Linux box essentials

Lounge
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I purchased a refurbished laptop for people with low income. It was a risk because it was very much a lottery: they give you something for $300. Today I picked it up and didn’t get much of a deal. Got an HP EliteBook 840 G2 with i5-5300u (2-core), 8GB RAM and 500 HDD. I will have to replace the HDD with an SSD, buy an DP-to-HDMI and contend with the other half-way-there ports.

In any case, it is a small upgrade from the 2nd gen i3, double the RAM, better keyboard, hopefully working camera, speaker, audio for our next Jitsi sesh, etc. At least, there won’t be any more hardware related crashes.

This will be my next Linux device.

2 Likes
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Double the RAM sounds amazing!

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Ha ha, much better than the 2-4GB that I had to bear with beforehand!

It is super heavy though. A little noisy. Reminds me of the IBM ThinkPad days.

I took a look at its innards. I am glad nothing is soldered on. It looks like there is also an empty M.2 slot. Perfect for Linux on an SSD.

(Future) Shopping list

1 DP-to-HDMI
2 M.2 SSD
3 Upgrade RAM to 16 GB
4 Upgrade HDD to SSD

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My notebook is an HP Probook G3. Except for the wi-fi card, it has worked pretty well for me for several years. I had to replace the crappy wi-fi card with an Intel, but that cost me only about $40 US.

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Looks like another laptop will be entering my life since my job is starting soon and I will be working from home due to COVID-19. Remote work is the worst for me due to the situation I have here. Maybe I will find an alternative location to work. I wonder what the specs will be like…

Any recommendations on a HDMI switch? Using an external monitor would be better on the eyes. I don’t know which HDMI spec I have. Would it matter? Is HDMI backward compatible?

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HDMI should be backward compatible.

1 Like
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Congratulations on the job, I hope things work out well! I’m equally delighted to hear you’re giving linux another shot, it’s been a long time coming :slight_smile:

(Apologies as usual for not being around here much, I’m reduced to “lurker” status for the time being…)

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Thanks @garagecoder. I haven’t touched the laptop much yet. Just installed Firefox to reply to you. No Linux yet. The clunker of a hard drive I got with this random laptop is so very slow. I will wait until I get my hands on a M.2 SSD.

Speaking of clunky, I just tried the webcam and it is definitely the worst one I own, including the mostly nonfunctional one in my old laptop. :frowning_face: Green speckle noise and posterization. Bad driver or bad hardware…?

The redeeming feature is that there isn’t much of a barrel distortion but that makes the capture too wide for my taste. More stuff is showing than I am comfortable with for a work meeting.