Does your Office-issued Laptop Suck?

[taemo]

we switched from HP x360 to Surface Laptop 4 (AMD) earlier this year and has been a nice upgrade.
the 7th gen i7 with 2 cores cant compare with a Ryzen 5 and 6 cores, only disappointing spec is 256GB SSD instead of 512GB but doesnt bother me.
my work is mostly a bunch of edge tabs open, outlook, RDC Manager excel and visio.

even when working from home, most of the stuff I do can be done through my home browser but I still have a VPN RDP session to my work laptop that I jump into occasionally.

I know some of our engineers and analyst have SL4 with Intel CPU, and so far no major complaint. We have a high end user that we had to give a Surface Laptop Studio.

our BA has been working at home since covid using a M1 Mac Mini and loving it

[bjstare]

I'm on a 2.5 yr old thinkpad. i5, 8Gb.

Not a power user. 90% emails and teams calls, the rest is excel and ppt. I hate having many things open at the same time, so usually constrained to just what I'm working on with a few tabs open to the correct sharepoint sites so I can access files quickly when I need them.

That being said, my computer has been going downhill rapidly lately with even a couple of xls files open so I'll be pushing for early renewal.

[sabad66]

My work issued i5 surface pro sucks balls. I have an older gen compared to what they are issuing now (I had bad luck and my first day at the new company was a month before they started issuing the new ones), so not sure if the new ones are better. All I know is they look a bit sleeker and have usb-c so I assume they are at least slightly better hardware specs.

I manage by being conscious about closing tabs in Edge, closing outlook items, and then doing a full shutdown at the end of the day vs just putting it to sleep.

I feel like the daily restart is an easy low hanging fruit thing that will help most people see a minor boost (if they aren’t already doing it)

And another thing, single-click the battery icon in your sys tray and make sure it’s on High Performance. By default it is set to Balanced, and I found it made a slight improvement by switching to High Performance

[pheoxs]

Had a decent desktop at work, could remote desktop into it from my home computer and worked great because it had a decent bit of power and everything was local for pulling databases and crunching calculations. Someone complained they had to use their personal computer to connect so IT came and swapped all our desktops out for surfaces. Now I have a weaker CPU, half the ram, less storage, and it struggles to do the same PI calcs over the network. Probably cut my producitivity by a solid 20%.

Dumb. I hate surfaces with a passion, I swear only middle management likes them so they can look fancy in meetings without actually doing work.

[suntan]

Every nitwit remoting in from a home computer is a network vulnerability.

Sometimes when I'm feeling a bit peckish I just want to ransomware the fuck out of a bunch of companies.

[bjstare]

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Dumb. I hate surfaces with a passion, I swear only middle management likes them so they can look fancy in meetings without actually doing work.

If your work is writing emails, and looking at other people's ppt presentations (marking them up with notes/questions/etc), the surface is actually pretty perfect.

On the other hand, if you think that people aren't working unless they're running calcs, then I'll see myself out.

[LilDrunkenSmurf]

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M1 Pro does 2 external, m1 max does 3.

I’m so glad I don’t have to use teams or meets regularly, only with some vendors. They chugged the i5 and ruins my day. Haven’t tried on m1 yet.

Zoom native m1 version uses almost no cpu or battery. I’ve done 12 hrs of zoom over 2 days on my mba on a single charge.

Great, when I'm forced into an upgrade, M1 max for me then.

[sabad66]

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Had a decent desktop at work, could remote desktop into it from my home computer and worked great because it had a decent bit of power and everything was local for pulling databases and crunching calculations. Someone complained they had to use their personal computer to connect so IT came and swapped all our desktops out for surfaces. Now I have a weaker CPU, half the ram, less storage, and it struggles to do the same PI calcs over the network. Probably cut my producitivity by a solid 20%.

Dumb. I hate surfaces with a passion, I swear only middle management likes them so they can look fancy in meetings without actually doing work.

I’d wager that the decision to stop allowing people to remote in from home computers was less about an employee complaint, and instead was because finally someone competent realized how dumb of a risk it was to allow that in the first place.

This is why most large companies are enforcing data security standards and SOC 2 compliance with companies they partner with. Insane how widespread this seems to be but at least seems to be trending in the right direction.

[pheoxs]

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If your work is writing emails, and looking at other people's ppt presentations (marking them up with notes/questions/etc), the surface is actually pretty perfect.

On the other hand, if you think that people aren't working unless they're running calcs, then I'll see myself out.

My issue is the one size fits all approach. They simply say hey they like them so lets make everyone have them, instead of realizing everyones jobs are different.

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I’d wager that the decision to stop allowing people to remote in from home computers was less about an employee complaint, and instead was because finally someone competent realized how dumb of a risk it was to allow that in the first place.

This is why most large companies are enforcing data security standards and SOC 2 compliance with companies they partner with. Insane how widespread this seems to be but at least seems to be trending in the right direction.

I don't think it's that hard. We don't actually connect onto the network itself. Have to install Citrix along with a bunch of security certifications to launch a web portal that then launches the embedded RDP application from within there. It's basically browser based mouse / keyboard control for most things. We can't actually attach any USB or printers or file transfers through there so I don't really see much vulnerabilities there.

[suntan]

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I’d wager that the decision to stop allowing people to remote in from home computers was less about an employee complaint, and instead was because finally someone competent realized how dumb of a risk it was to allow that in the first place.

This is why most large companies are enforcing data security standards and SOC 2 compliance with companies they partner with. Insane how widespread this seems to be but at least seems to be trending in the right direction.

It's pretty well impossible to have SOC2/SOC3/ISO 27001 compliance with WFH employees.

[ExtraSlow]

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It's pretty well impossible to have SOC2/SOC3/ISO 27001 compliance with WFH employees.

How compliant is Wechat? asking for a freind...

[suntan]

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I don't think it's that hard. We don't actually connect onto the network itself. Have to install Citrix along with a bunch of security certifications to launch a web portal that then launches the embedded RDP application from within there. It's basically browser based mouse / keyboard control for most things. We can't actually attach any USB or printers or file transfers through there so I don't really see much vulnerabilities there.

lol oh man.

[rage2]

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My issue is the one size fits all approach. They simply say hey they like them so lets make everyone have them, instead of realizing everyones jobs are different.

I was a Surface Pro user up to 5. It was a decent machine and pretty much one size fit all (just spec with different CPU/memory for needs). Did some heavy work, video and photo editing, and decent battery life especially with the keyboard battery. We had some engineering staff that was quite happy with them as well.

I just wished Microsoft didn't fuck up the user experience when they literally have their own hardware running their own software. The # of times I lost my work because it decides to not wake up from sleep 2% of the time really soured me on the experience. Nothing like sitting in a meeting waiting 5-10 mins for the damn thing to come back up.

That said, maybe it's not even their fault, and it's Intel's fault, because the sleep -> wake quirks weren't as bad, but still persistent on my i5 MacBooks. From monitors not connecting from wake, to just slow as shit and needing a reboot anyways, it was such a massive pain in the ass transitioning from my dock to other areas in the office as a laptop.

[LilDrunkenSmurf]

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It's pretty well impossible to have SOC2/SOC3/ISO 27001 compliance with WFH employees.

We're working on SOC2 compliance right now as a SaaS company, with WFH employees. All our computers will have 2 different agents on it, an MDM agent, and a compliance agent.

[killramos]

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Dude, we get it - you like to remote in.

And yet people still buy overpowered laptops that still suck.

[suntan]

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We're working on SOC2 compliance right now as a SaaS company, with WFH employees. All our computers will have 2 different agents on it, an MDM agent, and a compliance agent.

And it's not enough. Sorry.

[mr2mike]

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How compliant is Wechat? asking for a freind...

Is that like a group version of chatterbate?

[suntan]

Everything is a group version of chaturbate if you're brave enough.

[ExtraSlow]

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Everything is a group version of chaturbate if you're brave enough.

This guy knows what's up. #teambuilding

[cyra1ax]

On a work issued 8th gen i5 Dell tablet and I hate the thing with a burning passion. Only thing I use it for is Teams calls and remoting into my workstation. I'm surprised the battery hasn't expanded yet with how hot the damn thing gets, fans are constantly running with zero effect. Found out during WFH that the lag I was seeing during remote sessions was actually being caused by the tablet, I don't get that same issue when connecting from my home PC.