I bought my laptop around 2017, and it’s been my primary computer for that time, so in this post I talk about why this laptop is a good computer for programmers and for computer engineers. Is an Acer Aspire F5-573, the specs from factory are:
- Processor: Intel Core i5-7200U @2.5 GHz
- Memory: 16 GB DDR4
- Storage: 1 TB SATA HDD
- 4 USB ports, 3 ports are USB 3 and one port USB 2.
- Windows 10 Home.
However since I got it I have been doing upgrades to it, the first one was my main drive. I upgraded the SATA drive with a cheap 120 GB
This one was easy as I already had the drive and it was a no brainer to gain a little bit of speed over the 5400 rpm drive the laptop originally came with. The next upgrade for the laptop was a 1 TB NVMe drive and an upgrade in memory with a 16 GB DDR4 module, for a total of 24 GB of memory.
The NVMe Drive is now my main drive and I installed Linux on it.
Upgrades are important but is worth mentioning the maintenance I have done to it, I bought new thermal paste and I applied it to the processor, also clean the fans and changed the inferior base as it was already cracked. I also replaced the battery because it was unable to hold charge, later I found that one cell was damaged and because of that, the other 3 cells were not able to maintain the charge.
I don’t have picture of the last upgrade, but it consisted of adding a third drive in the optical bay, since I don’t need and optical drive (who uses CD’s and DVD’s anymore??) I went for a cheap adapter and another 120 GB SATA SSD, the brand is ADATA, I choose that one ‘cause it was the cheaper option on amazon.
This 2022 I installed PopOS 21.10 in the NVMe drive, the old SATA drive is a copy of Windows 10, and the third drive is installed Linux Mint MATE, the main OS is PopOS and is my daily driver, from web browsing to golang and rust programming, I primarily use Windows for some 3D design and to test apps that I’ve developed, I need to make sure that my code compiles in Linux as well as in Windows.
Linux Mint is actually an afterthought, and is there for security, if my main drive dies or something happens to my main Linux installation is nice to be able to boot from a Linux drive and use it as my main OS.
When I said this is a good laptop for programmers or engineers, I don’t mean that is really fast or that it can crush in performance the new multicore processors, however what (in my opinion) sets a good laptop apart from a normal laptop is the ability to upgrade it, something as simple as upgrade RAM is really difficult to do in a modern laptop, on the newer laptops I find myself constantly out of memory and the only easy way to upgrade it is to buy a new computer. The computer is fast enough for my job, on which I use a lot of virtualization and containers. The programs and apps I developed are easily compiled in a few minutes, the 3D design and photo editing I do is just for learning and is not for a professional setup.
Ports are also an important part of a good laptop, something as easy as using HDMI and VGA is almost impossible on some computers, without two dongles and other two for USB drives. This computer would be really good if I could upgrade the processor since as of now that is the only bottleneck I have experienced. The last upgrade for this computer would be 32 GB of RAM but I’m not in need of it at the moment and possibly a faster and bigger NVMe drive.