Thinking of buying a framework myself, what should i look out for?

General Topics
#1

Hey all, I’m in need of a laptop in the near future as i am expecting to graduate high school this summer and need a laptop for my further education.

I want a reliable laptop that has all of the grunt i need for simple tasks and maybe a bit of light gaming during lunch break. I have a gaming PC at home so it doesn’t have to be a gaming powerhouse.

I’ve read a lot of reviews and the only thing i’m really divided about is the battery life, is it going to be enough to last me an entire day at school? the rest of the “problems” this laptop has are in my opinion quite manageable, but if you guys know anything i should know before buying one, i would greatly appreciate that.

BTW, i love the design approach on this laptop, this company is going to pave the way for enthusiast grade laptops if it keeps progressing the way it is now.

The specs i’m looking at right now are:
I7 1165G7
16-32 GB RAM idk
about 1 tb of storage

Thanks in advance!

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#2

I wouldn’t get the i7, just because it’d be more worth it to save the money towards a future mainboard or more memory, instead of spending it on the i7 for the miniscule CPU improvement, and reasonably small iGPU performance bump.

Battery life is- well it’s manageable, there’s a lot of tuning you can do, depending on what you’re doing it likely won’t last you through the full day though (Although this is less of a problem then it seems with the amount of charging ports everywhere). Of course if you’re just editing text documents you can tune it to make sure it lasts for long enough.

That’s about all, I really love my Framework and would highly reccomend it!

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#3

If you use Windows, I am not sure. If you use Linux, the answer is no as a default setting, but 8 - 10 hours can be possible by tuning, according to Linux battery life tuning - #174 by Richard_Tango-Lowy . An external battery pack might help you. See Anyone test external Laptop Battery packs yet? .

#4

Well for battery don’t use 32GRAM if you can use 16G

An entire day at school, what? On the computer all day. How many hours are you thinking of and what will you be doing?

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#5

Hi, and welcome to the forum!

This really depends on your workload. But my simple solution to battery life is always that I take a charger. My old laptop (not a Framework Laptop) got through most of the day most of the time, but in those few cases it didn’t I’d just put it on the charger for that last hour or two of the day.

Personally, I am very pleased with this laptop so far. The thing that bugs me the most personally is the audio codec. There’s a slight hiss when using the 3.5mm jack. I would have loved more battery life too, but it’s manageable most of the time, and again, I can take my charger (which happens to also be able to charge my phone and my headphones, which is a huge plus). But what pushed my to buy this laptop is all the great pro-consumer and sustainability features that you just don’t see in any other laptop. This way outweighs those smaller issues for me, and I’ve never been this happy with a laptop.

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#6

Four hours on the plane to Grenada with wi-fi: started at 90% and ended at 60%.

Friday I hosted a class over Zoom from the patio at the house I’m staying in. I was unable to plug in, so I figured battery life might be a close thing.

  • Display on full (bright Grenada sun)
  • Sound on full (loud Grenada street music)
  • Zoom session for 8 students
  • Power set to “Balanced”
  • Session was almost exactly 2 hours

My laptop started at 90% and ended at 12%.

This is an extreme use-case for me, as I’d rarely be in a position where I’ve cranked up everything and am unable to recharge. The laptop couldn’t have run much longer, but after two hours of teaching, I’m not sure I could’ve run much longer either.

While I’m traveling, I’ve been hibernating the laptop instead of suspending or shutting down. About every 5th wake my mouse glitches out wildly and I need to reboot. Might look into that once I’m back home.

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