I miss my desktop, my christmas gift to myself!

Need to write on that some time later.

During the announcement of a Community Quarantine or “Lockdown”.

Because that is what it is, even officials being interviewed is saying that it is not a “Lockdown” but similar to a “Lockdown”.

You know what comes to mind when I hear the term Lockdown?

Terran Ghosts, Siege Tanks, Carriers and Battlecruisers

Okay I’m getting side tracked back to the topic, so I had to go back to our house with my parents and leave the place I’m renting.

I don’t have much food and supplies. I thought it would suck to be stuck in there alone so when the rumors that there’s going to be a community quarantine I packed my laptop and left.

Fast forward to present, A month and a half quarantined.

It’s back to my Asus again. My old trusty partner for almost 6 years.

When I bought the new box last christmas I gave this to my parents, nice thing is that my good friend handed me down his old laptop.

What I am using in typing this right now. Still works great with MX Linux.

There is this SSD in a portable enclosure I bring everywhere as my work OS, so no problem whichever computer I am using.

This is loaded with Pop OS; An Ubuntu based distro which I really like.

Easy to use and loads Steam games without issues.

It’s all good but when it’s running on older machines like my Asus, the limited resources are creeping out.

Lack of RAM keeps slowing down the system and the Gnome also uses a lot of memory.

When used with IDEs like Android Studio and PHP Storm a significant slowness is noticeable.

Oh and on top of that, the fan broke. (Pics to upload later.)

You can hear the noisy grinding fan causing vibrations on the laptop.

So I realized that to remedy this lack of performance and the risk that this quarantine can be extended again…

Maybe I can get a nice budget laptop.

Requirements is not so high.

  • Minimum 16GB RAM
  • Decent AMD processor for multitask and to be more cheaper.

Nice to have

  • Nice keyboard. I really like the HP Pavilion’s keyboard.

I kept searching and disappointed on how expensive laptops are right now.

A decent specced unit is more expensive than my gaming desktop.

For me, I’m not really a fan of laptops but I think I should invest in one since it is useful for my work.

Found one from Dell I think but when I thought about it long and hard… Why not just upgrade my Asus.

It still works great, just need to do some upgrades then it should be good as new.

Wow that introduction was longer than expected, sorry I kept rambling.

In to the meat of the matter.

There were checklist on what I thought of to improve the performance.

  • Replaced Pop OS with MX Linux. ✅
  • Max out the RAM to 12GB.
  • Slap in the SSD as main drive. ✅
  • Replaced Jetbrains' IDEs for lighter Visual Studio Code. ✅

Additional quality of life improvements that are nice to have

  • Buy new battery to be used in meetings and on situational work outside.
  • Replace speaker, it is cracking sound. Really bothers me even though I can use an external speaker and headsets.
  • Replace fan. I had to break it down, add lots of electrical tapes and apply oil as prescribed in forums.

Greatest improvement was switching to MX Linux.

I have used Lubuntu and LXLE before for a long time but they feel like Windows 98.

LXDE isn’t the prettiest but the performance is solid.

On first search for light distros this MX is always showing up.

Gave it a try and popped the SSD’s Pop OS as soon as I can.

Of course I backed up the Pop OS first since I’ll still use that for my powerful computer.

Backing it up was easy using Gparted. I should write about this sometime or maybe just link the guide that I followed.

The built in resource monitor is a nice addition.

Customized it a little made it look really good.

Moved the menu to top then changed the wallpaper and you’re set.

I’m surprised at the wallpaper I used that it looks good here.

To get the same wallpaper, see Unsplash credits at the end. 😜

Conclusion

Don’t buy new laptop. Max out current one and extend it’s life.

Sometimes I’m thinking that my laptop was sulking when I gave it to my parents but now we are back together.

She doesn’t run as smooth back when I was using it heavily.

Her name is Gortys.

A naming convention for my other devices is they should resemble an AI or robot somewhere.

A couple examples includes my mobile internet as Skynet, my phone is GlaDOS and my PC is Claptrap, this laptop is Simaris and last but not the least my other portable HD Ubuntu install is JuiceBox.

Got where the names are from? Then I’m sure we’ll get along.

That should be all for today.

Still here? Thanks for reaching the end.

Appreciate your time!

TODO: Upload other laptop pics or on another post. Changing thermal paste, disassembling and lubing fan etc..

Photo by John Cosio on Unsplash 😉