For some time now, I have been having a bunch of issues concerning my PC.
I've always had issues with its overall performance. This is not a surprise with specs like an Intel Celeron processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM and running a heavy operating system like Windows 10.
Of course, using a Windows 10 computer in this era with specifications like the ones I listed is a first-class ticket to getting really frustrated, and having a ton of crashes.
Everything lagged horribly on the laptop, and it was honestly difficult to get any work done with it like programming. If I spent 2 hours programming on it, about 30 minutes to an hour was spent on waiting for things to load.
And don't even let me get started on when I open up a browser.
My old laptop - A Lenovo Ideapad 110-15IBR. At least what's left of it.
Combined with slow performance, the laptop was already old from the time I got it since it was previously my brother's.
So, it began to break down slowly when I got it.
First, the keyboard had issues where it would just not respond or spam random keys. I managed to get around this by disabling the inbuilt keyboard and use an external one.
Everything was somewhat peaceful, until the screen's backlight stopped working which made it impossible to see anything on the screen, making it unusable.
Fortunately, one of my friends found out that the laptop I had was bad and the fact that I had been using my mobile phone to code. So, he decided to give me his old laptop since he had no use for it.
The laptop he offered was an Acer Aspire E1-572G laptop and compared to the laptops I've owned or had the privilege of using for more than a week, this is a pretty good laptop.
Please ignore the blue-green-ness of the pictures. 😅
It has an Intel Core i3-4010U processor, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an AMD Radeon R5 M240 GPU with 1GB of VRAM. But unfortunately, the GPU doesn't seem to work for some reason.
While these PC specs may not seem like the best, comparing this with where I'm coming from, this is pretty much the best laptop I've ever owned.
However, when my friend gave it to me, he mentioned that there were a few caveats.
The laptop's hinge was broken, and this also broke the screen and top panel of the laptop. So, he mentioned that I would have to replace the screen and the laptop's panel.
He mentioned that the USB ports weren't working well. The laptop had 3 ports in total - 2 of them are non-functional and the only working one fluctuates a lot when something is connected to it.
He also had to take out the laptop's hard drive because of all his files that were on it. That was not a problem though because I could use the hard drive from my previous laptop.
I was able to get the top panel and screen hinge replaced. But not the screen or USB ports unfortunately.
I know, it's not the same as the original. But it works as intended so I don't really care.
Unfortunately, another friend of mine who wanted to repair his phone tricked me into paying for his phone repairs and promised that he would repay me. He still hasn't fully repaid until this day. It's actually a pretty long story so this is the best way I can summarize it.
So much for helping out a friend...
Of course, I missed out on the opportunity to get a laptop screen because of this. So, I have to wait for another chance now.
I tried to see if I could possibly 'repair' the LCD screen. Then I ended up making things even worse. Honestly, I don't know why I even thought of doing this. 😅
Well RIP... 🙏🏾
I really wanted to try out this laptop, so I found an app called Spacedesk which allows you to use your mobile phone as a computer screen.
I managed to get the app on the laptop by connecting it to a television via the HDMI cable and then installing the application on the laptop. Then installed the mobile client, did a few things to set up, and voila.
This has made my setup to look pretty strange and it is a bit difficult to see things on such a tiny screen. But hey, if it works, it works. I'll just bear with it until I manage to get enough cash to buy a screen.
Frankly, it feels so nice to be able to run tasks on a laptop without severe performance issues again.
It is also really nice to open up task manager and see that there is still a lot of RAM available. On my previous PC, 80% of the RAM was always used up. Even though the laptop just started up.
And this is the RAM usage after startup of the new laptop.
While this is not the best laptop ever, I believe that I can build up with what I have now.
Once again, I am really grateful for my friend giving me this laptop. It feels like a whole lot of opportunities just opened up for me with it.
I can open multiple tabs on browsers, I can screen record, I can play some games without lag now...
But most importantly, I can use Visual Studio Code again!