - Thinkpad E14 - Ryzen 5 4500U
Cinebench R20 2308 score is not high for a computer in 2024, as this is an 3-4 years old laptop, but it's higher than most laptops using the same AMD Ryzen 5 4500U CPU, of which most have a score lower than 2000. The Cinebench score may not justify the true processing power of this laptop because the CPU is proportionally more powerful than its integrated GPU, so an overall lower score is expected, but the CPU on this laptop is still super fast and capable.
Things fixed:
-CPU chip re-pasted and CPU fan cleaned
-Added an 8GB RAM module
-Reinstalled windows 10 and perfectly installed everything to my preference
Windows 10 can be tamed to make it a more productive machine. A lot of the windows 10 garbage features are disabled.
This laptop has two M.2 SSD slots. One already has 256GB. It has been partitioned into 2 drivers: 1 for the main windows 10 OS, and 1 for applications and backup; If I need more memory later on, I can add another SSD to the laptop. Having this second option is nice for all laptops, instead of requiring to carry external memory. External SSD could be more useful. It's tiny and more portable. In case of a fire, you can't really expect to save the laptop, but it's easy to take the SSD with you. Instead of buying off the shelf SSD, I recommend building your own. It's easy to find an M.2 SSD enclosure, and you can buy your own memory to put into the enclosure to make it a portable external SSD drive. The enclosure can be used as a reader for data recovery. The SSD module can be used inside your laptop if needed to be. It's more flexible that way.
For productive tasks such as video editing, you need to have a 15"+ screen size laptop. This is 14", and it's on the edge of being comfortable to work on. It's a trade off between screen size and portability. 14" is more portable while being less capable with applications with a lot of UIs. E14 is Lenovo's cheapest premium thinkpad lineup. It's thick-textbook heavy, but build quality is great, and the keyboard is great. The battery life is okay even aged 3-4 years, 12 hour and 43 minutes screen time on battery-saving mode. For a writer, a 12" laptop with 720p screen is more preferable, less eye strain and more battery life.
Note about screen resolution:
It's a gimmick to sell you something that you don't need. For a 14" laptop, under normal working distance between your eyes and the screen, you can't possibly see any pixel, so the extra resolution is wasted. Extra resolution means that the GPU would need to work harder, and so more energy is also wasted. For my 768p 15" laptop, I can't see any pixel at normal working distance, so it's good enough for me, but since its resolution is very small, the UI for some applications are not scaled correctly. It's really not the issue of my screen resolution, but a badly created application. Similarly, a lot of the badly designed web sites have scaling problems on a lower resolution screen. The dummy designers are using a high end computer with high resolution, so everything appears too big on your lower resolution screen. It's not your problem. It's their problem. Most professional web sites still work fine on lower resolution screens. In case you encounter a badly designed page, use the zoom out function of the browser.
Most people don't understand this, nor do they understand how to fix it. Having a higher resolution is a curse especially when the scale for the application/web-page is badly designed. The solution is simple and unconscionable to most people: it's to reduce the screen resolution. For most of the applications with a lot of UI to scale properly, I need to reduce my screen resolution from 1920x1080 to 1600x900; and now everything displays correctly, AKA, the front is not too small to see and the icon is not too small. Windows 10's own scaling doesn't work at all. It's garbage. Therefore the idea that you actually pay for a 2k screen for a small laptop is a very dumb idea.
To sum up, screen resolution is not the true cause of the scaling problem. Imagine there are two 720p monitors in 12" and 22". If the icon and text are designed for the 12" in a normal working distance of 20". The same icon and text would appear oversize viewed at the same 20" distance on the 22" screen, so resolution alone can't be used as the main design factor, and it is actually very challenging to create a design that works flawlessly on different screen size and resolution. Reducing a 1080p 14" screen to 900p is not an ideal solution in the technical sense, but it's the ideal solution in a practical sense. The 14" screen can have any resolution, including 1080p, but since the majority of these applications are badly scaled/designed, reducing the resolution will increase the text and icon size in a more correct proportion. Likewise, lower resolution laptops will be made obsolete, not because it's not working any more, but the lack of understanding, laziness and incompetence of the designers are to be blamed.