My hard working little Dell XPS that I've had for 7 years has been showing signs of breaking. It's the battery and the harddrive and as Dell discontinued the XPS line a while back there isn't that many spare parts available and I was certainly not getting their new line with "dedicated Copilot" button or whatever integrated AI horror most of the major brands are doing now.
This really couldn't have come at a worse time too, the prices of RAM, GPUs and general hardware is skyrocketing because of the AI Sloppificaiton pushed by NVIDIA and others.
So I was hoping to do a gentle switch over to Linux on a new machine. But the new machine purchase had quickly become a now or never kinda thing.
So I got a Framework laptop, the DIY edition, and it was such a pleasant, if a little scary when there was a boot error to diagnose, experience in physically putting together a computer again! Cannot recommend it enough actually getting to see the parts and components that make up the machine you are using.
I'd not done a PC build in nearly 2 decades since I built my tower PC for going back to education with. And that might as well be century in the tech world. So Framework was a nice little hybrid way of getting used to the newer hardware without trying to do it completely from scratch.
My shock of the size of a 1TB SSD will always be stuck in my mind, the last time I upgraded a harddrive it was a HDD, with actual spinning disc, small fan and requirement to plug into the right port if the PSU. That and it was at the time the impressive size of 60GB, which was pricey back then but I was doing video editing and 3D modelling so space filled up quick.
Anyway I've put together in an afternoon, then installed Win11 as I'm not quite ready to have Linux as my main OS just yet. But a lot of debloat and some registry edits later it is as "clean" a Win11 install as I can get at least.
The best thing about it though, is the Framework laptop is designed to be upgradable, it's designed to have parts replaced and upgraded as needed. It also has swappable ports so I can also use my existing and old tech with it. No disc drive, but a swappable USB A port and my external disc drive connects super easily.
I'm excited to have a piece of tech that can actually be taken apart and upgraded though. That tower PC was kept going for years until the motherboard couldn't support the memory requirements of my work anymore. The thin, lightweight, but closed and sealed hardware we have these days maybe great for portability, but it's only really great for the manufacturer and their profit margin, not so much for the planet or the consumer.
So as an avid user of tech until it can't be repaired or reused to get the absolute most out of it Framework seemed like it would be well worth giving a go and so far I'm glad I did.