The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I bought a cheap Dell Inspiron with a qualcomm snapdragon cx gen2.  

First, the laptop couldn't get out of Windows s mode for two days.  That meant I couldn't install any third party programs like chrome, firefox, vscode or java.  it also failed to install many apps from the windows app store until today.

Gaming doesn't work fully.  While I expected many games to not be ported to arm, the game services installer needed for the xbox app fails on this CPU.  It throws dll errors constantly on login/reboot of windows or when trying to launch the xbox app. I reported this to microsoft.  A few games were installable on the device such as the microsoft jigsaw app and minecraft.

Thunderbird and virtualbox are not available on windows/arm64.  In fact, there are no VM apps available from third parties so far.  I found that hyper-v is available, but requires a pro windows license. I haven't paid the 99 dollars to find out if it works.

Battery life is good.  I'm seeing about 25% per 2-2.5 hours of use.  I'm down to 30% remaining since I got the device on saturday.  I've only charged it once.

This arm chip is not the new snapdragon elite x with the AI crap.  It's an older ARM chip so there are possibilities for some things to work on the upcoming platform that don't here.  Still, it's interesting to see the state of arm on windows.

Edge and chrome are fast on the device.  Firefox feels a little slugish compared to using it on windows x86_64 or linux. 

I was able to setup wsl on the device with debian.  None of the ubuntu installers worked despite some listing arm64 support.  I had to go cli and run the wsl --update and wsl --install -d Debian to get there though.