Acer Nitro Black Edition...

[SpecialEd]

Yeah, laptops aren't meant for user upgrades, lol. Looks like a nice machine though.

This thread makes me think there's probably a market to buy "broken" (by malware or viruses) Windows laptops and PCs, install Linux on them, and re-sell them at a profit!

Not the higher powered ones. My Asus is a breeze, take off the bottom and everything is right there. Remember when they had little windows to get to the RAM?

[GreyGeek]

Yeah, laptops aren't meant for user upgrades, lol. Looks like a nice machine though.

This thread makes me think there's probably a market to buy "broken" (by malware or viruses) Windows laptops and PCs, install Linux on them, and re-sell them at a profit!

There were a lot of old folks my age +- 5 years who often went out for dinner on Sunday afternoons. We called ourselves the Rat Pack. Most did not have any computer savvy. ALL of their laptops became infected or in some way or rather their WinXX install became disabled. When they asked me if I could help I told them that I didn't do Windows but if they would allow it I would install Kubuntu on their laptops. All agreed (one went back to Windows later) and none had any malware stability problems after that.

One person who was not part of the Rat Pack (he was too young) had a DELL E500 desktop that he couldn't keep disinfected. I installed Kubuntu 12.04 on it when it was in Beta. His kids use it for their homework, mostly LibreOffice and graphics stuff. The last time I asked, about a year ago or so, he said it was still running fine, except that the smallest kid had jammed a CD into the CDROM and they couldn't open it or close it. I had to take it out to fix the problem. The CDROM continued to work.

There is a new crop of Windows refugees rising up in the ranks but my hands are too shaky to help them any more.

[SpecialEd]

Yeah, laptops aren't meant for user upgrades, lol. Looks like a nice machine though.

This thread makes me think there's probably a market to buy "broken" (by malware or viruses) Windows laptops and PCs, install Linux on them, and re-sell them at a profit!

My wife works from home as an Editor/Copywriter/Technical Writer, etc. She has two Thinkpads provided by the woman/company she works for. I mentioned to her boss that when those Thinkpads were amortized off the books, I'd be interested in picking them up. She suggested the Acer instead. I'm not really out to make a profit but I do like tinkering and know some family and friends that could use a reliable laptop for basic needs. A Win/Win.

[SpecialEd]

Being slow and unstable is not characteristic of my V3 or any Acer I’ve run in the past, and I’ve been using them exclusively for the last 14 years.

Was that before or after you installed NVIDIA drivers?

I installed the recommended NVIDIA driver this morning from the repositories. It seems to be working fine but how can I test to be sure I'm actually using the NVIDIA GPU?

[GreyGeek]

I installed the recommended NVIDIA driver this morning from the repositories. It seems to be working fine but how can I test to be sure I'm actually using the NVIDIA GPU?

I have two ways. 1st, I can open the GUI config app for NVIDIA. It shows the active GPU by an active radio button.
2ndly, I installed the “Thermal Monitor” widget and sit it to display the temps of my CPU, sda, and Nvidia, which uses the nvidia-smi If the NVIDIA is active it shows its temperature. If not it shows nothing

[SpecialEd]

I have two ways. 1st, I can open the GUI config app for NVIDIA. It shows the active GPU by an active radio button.
2ndly, I installed the “Thermal Monitor” widget and sit it to display the temps of my CPU, sda, and Nvidia, which uses the nvidia-smi If the NVIDIA is active it shows its temperature. If not it shows nothing

Psensor has been showing five different readings for NVIDIA, including temp. This Acer runs almost twice as hot as my ASUS. <> 115F for the cpu cores.

[GreyGeek]

My i7 idles at 110-115F and my NVidia idles at 88-100F. My HDD idles at 90-100F.

[SpecialEd]

So today after a not so smooth "awakening" my screen was acting funky and I could not reboot or shutdown. I had to do the old hold down the power button. It took a few reboots to stabilize but now my mouse pointer is acting strangely, (touchpad pointer too). I reset my graphics back to the onboard chip and the problem went away so it's related to Nividia. I purged the Nividia drivers and reinstalled them but still I get ghosting, artifacts, improper highlighting, etc. Any ideas?

Nividia 384.111 but this didn't happen yesterday or this morning.

EDIT: D'oh! I just remembered that I installed Timeshift last night. I reverted back to a snapshot from early this morning and voila, back to normal.

[GreyGeek]

Was that the TimeShift Steam game or the TimeShift backup utility?

A Btrfs snapshot?

[SpecialEd]

Timeshift backup utility. No BTRFS yet, waiting for 18.04/new SSD. (Weird as it may seem, I've never been a gamer, preferring to learn new apps, etc. My son's do not understand this).

[GreyGeek]

Wow, I suspected that game toying with the video settings. Why would a backup utility care about video settings?

[SpecialEd]

It takes snapshots of the system and keeps several at a time. If you run into a problem you can use one to restore your system.