A brick and mortar surprise

[digitalwanderer]

So my wife's PC started acting up with shutting itself off, and rather than have me fix it we ran out to Best Buy and she got herself a new laptop for under $230us.

I didn't think you could get much laptop for that kind of money, but she seems pretty happy with it so far and it's not as terrible as I feared. It's an Asus - VivoBook X540SA 15.6" Laptop - Intel Pentium - 4GB Memory - 500GB Hard Drive, and as much as I feel it's cheap and under powered it seems like a decent little web cruiser/video player for her to take to work and kill time on.

I'm still fixing her PC, but I found her temporary solution fascinating. I haven't bought a PC from a brick and mortar in ages, and definitely never quite that impulsively. I'm interested to see how it works out.

 

[digitalwanderer]

It is terrifyingly and agonizingly slow to me, but my wife seems happy.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

The only thing pushing it down should be the 5400rpm HDD.
The CPU is virtually the same as Surface 3's Atom X7, so it should be more than capable for video decoding and web browsing.

A cheapo 128GB SSD and a fresh windows installation (pick up the serial number and just download the windows 10 image from microsoft) would make that thing fly for web, text and multimedia.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

The only thing pushing it down should be the 5400rpm HDD.
The CPU is virtually the same as Surface 3's Atom X7, so it should be more than capable for video decoding and web browsing.

A cheapo 128GB SSD and a fresh windows installation (pick up the serial number and just download the windows 10 image from microsoft) would make that thing fly for web, text and multimedia.

I hate how slow my Surface 3 is. I don't have any other "tablets" to compare it to, but when I try to use it to do something really quickly in between commercials, it usually ends up taking 2 or 3 commercials for me to get done what should have only taken one.

But, if I'd only paid $230 for my Surface 3, I might be more forgiving.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Yeah, that thought keeps coming up in my head too. "But for $230, it ain't so bad."


She cruises the web and plays back videos just fine, I think a lot of it is the Windows 10 updates/teething pains stuff. It's getting better.

I ordered her a laptop bag today since she's carrying it back and forth to work, but due to her work's security policies this is what I ended up ordering:


Ugly, but it'll do.

 

[Davros]

A transparent laptop bag, thats bad you dont want people to know your carrying a laptop

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Yeah, that thought keeps coming up in my head too. "But for $230, it ain't so bad."


She cruises the web and plays back videos just fine, I think a lot of it is the Windows 10 updates/teething pains stuff. It's getting better.

Oh my, don't get me started on the W10 updates. That is the source of the majority of the problems, as I don't use the Surface 3 every day, when I do go to use it (it's a tablet, I'm trying to do something quickly), it is dog slow and then will usually pop up saying "Updates ready to install" or "Reboot required" or something because it's always using half it's processing power to download and install updates!

..it's actually still slow when that isn't happening.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Yup.

On a happy note, my wife LOVES the bag! She was surprised as hell and pleased as punch, double-win!

And I fixed her desktop, it was the GPU that went bad. The 6970 had a hard life as a 6950 before I got my hands on it and flashed it, and then it served me well for many years so I ain't complaining. I tossed in an old Gainward 8800GTX last night and she's been solid as a rock since.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Fantastic!

 

[Arwin]

I picked a Samsung Book Lite 9 or something like that a few years ago. It really is very light, has a touch screen and an AMD processor (quad core something I think). She never really used it as a laptop though, and when her desktop started giving out I replaced it with that and now she just uses it with a regular desktop monitor on top of it. Turned out to be a good balanced machine though, as for everything she does on it, it has proven to be good enough, and upgraded to and keeps running Windows 10 like a charm.