This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,766 from Monday 9 January 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Acer Nitro 5 Laptop Review.
It is hosted by Bookworm and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
Acer Nitro 5 Laptop Review.
Hello, Hacker Public Radio Bookworm reporting.
Wanted to check in for the first time in a couple of years, been formulating a couple
of things to record and never got around to it until now.
I apologize.
I've promised to make up the difference.
So, today's recording is a review of my brand new laptop.
I've been using an ASUS I3 laptop for many years and it finally decided to give up the
ghost.
So, I found myself having been researching laptops and all of a sudden in desperate need
of a new laptop.
So, well, I went into a best buy.
I know that was mistake, I apologize, I hate best buy, but I was out of town away from
home and I desperately needed something.
So, I go into best buy and I ask the sales monkey, monkey, what can you do me for in a good
laptop?
And, of course, she starts showing me all the generic garbage, the HPs and the Dells.
Now, some Dells and some HPs are very good laptops and I don't begrudge them that
Dells and HP now are selling Linux laptops, but not in retail stores like Best Buy.
So, I'm like, well, I do want to record, I do want to play games, I do want to do a
couple other things on it, so let's see what you got for that.
So, he starts showing me a couple of 15 inch laptops and I'm like, no, I want something
just a little larger, I like the additional retail or the additional landscape on
my screen.
So, he's like, well, we've got these 17s, and he said this one's a particularly nice one
and it's on sale right now.
It's an Acer Nitro 5, it comes with a 500 gig solid state drive, an M2 SATA, an extremely narrow
bezel, of course, even that Wi-Fi 6 compatible full HDMI port and DTX audio, core i5, 10th
gen processor, and the discrete Nvidia GeForce GTX GPU.
After looking up some more of the specs online, has two additional spots, one for an SSD
and one for hard drive, so I want to head and purchase the laptop.
$780, $800 and change out the door, my credit card cried for a couple of days after
that one, but we'll get that taken care of and do time.
So I get home and I start scavenging pieces and parts out of my old, dearly departed I3,
including a 500 gig SSD, and I had a 120 gig M2 SATA laying around, and so I put those
in the Nitro 5 and they went in and take 12 screws out of the bottom very easily, bottom
just pops right off, you will need a guitar pick or some other sort of separator to get
the bottom frame to separate, but it came off very easily.
The two new drives slotted in perfectly, so now I have 120 gig shared drive between my windows
and Linux installs, and I have 2 500 gig 1M2 and 1 SSD for my operating systems.
So the next step was obviously to get Linux going.
So I went to my good old stand by Katie Eneon, ran the installer.
The weird thing was during the install, it did not see the windows hard drive at all, typically
in a dual boot situation, you will have to install grub in the root or in the boot drive
so that you can select what operating system you want at boot time.
It didn't see it, it didn't even see the hard drive, it didn't even give it as an option.
So all the other two just fine, so I went ahead and installed it onto the 500 gig hard
drive, reboot the laptop, nothing right into windows, no grub menu, no grub options, nothing.
So reboot the laptop, go back into the BIOS, make sure that the hot keys enabled
a boot time to select the boot device.
On this laptop it's the S12 button, so a reboot again starts spamming F12, come up to
a boot menu, the only option is Windows Boot Partitions, which is a little curious because
I've just installed Katie Eneon.
So I'm like, well, maybe something didn't go in properly, let's try it again.
So reboot, back to my Katie Eneon boot USB drive, reinstalled Katie Eneon, same thing,
Lather Rinsor P, did not see it under the boot menu or the boot options at all, sorry,
let's drop back in punt.
Right up, downloaded the latest version of Fedora, and I know that it uses the Nome desktop
by default, but I'll just have to deal with it for a few minutes until I can get a Katie
Eneon desktop or a plasma desktop.
So installed Fedora, 33, when I'll just as easy as you please.
But again, once I reboot it after the installation of the operating system, no grub.
The installer didn't even see the Windows hard drive at all, curiouser and curiouser.
So reboot again, spam the F12 to get the boot drive options.
I see there's a Linux boot option, so I select it, Fedora came up, no problem at all.
I haven't dug any further to see why the Linux aren't seeing the Windows drive part drive
and drive partitions at all.
I suspect it has something to do with the UEFI settings, and I'm not going to change those.
I'm working in Linux in Fedora, and I have no problems with that.
I've got my Katie E desktop, and I'm happy.
But other than that, it's been a very good laptop.
I do plan on at some point probably upgrading the default 8 gigs of RAM to 16, and according
to manufacturer's spec, it will take up to 32 gigs of RAM.
So I think no matter what, giant stompy robot game I want to play, this should be sufficient
for me for quite some time.
So if you're in the market for a laptop, and you've got about $800, I really recommend
this one.
Performance wise, it's been very good, no qualms, no issues.
The only minor issue I have is in the construction.
The entire case and frame of the laptop is plastic.
There's no metal reinforcing except for a frame inside that their motherboard is fixed to.
So overall, it could be a little sturdier.
But it's not so flexible that you can bend it with your hands.
It doesn't bend, it doesn't flex.
So it's a very sturdy laptop without any metal components in the frame.
But like I said, that's all I've got for now.
I'm happy with this laptop, and if you need one, I hope you would be too.
Thanks again, and have a happy day.
Hello again, HPR users, bookworm again, just wanted to give you a brief update on the status
of that laptop.
It's been about two years since that audio was recorded, and I've still got that laptop,
it's still a great little device I've traveled extensively with it at this point.
Did recommend one to a friend within six months after I got mine, when they received
theirs, when booting into Windows for the first time, it went into an infinite boot loop.
They were able to get that issue resolved with tech support, but within a week, they're
developed an issue with the graphics card and the graphics drivers, and it would just crash
every 30 minutes or so.
So after that many troubles within 30 days, they decided to return it.
Again, I've had no problems with mine, booting into Windows or Linux, but I still do have
to use the F12 hot key in order to be able to select the operating system at boot time.
But I've still like mine, they moved on to something else, so it's just something to keep
in mind when picking a laptop.
Also of note, since it has been two years, the price has dropped pretty dramatically,
I think by about $250, so at this point it's going into the budget laptop range, and
so keep that in mind in your options as well.
Thank you, and have a good day.
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冠冼冼.