Tag: laptop

My New Laptop Finally Showed Up

It feels like forever ago that I mentioned I ordered a new laptop. I was expecting to get it before Christmas, and initially at least, the post office agreed. It quickly made its way from Long Island to a post office distribution center in New Jersey. Where it then sat for almost two weeks. It appeared to be lost in transit. Eventually, someone must have tripped over it and got it on the right truck, because it showed up on Saturday. It’s pretty much what I was expecting so far.

I picked an excellent condition open-box option, which saved about $70. The computer arrived in its original box, and appeared to include all the original items, which was just the charger and a couple papers. My HP Envy x360 15″ is equipped with and AMD Ryzen 4500U, 8 GB of RAM, a 256 GB NVMe SSD and a 250 nit 1080p display. I ordered a 16 GB RAM kit which should be in some time next week. I picked a Ryzen system to take advantage of the excellent on-board graphics capability, and I’ve been pleased with that so far.

I’ve only tried out Civ 6 and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but both have been completely playable at 1080p on medium settings, getting 30-45 fps with no trouble. Neither of those are terribly intense games though, so I’ll have to try out something heavier in the near future. I should also try them out on the old Surface Book to see what a big leap it is.

Other things I like: the keyboard is excellent, and it has a number pad which is nice. It has a little cover for the webcam that’s electronically controlled. The display takes up almost the entire lid. The battery life is good, and it’s very quiet. It’s a new computer, so of course it’s still speedy and uncluttered. I almost love the trackpad. Its clicks are great, and it’s a nice large size. It would be perfect if it was glass instead of plastic.

Which brings me to things I don’t care for: The overall construction, while solid, appears to only use metal on the lid exterior and it doesn’t feel nearly as nice as the Surface, or my wife’s old Lenovo Yoga, which are both all-metal. The screen, which does have nice colors, seems kind of dim to me, but it’s not problematic indoors. This particular laptop has the lowest-end 250 nit display, and there are 300, 400 and 1000 nit versions available. I couldn’t find a 400 nit version anywhere for a reasonable price. Maybe some day in the future I can swap in a used one. The display is of course in the 16:9 format, which frankly sucks for a laptop. It’s way too wide. The 3:2 of the Surface is maybe a tad narrow, but it’s so much better than 16:9, especially for writing. My Surface pen works perfectly with this computer, but with the screen so narrow and ridiculously long in portrait mode, it’s almost pointless to write on it. I don’t think there are any Windows laptops other than the Surface line with a 3:2 screen, and they’re just too expensive now. Dell offers a 16:10 format on there higher-end stuff, but they’re a little too expensive for me. Personally, I think the 4:3 format of the iPad is probably the ideal for non-television screens.

Anyways, I really like it so far. I’m eager to get the new RAM installed and see if that makes any difference to gaming. Task manager showed that all 8 GB were used with Lego Star Wars going. Despite it’s foibles, I think it would be hard to do better for the price.

Some Computer News

Over the last couple days, I’ve acquired a whole bunch of TV shows with the HEVC codec. Not really a problem, but a lot of devices, like a Roku or Fire TV thing, can’t play it directly. That means it has to be transcoded. I use VAAPI in Jellyfin to trancode, but it doesn’t really work with HEVC. I found out the drivers that Debian provides are version 18.something, and I need at least version 20.1 for VAAPI to transcode HEVC video on an AMD graphics card. Those drivers are available in the testing repositories, but the dependency requirements are a little too complicated to make installing them worthwhile. I also put together a VM with Ubuntu 20.10, which has those drivers as standard, but it failed to boot up when I had the GPU passed though to it. The LTS version worked, but like Debian, the drivers are too old. Hopefully the newer drivers make it to Debian’s stable repos sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I’m fine for two reasons: First, I usually watch stuff through Kodi on a computer, which means I can direct play everything; second, my CPU can handle transcoding a couple streams at once, so it’s not a huge problem.

In other news, I ordered a new laptop today. I was eyeing a few during the black Friday week things a couple weeks ago, but decided against it. Today, I was at my parents’ house taking care of some school work. I had my Surface Book (first gen) hooked up to a 1080p monitor for some extra work space. I had Excel, Word, about a dozen Firefox tabs open while playing music on Spotify. It felt a little sluggish and not as responsive as it should be. In fact, when I scrolled though my RSS feeds, the music skipped when it was loading images. CPU usage was 80-95% when watching a 1080p Youtube video with the other stuff open in the background. This isn’t something I do often, and this semester is coming to an end, but I still have two more to go, and it is nice to take my work with me if I want to.

The touch screen on the Surface has also been broken since the summer. It sometimes experiences phantom touches along the bottom inch of the screen. That’s disappointing, but livable. I don’t really use the touchscreen. More unforgivable though, is the stylus situation. It won’t work along the edges of the screen, even after repeated calibrations, rendering it useless. I bought an iPad and Apple Pencil in September to pick up this slack, but I haven’t used it much. I haven’t felt the need to take notes in my classes. It feels like I kind of wasted the money on that, but eBay shows that I should be able to sell the stuff for almost as much as I paid for it if I want.

These issues got me looking for laptops this afternoon. I first turned to Slickdeals to see if there were any good deals out there today. First, I found an HP Pavilion that seemed like a good deal. It had a Ryzen 4700U CPU, 8GB RAM 128 GB NVMe SSD and a 1080p display for $450. Someone left a comment comparing it to a similar Dell. The Dell seemed like a better deal, with a better charging system, two M.2 slots, and 1x 8GB RAM stick (making the upgrade to 16GB easier). I found out from another Slickdeals post that there was 12% off Dell stuff with a sign up at a third-party site. I did that and was ready to order a 15″ Inspiron 5000 for about $500. I read and watched a few reviews, and decided the display and build quality would be too big a step down from the Surface, so I moved on.

I gave Best Buy a look and set my only criteria to an AMD processor and a 1080p display. Another HP popped up, but this time it was an Envy x360 (that means the screen flips all the way around). This one was equipped with a Ryzen 4500U, 256GB NVMe SSD and 8GB RAM for $629 new. I learned in the Best Buy questions and through some research that the RAM and SSD are able to be upgraded, and it’s compatible with an active stylus, like the Surface pen. The upgradability is a must-have for me, and the stylus compatibility is a huge plus. I waffled for a couple hours, but decided to buy an excellent condition open-box one for about $570. It should be in by December 22 they say, but of course I’m hoping it arrives earlier. The AMD processor bests more expensive Intels and has pretty good integrated graphics. I should be able to run some games at 1080p medium settings. It totally murders the i5 6300U in the Surface Book (11,286 passmark score vs. 3,269). The Verge called the 13″ version the best sub-$1000 laptop. I think I’ll probably keep the 256GB SSD for now, but I’ll definitely be upgrading to 16GB RAM as soon as possible. I’m really looking forward to it, and I’ll update when it comes in.

Resurrecting an Old Laptop

I really enjoy bringing old computer hardware back to life. For instance, I used to run a previous blog on a Frankensteined computer composed of old parts from a couple Dell desktops. This time, I brought back my brother’s old laptop. My dad asked me to take a look at it because his current laptop is a dinosaur over 10-years-old and it’s just not cutting it for the work from home stuff.

The laptop in question is an Asus Q501LA, which I feel like was refurbished when we got it a while ago. According to the stickers inside, it was made some time in 2014. It has an Intel Core i5 4200U, 8GB of RAM, a 1080p IPS touch screen, backlit keyboard and originally, a 750GB hard drive. It was a pretty good mid-range laptop back in 2014, or whenever we got it. Along the way, it broke down for some reason, and got put into the attic because my brother needed a working laptop for school immediately. The most obvious problem was cracked glass on the display, which was duct taped to the lid. My dad bought a new piece of glass ages ago, which I was planning on installing.

After a quick diagnosis, I decided it needed a new motherboard to hard drive connecting circuit board. Mostly because it broke when I pulled it out. I surmised that the connector that broke was probably already in bad condition before removal because while the computer’s BIOS loaded, the hard drive wasn’t spinning. Luckily, that part was only about $10 on eBay. I convinced my dad that it’s practically criminal to not have an SSD in a computer these days, so I ordered a 500GB Western Digital Blue SSD.

While waiting on the parts, I decided to take a crack (see what I did there?) at the glass on the screen. I quickly discovered two problems: firstly, the glass is glued to the display behind it really well. I probably wouldn’t be able to separate the two. Secondly, on this computer, the display assembly attaches to the lid with a system of snap-fit connectors, similar to car interior panels. Probably 90% of them were damaged beyond use. My dad decided he was willing to shell out for a replacement screen, thinking that this laptop would still be better than a comparably priced Chromebook or Windows laptop.

When the parts finally arrived, I put everything together ready for some success. Unfortunately, the backlight of the new screen was dim, and flickered rapidly while on the charger. Off the charger, the screen was only barely bright enough to read with total concentration. I thought maybe getting Windows fully installed would fix it up, but it made no difference. I was fairly convinced it was a problem with the motherboard because the screen was bought used from a reputable seller on eBay. Both my dad and I were disappointed. For the last couple days, the laptop sat on my dining room table, waiting to be parted out.

Today, on a whim, I decided to try out the old, cracked screen to verify the new screen was at fault. To my surprise, the new screen looked perfect (other than the broken glass of course). I cleaned off some exposed copper parts on the motherboard where the hinges screw in, thinking that may be part of the problem. Even if it wasn’t, clean parts are better than dirty parts. I screwed the new screen back down, and after a little flickering, it came back and it’s now totally normal. The touch screen stuff doesn’t work, which is a tad disappointing, but my dad doesn’t care. I’m pretty happy that it kind of fixed itself, but I wish I knew exactly what the problem was. So it’s mission accomplished I guess. I’ll drop it off to my dad this weekend and I’m sure he’ll be really happy with it. I don’t think he’s used a computer with an SSD for any length of time, so he’ll probably be blown away by the boot up time.