Even though I told myself I was done with programming for quite a long time, over the weekend I fixed sunamo.cz, and since I want to build my own website on the MBTI personality typology, I would hardly get by without programming.
But here at home it goes nowhere, and when I am out, I can hardly get anything done on my Chromebook, which is my only laptop. I took a quick look at Heureka to see if there was anything that would meet these requirements of mine:
- At least 4 GB of RAM
- SSD drive with at least 64 GB of capacity
- Windows 10
- Battery life of at least 8 hours
- Price under 10 000 CZK
Only one laptop matched this filter: https://notebooky.heureka.cz/asus-e403sa-wx0003t/ . And since delivery services usually cost extra, I wanted to have it delivered somewhere in Tesin, so first of all I looked at the Euronics, Okay and Exasoft stores.
The second one had a price very similar to all the others, but on top of that it offered a 1000 CZK discount as part of its Happy Days promotion. There were only 2 reviews, both at 90% satisfaction, and the only complaint was the processor. okay.cz listed the processor speed as 2.16 GHz with two cores, and even though it was just a Celeron with the Braswell architecture, I figured it would hopefully be usable. I knew that PCs come with tons of bloatware, but if need be, it would go.
So I ordered it right away for pickup at a branch with no fee, which delayed it by one day. At the store the saleswoman unpacked it, I tried to turn it on, but it probably had a dead battery, which seems odd to me, but whatever. At home I plugged it in and it started after pressing the button. The startup was not too slow, and of course the first thing I wanted to do was install updates. Since Win 10 Home was on build 10240, the big November update downloaded as well. I felt like turning off Wi-Fi and installing it from an ISO I had on the HDD in my desktop, but in the end I let it download and it installed. Once Windows stopped offering any more updates, I deleted all the modern apps that could be removed, since I do not use them.
I turned off hibernation, split the only visible drive into 2 partitions, and the only thing I left there were the Asus apps. Windows Defender kept insisting that I run a quick scan. Apart from the fact that it checked over 200 000 files and took 45 minutes, fine. Up to about 60% it was as slow as a snail; when I looked in Task Manager, Asus Smart Gestures was constantly taking about 30 %. So I deleted everything from Asus, and the remaining 40% of the scan finished within 5 minutes. Then I wanted to transfer data from my Samsung 250 GB SSD, where I keep everything except videos and such, which I put on my mom’s PC. I used my trusty USB 3 HDD dock and the device was not recognized on the USB3 port. The second attempt ended the same way, and so did the third on USB 2.
Nothing on my mom’s PC with USB 3 either. I tried a Kingston SSD 120 GB and that one worked without any problems. So I had to connect the Kingston to my desktop, where the Samsung was the internal SSD, and copy the necessary data and installers that way. After I installed VS 2015 Community and SQL Server, there was almost no free space left on the drive, and the worst part was the processor. Right now, for example, I am compiling my Windows Store App GeoCaching Tool, and on an Intel Core i5-4570 it takes about 4 minutes. A regular build takes about a second here; there it took maybe even 3. I realized that this was not worth it, but what to do with it now?
It has no backup to restore the OS with the Asus apps from, and I do not know what they would say at the store about me having reinstalled the system. Of course, I could put everything back manually, but I did not feel like it. It might not have gone through anyway. I asked my father whether he wanted it. He still has an extremely weak Toshiba from 2006 running Vista. He did not even touch it, even though it sat right next to his Toshiba the whole time, so in the end I gave it to my mom on the condition that I would take her Acer.
She has had that Acer for about 2 years and it is disgusting. When I bought it for her on the understanding that she would pay me back, she promised she would never in her life smoke at the PC. That lasted about 37 seconds. The Acer reeks of cigarette smoke from a mile away, and I even took it to Exasoft in Tesin for repair and paid for it, but even they could not do anything about it. It rattles just like before, and I am not going to pay 700 CZK for a new fan. They can go to hell. I will try to sell it very cheaply.