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2ndLife: Refurbishing Aspire-V3-471G

** I have gave away this refurbished laptop to a community volunteer uncle whose laptop has screen issues. His basic usage is normal surfing the Internet and writing chinese using pinyin so this laptop basically meets his needs after I changed the default language to Simplified Chinese and enable pinyin write method on this laptop. 


    Recently I have dumpster dived 2 ACER laptop. One of which is the Acer Aspire-V3-471G (Gold). It is quite a heavy laptop but when I realized the specifications are not too shabby and also the battery is still able to hold more than charge for more than 50%, I decided to refurbish the laptop for Linux Lite and becomes a spare laptop for my laptop collection. My first task was upgrading the RAM from 4GB to 8GB since I have quite a lot of spare RAMs. I did not upgrade to 256GB SSD since I prefer to have larger capacity compared to speed whenever possible.  

Image from https://cdn.rios.hu/dl/cnt/2012-07/88012/pic/acer_aspire_v3_471_gold_angle3_b.jpg

Specs:

  • Intel® Core™ i5-3210M processor (3 MB L3 cache, 2.50GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.10GHz, DDR3 1600 MHz, 35 W), supporting Intel® 64 architecture, Intel® Smart Cache
  • Mobile Intel® HM77 Express Chipset
  • 4GB DDRIII
  • 750GB
  • 8X DVD-Super Multi double-layer drive
  • 14" HD 1366 x 768 resolution, high-brightness (200-nit) Acer CineCrystal™ LED-backlit TFT LCD
  • NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 630M with 2 GB of dedicated DDR3 VRAM, supporting NVIDIA® CUDA™, PhysX™, PureVideo® HD technology, OpenEXR High Dynamic-Range (HDR) technology, Shader Model 5.0, Microsoft® DirectX® 11, OpenGL® 4.1, OpenCL™ 1.1
  • Optimized Dolby® Home Theater® v4 audio enhancement, featuring Audio Optimizer, Audio Regulator, Volume Leveler, Volume Maximizer, Intelligent EQ, Dialogue Enhancer, Surround Virtualizer (for headphones and built-in speakers), and Dolby® Digital Output technologies7
  • LAN: Gigabit Ethernet, Wake-on-LAN ready
  • Bluetooth® 4.0
  • Acer InviLink™ Nplify™ 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi CERTIFIED
  • 2.30 kg (5.08 lbs.)11 with 6-cell battery pack
  • 342 (W) x 245 (D) x 27.2/33.4 (H) mm (13.5 x 9.6 x 1.07/1.31 inches)
  • 48 Wh 4400 mAh 6-cell Li-ion standard battery pack
  • Up to 4.5 hours
  • Multi-in-1 card reader
  • Acer Crystal Eye HD webcam with:
  • 1280 x 1024 resolution
  • 720p HD audio/video recording
  • Multi-in-1 card reader (SD , MMC, MS, MS PRO, xD)
  • USB 3.0 port with Power-off Charging
  • Two USB 2.0 ports
  • HDMI® port with HDCP support
  • External display (VGA) port
  • Headphone/speaker jack, supporting 3.5 mm headset with built-in microphone for Acer smart handhelds
  • Microphone-in jack
  • Ethernet (RJ-45) port
  • DC-in jack for AC adapter
  • Multi-gesture touchpad, supporting two-finger scroll, pinch, rotate, flip
    Since I have a preference for Linux Lite when I prefer to refurbish any laptop, unless the hardware is too slow and old, then I would opt for WattOS, or Bodhi Linux. I have tried MX Linux with Fluxbox with quite satisfactory experiences so I would install it too if low powered specs laptop.

    After installing Linux Lite 7.4, I went around uninstalling apps that I don't use and install most apps using the Synaptic Package Manager and individually downloaded deb packages. I did not enable flatpak or snap on my laptops as I prefer to use deb package managers. However I noticed some apps no longer have newer versions for deb packages. 

    The newly installed Linux Lite worked well for this laptop and I do not have any issues for this laptop after using it for a while (4-6) hours of continuous use in the public library. 




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