The laptop’s specifications are as follows:[6]
Processor: 1.6 GHz AMD E350 dual core
Chipset: AMD A50M
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6310
Memory: 2GB DDR3 (upgraded to 4GB)
Storage: 250GB (upgraded to 500GB when bought and now on 120GB SSD)
Display: 14″ (maximum resolution of 1366 × 768)
Optical Drive: DVD reader/writer
USB Ports: 4 (USB 2.0)
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium.
With a 6-cell battery, the laptop offered up to 5.6 hours of battery life.
When she bought it, she bought it without windows. If I remember correctly she got a discount for a few hundred ringgit. I’ve tried very hard to push a Macbook to her but she refuse to spend more on a laptop. Instead, she spend a little more money and bought a Windows 8 license for it.
In year circa 2015, this laptop has lost all love of my sister and has been stored in our store room ever since. She complains that the OS runs very slowly (thanks to her magical ability to install malware and viruses). On year 2018, I helped her to purchased a used Macbook 2010 white and that thing flies even without SSD.
So yesterday, I took a bit of time to look in to this system and was trying to make it works again. I put in a 128GB ssd to replace it’s 5400RPM hard disk. Then I’ve tried a few Linux Distro with it. First Elementary OS then to Lubuntu. Elementary OS has plenty of eye candy effects and made the system sluggish. Even the mouse feels sluggish in this. I don’t like it at all. Then on Lubuntu, it’s better but I don’t like it’s interface and lack of user friendly programs to find software (mind you, I know to use apt in terminal).
Then the last resort is to try Peppermint OS. It’s an amazing OS, it makes the whole laptop feels new again. I did a little bit of wallpaper customisation, installed Chrome, Steam, VNC viewer, VLC, Blender, Godot and Filezilla. This thing flies.
I can watch Youtube smoothly with it (but of course the full screen takes a few seconds to settle down). This whole machine has 4GB of rams but it only took less than 1GB of rams even when I runs 3 tabs of Chrome, running steam and other softwares in the background.
The CPU for this laptop is AMD E-350 with Radeon HD 6310 in it. It’s a low powered machine and it rarely gets hot. I’ve just measured, it’s running at 31c while my Macbook Pro 16″ is 39c and my Alienware 17″ R3 is 43c. It will be a comfortable machine for typing documents, emails and light gaming (newer 2D games or older retro games).
I felt glad that I spend a little time to do a research on this. I am sure I’m going to put this in some of the older PC in my office when we are back to work.
KONGTECH BLOG 