Help Me Select a Replacement Laptop for a Win10 EOL situation (NOT AN "AI PC")

Hardware Hub Laptops & Netbooks
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Hey everyone,

I’ve been very disappointed with the direction laptops have been going for the last decade+ in the “Ultrabook” era. For myself I am primarily a Desktop/Workstation user and very rarely touch laptops. For my own use, I still have one of the last real thick Dell Latitudes from 2013 (a Latitude E6540) which is fine for me, as I am primarily a Linux user and don’t need Windows.

The better half - however - has been using a basic laptop purchased in ~2016 or so, which was just unceremoniously turned into e-Waste by Microsoft, which is really frustrating considering the hardware is still perfectly fit for purpose.

I’d prefer to not monkey around with disabling hardware compatibility checks for Windows 11. I mean, I know how to do it, it’s not that hard, but I don’t want to deal with all the eventual and inevitable issues from doing so.

Anyway, so I am looking around for a replacement laptop for her.

The criteria are something like this:

1.) Must not be a Chinese brand. Not even Lenovo.

2.) Things like drives, RAM and WLAN cards must be accessible (preferably without having to remove 28 tiny little screws and taking the whole thing apart and possibly bending the chassis in the process) and must be user upgradeable. If any of these parts are soldered to the board, I will not buy it.

3.) Must not be an “AI PC” or a “Copilot PC”. If it has an NPU I’m not buying it. We are both irritated by the AI trend.

In general AI adds no value to the user, and is best considered as little more than another way to spy on the user, and thus it is important that this hardware does not exist in the machine, as even if the option exists to disable these features, you can never trust that they are truly off.

If it so much as has a “Copilot” button on the keyboard, she will likely be unhappy. I know the key can be remapped, but the very fact that it is visible is likely to irritate her every time she sees it, so the ideal situation would be for it to not exist at all.

4.) The machine will never run a game. It will entirely be used for basic web/email/office type of use, so it doesn’t need a ton of performance.

5.) Preferably budget friendly. I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars here. The machine it is replacing was a basic one. One of those basic laptops (from a major OEM brand) that could be had for ~$225 at a big box store. I know there has been inflation, and now there are tariffs but I am not looking to go upscale with this one.

I’ve been clicking around vendor sites, and have not been happy at all with what I have been finding. Seemingly there is nothing but junk out there. I’d take my 12 year old Latitude E6540 over the let of them, if I had the choice.

I’d appreciate any suggestions of places to start looking.

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I would look at framework 13(https://frame.work/) Very easy to work on. Great long term upgrade path and they even have open source cases so you can convert your old main board into a homelab or basic server. They are a US based company.

Beyond that Dell or HP have solid options, but you won’t be able to upgrade as easy for most of them when compared to the framework, but you can save some money that way.

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Thank you for your input!

I was familiar with Framework, but I looked them up, and yikes. The pricing is a bit up there… I know a $200 basic laptop is no longer feasible, but I also wasn’t looking to spend several times that.

Actually, it looks like I was in the wrong section at first. Slightly cheaper options exist, but I may have to DIY it. Not that I ma a stranger to anything DIY…

Dell seems to ahve a good deal on their base model Dell 14 Pro (PC14255) right now at $509 for a laptop with a 6C/12T AMD Ryzen 5 220. It only has a 256GB TLC drive, though that is probably sufficient for her use. Of a little more concern is that it ships with only 8GB of RAM. That feels a little tight even for basic use in 2025.

On the plus side, I think I have confirmed that it is (at least relatively) easy to work on, and neither RAM, drive nor WLAN card are soldered to the board, which is good. I may have to immediately buy and install a 16GB RAM kit, but other than that it is doable.

Edit: Come to think of it. DDR5 doesn’t typically come in sizes smaller than 8GB, so I guess it just has a single channel 8GB configuration in it. Maybe I can’ just find a second identical stick and pop it in…

The presence of the “copilot key” on the keyboard is an annoyance though.

Also, the 14" model may be too small. Not sure…

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I’m happy with my Framework 13. Been running it for a couple years now. Only issue I had was about a month in the mainboard died. Took one email chain and 12 hours later I had a new board installed and working (they overnighted a new board).

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Looks like there is also a deal on the Dell Pro 16 (PC16255) (which solves the potential screen size problem) This model also comes with 16GB from the factory, which means I don’t have to go hunting for a second stick of RAM, which is good. At $599 it seems pretty decent. I just hope Dell’s stock 256GB TLC drives aren’t too terrible, but that said, I probably have an old Samsung 980 Pro kicking around somewhere I could plop in if necessary.

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As I am investigating here, I had a thought.

There is a strong desire to avoid any kind of NPU/AI implications for spyware reasons. (The prospect of what Microsoft might actually do with Recall data is truly dystopian, so it is best if there is no NPU so it can’t)

but I wonder if by doing so I am painting myself into a corner here. For all I know, these days where Microsoft sees it fit to just turn perfectly acceptable hardware into e-waste with the stroke of a pen, how long until there is a version of Windows for which having an NPU is a hard requirement?

It almost feels like that is the way all of this is going.

I don’t want to be back in this same situation, having to needlessly replace hardware because Microsoft says so yet again in just a couple of years…

Does anyone know if Dell’s “Pro” variants that come with NPU’s have any way of disabling the NPU in the BIOS? And if you do, does Windows 11 Pro revert to a non-“AI PC” state, or would that require a clean install? Is the included digital key for the “AI PC” version also good for the standard version?

I’d appreciate anyone who has experience with these things chiming in.

Because if it can just be disabled, then there is no short term harm including it. At least then it will be there in the increasingly creepy future where it might be forced on us as a hard requirement.

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You could always disable the device in the device manager. If that has any implications for privacy, I don’t know. Of course it seems realistic npus will become mandatory at some point like TPM today.

If that’s the main concern Linux would be my recommendation but I assume you have blockers for that? For privacy I’d also trust apple more (not fully) but that comes with its own drawbacks.

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The DIY isn’t really that much in the way of DIY. I think it’s just adding storage, RAM, and keyboard. So probably ~30 min for someone inexperienced.

They definitely have a bit of a tax for their design choices. I find they are overall worth it, but at the end of day if it doesn’t fit your budget I do not blame ya.

I would really look at the support docs for them. Sometimes the stock RAM is soldered with you having a spare slot in which to upgrade which can make RAM compatibility a real pain. Want to say when we had them at my last job we had to buy RAM from Dell to even get it to work.

I don’t think the lack of a NPU is going to stop them. At least from where I was sitting this time last year as a sys admin for large organization(talking +40k users). The impression I had in my meetings with the MS rep was that this is coming one way or another to everyone.

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This angers me more than I can possibly describe.

The way free markets are supposed to work is that the consumer is supposed to demand something, and multiple competitors are supposed to duke it out with one and other over who can best meet the desires of the consumer at the lowest price.

You should never have a company that feels it knows better than the customer what the customer should have.

I don’t want telemetry, I don’t want cloud integration, I don’t want a Microsoft Ecosystem of apps and services, I don’t want anything AI. I just want a standalone local operating system that is a blank slate, onto which I can install the programs I use, and only the programs I use, and I want it to never reach out over any network interface to anything outside the local machine unless I tell it to (or manually set up some kind of purposeful automation of my own)

As the owner of the machine, the only acceptable arrangement is one where I am in absolute control at all times, nothing ever gets done without my requesting it, and nothing ever gets done against my wishes. These are non-negotiables.

The modern business model of treating the user as a product and selling it to advertisers has completely broken the free market model, and we need to end it. It needs to be burned to the ground regardless of the consequences.

I’ve been avoiding this bullshit for years by running nothing but Linux on my own devices, but I can’t control the enterprise ecosystem, which means I am still forced to use Microsoft products at work.

I also dual boot to a very stripped down Windows install for the occasional game, and the rare occasion I need to do something that won’t work in Linux.

My better half is actually also - by way of me - primarily a Linux user, but she too occasionally has to boot into Windows for something.

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It’s unfortunately the world we live in. At the end of the day I do not think there ever really was a free market and I doubt any of us would truly want one. A layer of regulation has always been needed and it feels like we are relearning the lessons of the early 20th century all over again. Hopefully some form of commonsense prevails or MS shoots itself in the foot so badly windows collapses in on itself.

Done the same here on my end and even got my wife on Linux as well. She mostly games so put her on Bazzite and so far she’s had very few issues.

Best of luck your search for a laptop! Hoping my recommendation and insight helps.

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Does it have to be a PC? What are the mobility requirements? Why both the upgradability and the budget constraints?

As far as possibilities of spyware is concerned, I think that ship had already sailed, sunk, and an artificial reef and navigational hazard by the 2010s, with Intel ME and AMD PSP.

Not having an NPU also does not do all that much, as long as there is any GPU with compute capability, iGPU included. Even the regular old CPU SIMD compute, even on Intel’s gimped client implementations, is often less than a single order of magnitude less than the typical NPU compute found on the same package, for the same jobs.

I’d almost recommend a Raspberry Pi in official desktop packaging, maybe running off a power bank, except that it is not really all that upgradable without replacing the whole thing. It does fulfil your other posted requirements fairly well.

Even that is not quite open beyond all possibilities and suspicion, I don’t think.