Time for a laptop! I’ve always avoided them because a desktop is so much more powerful and upgradeable for the same price, and a smart phone filled my need for mobility. But something has to be said for the combination of power and mobility a laptop offers, and while a phone can be a fine substitute for some things, sometimes you need a bit more. So now I have a laptop.
This will be my first non-work laptop and I chose a solid mid-range machine with room for upgrades. I was tempted on one side by the ultra portable laptops, especially the Asus zenbook models because they are super light, but that portability comes at a cost – lower specs and almost nothing internally can be upgraded. I was also tempted on the other side by the gaming laptops with crazy specs and even priced a $7000 https://www.falcon-nw.com/) laptop with all the bells and whistles and a custom paint job. But this laptop isn’t meant to be the ultimate gaming machine, and my budget was a tenth of that so back to reality and it’s a mid-range for me – that custom paint job would have been nice though…
I chose the Acer Aspire E5-575G-53VG (that’s a mouthful, or keyboardful as it were) because it comes with solid performance (a core i5 processor, 8GB memory, an nvidia 940MX dedicated graphics processor and a 256GB solid state drive), has easy upgrade options (empty RAM slot, empty hard drive bay) and has plenty of connectors (2×3.0usb, 1×2.0usb, 1xusb c, HDMI, VGA, SD card reader) so I don’t have to buy a hub to connect everything. Plus it comes in at a base price of around $600 so adding in extra RAM and a hard drive to beef up the specs a bit still doesn’t break the bank.
Hardware
The laptop arrived pretty quickly (thanks amazon prime) and was packaged well.
After unpacking I turned it on to make sure it worked and was surprised when it had a better CPU than advertised!
Not a whole lot better, but it is the newer generation so it was still a nice surprise. The advertised CPU is a http://ark.intel.com/products/88193/Intel-Core-i5-6200U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-2_80-GHz) which comes with a 2.3GHz base frequency and turbo up to 2.8GHz, released in 2015 and is a 6th generation skylake intel chip; the CPU that came with the laptop is a https://ark.intel.com/products/95443/Intel-Core-i5-7200U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-3_10-GHz) with a base frequency of 2.5GHz and turbo up to 3.1GHz, released in 2016 and is a 7th generation kaby lake intel chip.
Once I determined that it all worked, and setup windows I installed the extra RAM and hard drive I also bought.
The base RAM is 8GB which is enough for most things, but I doubled up and got another 8GB (it’s in the clear plastic box in the above picture). The base hard drive is a 256GB solid state drive, which is super fast, like restart your computer in 20 seconds fast, but only enough storage for windows and two or three modern games. Since I am installing linux alongside windows and a number of games on each I also ordered a 1TB drive to expand the storage. Installation was pretty easy, the bays were accessible by just removing the back plate:
The empty bay on top is for hard drives and if you look carefully at the bottom bay you can see the right side is open for another stick of RAM. Here is a closeup with the RAM installed:
The green boards on the bottom are the RAM sticks and the one on the left is the RAM that came with the system, on the right is the newly installed stick. The green board across the top is the solid state drive. Speaking of hard drives here is the installation of the 1TB drive:
The empty bay really wants more storage attached.
It actually goes in upside down, and since the laptop itself is upside down the drive should spend most of the time right side up (although I don’t think it matters too much).
After booting up the RAM and harddrive were detected and worked, really easy install, just as easy as on a desktop really. So it was on to install the software I want.
Software
As I said earlier I installed both windows and linux on this machine, well after installing about 7 different flavors of linux because I wanted something a bit different than what I had, but eventually settled on the same one I currently use on my desktop, https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php). It’s stable, easy to setup, easy to use, and there are plenty of guides online to get it working or to fix something if it breaks.
Windows works pretty well out of the box, but I made a few tweaks to stop sending so much info to microsoft and get it to look a bit more to what I like (always a work in progress).
Linux had some more tweaking to do, although it worked out of the box, installing the nvidia drivers and making sure the intel and nvidia card switch off properly was some extra effort and while the wireless works, it has some issues (more on that in another post). But I have it set up and working well now.
Really neat stuff, but also requires a pretty robust network. Which is one of the reasons I also bought a wifi access point. But that’s for another post.
Conclusion
I’m happy with my laptop. It doesn’t have the same power as my desktop, but I can carry it with one hand. It doesn’t fit in my pocket like my phone, but I can play modern games like GTA V and TF2.
