My Daily Driver

I got my now daily driver from my brother. He had just gotten a new computer a few months prior and wasn't using his old one. I had mentioned in the car one day about wanting to fix a computer and he offered to give me his old one. I of course I gladly took it. He warned me that it was incredibly slow and so it was.

It is a Elitebook Folio 9480m. It has a Intel i5-4310U CPU with 4gbs of RAM

30 long long minutes. Thats how long it took to get to the sign in screen. Of course Linux was installed after a Long Long Time (side note really like that song) It installed quick but I was sceptical about the perfomance. I was wondering if the hardware was damaged.

When I installed it it went into a boot loop which is a common occurence on HP laptops running Linux. I didn't know this at the time but I went into the boot options and pciekd debian and I got in. To fix this you make a custom boot path in the boot option section. You add EFI\debian\grubx64.efi and then boom no more boot loop

I chose Debian as my distro because it is the most stable imo. Yes Arch elitists I did try Arch for about a month it just wasnt for me. I chose MATE as my desktop environment. It is lightweight and I like the feeling. It is my DE of choice. I love the app suite and the panel. I however didn't like the window manager Marco (Floating window manager). I prefer tiling window managers over floating WMs so I installed the trusty i3wm and its amazing! I saw a dramatic speed up in boot times from over 30 minutes to 30 seconds. Which my brother was impressed with

I quickly decided to repaste the CPU and to upgrade the RAM to 12gbs (One 8gbs stick and a 4gbs stick) as that was the most I had. I then decided how to test how far it could go on games. Before it was slideshows on DAYZ. Everything was white and you could not move. Now I can play it on here perfectly fine. I can move and it is playable on the lowest settings. I did try higher settings but it just wasn't playing well. Minecraft Java singleplayer before was also practically unplayable getting about 5fps after linux and Optifine it was running at 30fps (with shaders and a heavy texture pack)

One quirk of this laptop is that when I got it the battery would last about two minutes of battery. After I gave the inside a clean it now lasts 1h 30m off charge. Which is not a problem but it was interesting.

This has gotten really long. I don't know wnat else to say. Its awesome! Thanks for reading!

TLDR: Elitebook Folio 9480m upgraded from 4gbs of RAM to 12gbs. Now running Debian MATE + i3wm. Runs awesome.