Linux definitely seems much better in that respect than Windows.

Hmm, I guess I could keep it on a table in the corner to use it as a terminal to control music streaming from my server, so I don’t need to turn on my main PC (or let guests use my main PC) for that.

Having a spare laptop I can use on the sofa to experiment and learn stuff without worrying about messing up anything important might be useful too. I might be able to do that just as easily by using my new laptop as a terminal to SSH or VNC into my RPi or M700, and if I’m using docker there may be little risk of messing up anything important, but there’s always a bit of a risk, and if I mess up badly on a spare laptop I can just quit until I feel like reinstalling it and starting again, whereas if I mess up on my RPi or M700 and break something important I’d need to fix it immediately, when I might not have the time or energy to do that.

Maybe I could use this laptop as a pfsense machine. It’s got a Gigabit Ethernet port and it looks like I can get a USB2 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter for about £15, so if that would be sufficient to maintain full speeds with my Gigabit fibre Internet, that could be an option.

I hadn’t thought of putting the guts into another case. I don’t think I’ll do that with this laptop, as it’s running OK and it has a functional monitor and kbm (mostly, the v key is a bit unreliable), but if I definitely wanted to use it as a headless machine to run 24/7 off the mains (with a UPS backup instead of the battery) that would be an option.

Yeah, it’s not great. My RPi with an SSD and 6 USB HDDs is only drawing 45W, and about 30W of that is the HDDs.

I’ll check what my M700 draws later.

Windows always seems to be running something in the background, either Defender updates or telemetry, so Linux should be much better once the updates have finished.

Yeah, running it without the battery (if that works, I don’t think it does with all laptops) is safer but that loses the advantage of having the battery backup, and if you can’t leave it running 24/7 that rather limits what you can use it for.

I’ve got a smart plug that measures the power used, so I’ll see what that shows.

I just reinstalled Linux Mint on the whole drive and even with that it uses 60-80% of the CPU when updating. Synaptic used about 40%, right now two instances of rsync are using about 40% between them, dpkg sometimes uses 30-43%, so I’m not surprised that Windows with all its background processes and telemetry would use more.