Easy, which one has the highest interest rate. If you pay off your hdd now, do you save on loan interest? Then that 1000 is worth more because it’s 1000+ the Interest you now won’t have to pay. Same for savings. My savings rate is ~3.6% APY, so 1000 after a year is 1036, not much extra, but that’s a meal or two.

Or Yolo it into the stock market, and potentially make 20% ($200) on it by next year.

It depends what you think the future holds.

Boring answer is: can you put it in a Roth IRA or other post-tax advantaged account? That’s for if you think the world will be around when you retire.

If you think the price of ram is gonna double again, buy a 64 GB kit of DDR5 now and sell it on Craigslist next year

Or if you believe that memories now are worth more than memories in the future, just spend it on things that make you happy. This is free money, Noone can force you to be responsible

That’s a lot of misplaced trust you’re putting into graduate school admins.

That’s probably exactly what they did, deployed a sbc + some off the shelf model and increased the price 300x by making a black plastic shell.

I don’t remember if supernote is OSS, but I’ve got the A6, and I think they got an A5 and A4 sized one. Pricey though.

I got 16 gb on my W11 laptop, and I’m regularly bouncing off the 13 gb point where swap/ compression/ whatever kicks in and shit gets slow, doing relatively benign shit like browsing the web, YouTube and Gmail open, and vscode running working on some python shit. On 8 gb I’d probably have to use my phone for everything except vscode to get it to fit. It’s not the lightest possible workload, but it shouldn’t be slamming swap so regularly.