Pros: Short story, it works! Purchased about a year ago. Couple of weeks ago, mains power bounced up and down 4 times in 60 seconds, then went out for good for a few hours. UPS seems to have about 20 minutes of power at a 250 watt draw, or thereabouts. When UPS battery got to 50%, I had it trigger shutdown of the CPU. That all triggered very nicely, got a clean shutdown, everything worked as expected. Yay! BTW -- this is with Linux, Debian Stable, using a USB cable between CPU and computer. On the UPS, I mostly left everything at factory defaults, so my app is simple, undemanding.

Cons: None.

Pros: Seemed to work great for 24 hours. Part of RAID-mirror array. RAID reconstruction ran at about 150MBytes/sec which is more-or-less the spec'ed performance. So that means all 4TBytes of the disk got written to on the first day of install.

Cons: Day two: Symptoms: system randomly freezes for 3-20 seconds at a time, but otherwise normal when not frozen. No tell-tale messages in `syslog`. Looking at `iostat -x` reports that the new disk is taking 1-7 seconds!! to perform a single write! Yow! OK, so that explains the freezes. Removing it from the RAID gets system to behave normally. `smartctl` shows `188 Command_Timeout 65538` which parses out to be two timeouts, one greater than 5 seconds: this is a symptom of impending drive failure. See backblaze report on `SMART 188 Command_Timeout` Just in case: halt system, reset the SATA cable, resent the power connector. Reboot. Works great for 5 minutes, reconstructing the RAID array. Slower than before. At 100MBytes/sec ten minutes later, running at 50MBytes/sec Half-hour later, bouncing between 8MB/sec and 60MB/sec maybe averaging 25. As I write this review: perf dropped to 300KBytes/sec, response times (the `await` column) to 2-3 seconds per write! Yikes! I'm ordering a new hard drive in about 5 minutes. Just a different brand.

Overall Review: Did not survive 48 hours of use.

Pros: I was looking for something cheap for a low-end box. Cheap has always worked great in the past.

Cons: Bought new in 10 June 2021 died early July 2022 -- so it lasted 13 months. Not impressed by that. Seems that I accidentally bought a second one while not paying attention. The second one lasted 22 months: July 2022 (new) to May 2024. Would have been cheaper to pay three times as much to get something better.

Overall Review: Even if it's cheap .. I expect it to last 5+ years.

Pros: Reasonable price.

Cons: I read online: "lead-acid UPS batteries should last 4 years under ideal conditions, and 3 years under high-temperature/heavy load conditions. I'm running a home PC on this. We loose power no more than 4-6 times a year, usually for no more than a few seconds. Given this light-duty application, I expected the battery to last much much longer. I've had lead-acid automotive (car) batteries last ten years. Those get shaken around on potholes, endure summer heat and winter snow. I don't understand why a battery sitting on the floor in an air-conditioned room only lasts 2 years.

Overall Review: I assume the short lifetime was due to low-quality materials used in manufacture. The hassle of dealing with this is not worth it. For the price, I'm thinking I should buy a car battery and jerry-rig it. Car batteries last a decade. I've heard that Lithium-ion are available for UPS, have not looked at price or durability, but I've had laptop batteries that last a decade, so ....

Pros: 1/2 hour into backup. So far so good.

Cons: Missing S.M.A.R.T. functions. This makes the thing untrustworthy, if I cannot view the bad sector count and other SMART info, that correlate with pending disk failure. For all I know, this thing has 5000 bad sectors, and is one failure away from total failure. I mean, I cannot even read the model number and the serial number! I cannot even see if this really is a new disk, or its used. (I've bought other brands in the past, sold as "new/refurbished", which had SMART show that they were 5 years old, had been in constant use, and had a pile of errors. The vendor had clearly bought used disks from some cloud company, and resold them as "refurbished".) The intentional blanking of SMART info by a vendor is a 100% guarantee that the vendor is trying to hide something from the consumer. The disk is somehow damaged, used, not up to specs. Vendor may claim that the disk is still "fit for purpose", but is still fobbing off 2nd-rate damaged goods. I suspect most customers simply don't notice, but it is a big red warning flag when you do see it.

Overall Review: After half an hour, it still works. That's probably "good enough" for a backup disk (?) The lack of SMART info is a red flag that indicates the vendor is dishonest, and is trying to hide some defect.

Pros: * Great Hardware Specs! * Great battery life!

Cons: * Linux drivers in pitiful state. Vendor needs to work with Linux people and fix this!

Overall Review: I wanted a cheap cheap cheap laptop with lots of RAM and a fast CPU and great battery, and this was it! Nothing else came even close! So I ordered this with confidence, and I think I'm happy with it. I guess. ... there are some glitches. About 5 minutes of booting it and using Windows, I was ready to flash Linux on it. (I hate Windows; I know Linux upside-down and inside-out. For my work, Linux is a non-negotiable must-have.) And this is where the problems started. In historic order: * Just sticking in a Linux bootstick is not enough; it boots to Windows. Need to get into BIOS to tell it to boot from USB stick. * The BIOS boot screen is carefully hidden, but half-a-dozen reboots while poking F1, F2, F12 and/or DEL got me into BIOS. * BIOS is ... weird. Like really weird, nothing like anything I'd seen before. * Designating the boot device was .. really weird. Figured it out, but it was ... weird. * Installed. But WIFI doesn't work. Why? Need to have the latest and greatest Linux kernel to get working WIFI (I'm running 5.18.15 right now) Driver is `rtw_8821ce` * The only distro with a Linux kernel that is new enough is Debian Testing. Which is great, but more bleeding-edge than most will tolerate. * With working WIFI, the rest of the install can be completed. Everything works great, except for a few teeny-weeny issues: * Wifi won't resume after being suspended (by closing the lid) Need to reboot to get it to work. I will work with LKML to fix this, but it will take months. * Sound does not work. So no youtube. I don't know why. I assume its a bad device driver. Haven't figured it out yet. Will need quality LKML time, too. Other than that, it works great: * Got 6-8 hours of battery on a very long airplane flight with no electric outlets on the plane. * Camera works great; did multiple multi-hour zoom meetings (using cell phone for audio) * Fanless! I hate fans! I love laptops that don't make noise! * Fast! It's actually slightly faster than a 7-year-old beefy server that I have. * Used it all day, every day, for 6 weeks straight, doing development and also browsing. No issues Annoyance/possible problem(?): * Runs really hot. I'm not used to having laptops run this hot. My last one had a dinky CPU that never got hot (and it was fanless, too). Is this going to be a problem? Will it burn out early? I plan to keep this laptop for 6-8 years; I don't want it to die after only two years. See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1016395 for more info