Although I have plenty of monitors, keyboards, and mice for the purpose, until recently, I rarely got around to docking my laptop — even though I know having multiple monitors is one of the few things that measurably increases productivity.

Before, when I’ve docked my laptop via a USB-C hub, whether using my laptop’s trackpad and keyboard or an external mouse and keyboard, I’ve put my laptop on the same desk as the monitor, out-of-the-way, in clamshell mode.

This configuration has some benefits: big high-resolution screen, ergonomics, 104-key keyboard, and single-cable undocking for all peripherals (including Ethernet and USB-C charging).

Recently, I tried docking the same way, but storing my laptop on its side on the floor beside my desk, and discovered: this is way better!

Not because I have more desk space to cover with coffee cups and books, but because I can run my in Maximum Performance profile at all times and I never hear the fans.

The difference between different CPU profiles’ performance is substantial. Everything feels sluggish on Quiet, and snappy on Performance, and the timings on localhost show that Performance profile can give objectively faster load times (by ~3x).

I bought a gaming laptop even though I’m not a gamer, because the price-to-performance blew the competition out of the water. The downside, aside from the B-grade aesthetics and build quality, is that even after customizing the fan curves as much as I dared, the fans are loud. As one forum user put it, it “sounds like a fighter jet taking off” compiling Rust or running a local LLM.

Now, that doesn’t matter.