I had an old late model 2009 Macbook that I purchased for $100 and upgraded for about another $100 about a year ago. It finally kicked the bucket and went to the digital graveyard in the sky. Thankfully, it survived long enough for me to replace it with another cheap laptop that I can use for on the go work. Anyway, the Macbook I had upgraded to 8GB of RAM, and installed a 500 GB SSD drive, then reformatted it with my preferred Linux distribution. It didn’t have to be super powerful, as it’s not my main system, but rather just a on the go, light duty computer I can use to keep up on social media, and work on some code. Since the HDD and the RAM is new in it, I can scavenge those for another system, and they should be just fine.
The real bummer was that it died after setting up my new laptop, but before I could migrate important things off of it that I would need on the new system. I was also planning on giving it to a friend who is in need of a system of a similar spec as that Macbook, which I will no longer be able to give him. The good news is that the new laptop is 80% setup, it has my keepass, but I still need to recover my ssh and PGP keys off the old system. But enough with my sob storry, on with the specs of the new machine!
For around $400 ( it was on sale ) I bought myself a Dell Inspiron 15 5570 laptop with a 1 TB hdd, 8 GB of RAM, Intel Core i5-8250U, and Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU. It still has one unused sata slot, and an unused m.2 NVME slot which I plan on populating. I also plan on upgrading the RAM. I haven’t opened it up, so I’m not sure the exact configuration of RAM modules inside, so I’ve not determined the cost yet. It does have a built-in SD Card slot, which is helpful since I’ve been doing a lot of work with Raspberry Pi projects. It also has an 8x DVD +/- RW drive, if you care about optical media. I’m unlikely to ever use it, but who knows, I may want to burn off an install disk for someone in the future, or watch a movie, who knows. I have Netflix, so I don’t really see the point of it anymore. I, of course, removed Windows 10 Home ( which is useless, I mean, if I’m going to use Windows, it had better be Pro at least ) and replaced it with my preferred Linux distribution. It also has a fingerprint reader built into the power button, but that doesn’t currently work on Linux as yet. The fingerprint reader is the only thing without native Linux support. I didn’t plan on using it anyway, so it’s a non-issue. I don’t trust those things. And finally, it has a 15.4″ 1080p display.
The purpose of the new machine is to be a lightweight system for when I’m on the go, which I find myself needing a lot more than I had thought when I set up my command center, but a command center doesn’t travel well, so I needed something a bit more portable. At less than 5 lb.s, this machine serves that purpose beautifully without sacrificing so much power as to be pointless. If I need to do any heavy lifting, that will be done on my main system, of course.
I had meant to make this post about it *AFTER* I had completed setting it up to my liking, but my other laptops early demise made that no longer possible. I don’t blog from my main system, as well, I have to be in a certain mode to be comfortable documenting my life issues. I just prefer to do it from a laptop. My main system is great and all, but other than gaming and intense compiling operations, I don’t use it as much as I used to. It’s funny how that works out. Anyway, it might be another week or so until I post again, as I get this laptop into a more comfortable configuration with all my stuff on it that I rely on. Until next time!
Mark LaDoux 