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Thursday, January 5, 2017

Acer-15-6-Inch-Notebook-i5-5200U-Integrated


after making a video about this hp laptop,here's another one! this is my new main computer which replacesmy 2009 macbook pro. actually it's not even that new, because onmay 28, 2016 it will be exactly one year since purchasing this computer.so in this video i'm going to give my impressions and what's good and bad about this computerwhich i've had in daily use for a year. it's an hp 15-r127nl.this is actually how it looks like from the front.it's a 15.6-inch consumer grade laptop, so it's not all that special,but it's an improvement from my macbook pro which was three times the price of this.on the left side there's a kensington lock,

power jack with a little led indicator,cooling vent, hdmi port, ethernet port, usb 3.0 port, headphone jack,and hard drive and power leds. on the front there are the speakersand an sd card slot, which you can't really see, but it's right in the middle.on the right side it has two usb 2.0 ports and a dvd-rw drive.and on the back there's just the battery, which is removable.so that already makes it better than a macbook. the battery it comes with, which i haven'tused a lot, because at home i just keep it plugged in without the battery,to avoid wearing it out, is an hp oa04,14.8 v, 41 wh,

and 2620 mah.i think you can buy extended batteries that are thicker and make the laptop a bit at anangle, but it won't be a problem.on the back (bottom) there's an information sticker and you can see at the bottom thetwo speakers and the sd card slot. here is what it looks like opened up.it has a 15.6-inch glossy display at 1366*768 which is one of the weaker points of thiscomputer. at the top there's a 720p webcam and a microphone.there's the keyboard with a numeric keypad. it's a chiclet style keyboard. it has keyswith very little travel, but coming from a macbook i can't complain,and...

after getting used to it i actually like thiskeyboard better than the macbook keyboard. the only con is that it's not backlit.and there's the pretty big touchpad, which isn't as good as the macbook trackpad.it's not glass, but i've seen non-apple laptops with worse trackpads.and, actually, the left mouse button broke! just one day when i was using it, i hearda loud snap, and the button started not clicking properlyanymore. i pulled it a little bit and it came out right away.the right mouse button is fine, but the left one just snapped itself,which kinda sucks but i put a very small piece of black electrical tapeand now it stays in almost perfectly and clicks

with no problems.it's not perfect, but at least i can click it.the left mouse button for some reason is much louder than the right one;i wish it was the other way around. it only has two stickers on it,indicating the intel core i7-4510u processor it comes with,and an nvidia geforce 820m graphics card. and, by the way, i paid €600 for this laptop,which isn't cheap, but for what it does it's not that much.it's definitely a lot cheaper than a macbook with similar specs.the entire outside of this laptop is made out of plastic.the bezel is matte, which is nice, so it doesn't

leave fingerprints all around it like themacbook does. the rest is glossy, which does leave fingerprints,but it has a very subtle sparkling effect, but i think it looks really cool.if i turn on the flashlight you can see the sparkling effect where it's glossy.with the flash off, you can't see it. apart from the processor and the graphicscard, this computer came with 8 gb of ramand a 750 gb 5400 rpm hard drive. and in january 2016 i replaced that hard drivewith a 500 gb samsung ssd 850 evo, which dramatically improved the performance.this computer does not have an easy access door to replace components like the hard driveor the ram.

you have to take it apart.i'll put a link of the video i followed to replace the hard drive in the descriptionof this video. this computer came with windows 8.1 home edition,but in my "upgrading from windows 8.1 to windows 10" videoyou could see that i upgraded it, and when i replaced the hard drive i installedwindows 10 pro which i got for free with my university'sdreamspark account. and i also dual booted it with mac os 10.11el capitan, so this computer is also a hackintosh.and now we're gonna boot it up. maybe i didn't mention that right here isthe power button.

check out how fast this computer boots upwith an ssd. i turned off the lock screen when it bootsup. and after less than 30 seconds it's alreadyat the desktop. and i've already filled it up with programstoo. there's only 7 gb left on the windows partition.i only have this purple background for the video.but anyway, this is windows 10, running on this computer.the two biggest problems i've had with it: one is the touchpad, which i've already talkedabout, and another one is the wi-fi.as you can see, i'm not connected to the internet.

it says wi-fi turned off.so, naturally, i clicked "wi-fi" to turn it on. and it doesn't work.so i tried going into network settings. it says wi-fi is turned off, so i click theswitch... doesn't turn on!so i tried going into device manager and re-install the driver.at first it didn't work, then i tried again in safe mode, and it did work, butafter rebooting it stopped working again. the only fix i could find for it was usinga linux bootable usb drive. i ran a utility called "rfkill" and it saidthere was a hardware switch set to the off position.but this computer doesn't have a wireless

switch!the only pseudo-switch is the f12 key. (and for some reason i'm having trouble withthe camera focusing) but on windows it just turns on airplane mode.i tried turning it on and off... but it didn't do anything.it keeps thinking there's a switch, there's a physical switch set to the off position.so it keeps saying that wi-fi is turned off, and i can't turn it on.i just gave up and bought this usb wi-fi adapter. it's a tp-link tl-wn725n,costed €10 on amazon, it's very tiny,and i just plug it into the usb port. it's not usb 3.0, so it doesn't make a differencewhich port i plug it into.

"oh, shit! ooh!" (taken from the youtube video"mum plays one late night part 2" by terrifiedmum) ignore that, that was my ipad's email notificationsound. anyway, after plugging that in, it even hasa little green led, it connects to the internet just fine.well, that's still broken, it says wi-fi 4, but it works fine now.if you want to use this computer as a gaming laptop, you shouldn't buy it.but because i just play a few games occasionally, the nvidia geforce 820m graphics card with2 gb of vram does good enough for my needs. i can demonstrate playing grand theft autov, which on this computer runs at 720p with mostsettings turned down

at 30 fps, which isn't that great, but it'splayable. definitely much better than my macbook tryingto run grand theft auto iv. this is actually running at its native resolution,which is a little higher than 720p. and if we open fraps...we can check out the exact frame rate, which right now is a little less than 30,but it's good enough for my needs. damn it, i missed.and i have a mod called vehicle jetpack (i think)which makes any vehicle fly like this. and also the touchpad doesn't work while you'repressing keys, so you need to use an external mouse.let me show you the settings.

you can pause to see the exact settings.some can be improved, but most of the settings are low.actually if you set this post fx to high and turn on motion blur it looks a little bitbetter. but yeah, these are the settings.they're not high, and the game doesn't run perfectly, but it's good enough for me, idon't play games very much. you can't really concentrate right now, so...didn't mean to plant a bomb there, but... whatever.and apparently he hit his head on the steering wheel or something. (because he had a gashon his forehead) what's the button to press to make the bombblow up? i forgot.

oh, there it is.i don't know what...i just pressed all the keys.but, yeah, as you can see, it runs. so, quit before the battery is completelydischarged. i'll show you the system properties real quick,and then we'll boot into mac os x. i took it for granted, but i should say thatthis computer does not have a touch screen, so windows 8 wasn't really good for it.if windows 10 wasn't free, i would have bought windows 7 and downgraded to it.and i still really like windows 7, but because windows 10 is newer and hasn't caused manyissues, i'm keeping it. i should mention a lot of windows 10 privacysettings that should be turned off, like,

for example,if you go to network and internet, and manage wi-fi settings,i turned off "connect to suggested open hotspots" and "connect to networks shared by my contacts".in update and security, advanced settings, choose how updates are delivered,i only allowed updates to be shared on pcs on the local network,so it doesn't constantly use my very crappy internet connection to upload updates to otherwindows 10 users in the world. and in privacy, i turned off some settingsabout sending info to microsoft. you can download this program called spybotanti-beacon, that automates these steps for you, and more.i already ran this once, but anyway, you just

click immunize, and it will block all thestuff about sending info to microsoft, which wasn't that big of a deal for me anyway,but there is a way to block it if you don't want that,which i used too. so now we'll reboot into mac os x.because this computer came with windows 8, it has a uefi motherboard,so on this ssd it's set up with uefi. and it just started beeping because the batteryis low. so i'm gonna turn it off and remove the battery.with the battery removed, there is this gap between the display and the rest of the laptop.this is the power supply that came with it. on this side it has the same plug as the chargerin the asus m50v laptop i showed in a video,

which kinda looks like mickey mouse if youthink about it. and this is the kind of plug that it uses,no magsafe like the macbook of course. and this is the little led next to the powerjack. it's white if the battery is full or there'sno battery. it blinks white if the battery is low.it's orange if the battery is charging, and it blinks orange if you try to turn iton but the battery is too low. so, let's boot up this computer again, butthis time we'll press f9 to access the boot menu.and instead of the windows boot manager, we'll do the clover efi bootloader.and here's the option to boot to mac os x.

i know newer macs which come with an ssd makeyou log in immediately right after you press the power button,and then start up the operating system, which is kinda cool.this is obviously not like that, but it still starts up quite fast.i feel like i've said this too many times, but upgrading this computer with an ssd wasthe best upgrade i've done to it. so, if we go to about this mac...we can see that it's running the latest version of mac os x.it thinks it's a retina 13-inch late 2013 macbook pro.there's the info: 2.59 ghz intel core i7, 8 gigs of ram, and it recognizes the intelhd graphics 4400, which is the integrated

graphics card.this computer has dual graphics; it only uses the nvidia ones for games or other heavy applications.this computer runs mac os x just fine. everything works apart from the dedicatedgraphics, but i'm not gonna use mac os x for gaming of course.i can't set the brightness. it's set to some value in the middle.and also wi-fi doesn't work, which is a good thing i bought that usb adapter, because ithas drivers for mac os x. there's the display...storage... there you can see the dvd-rw drive, it's anhp gub0n. it has one free ram slot on the motherboard,and when i looked it up,

i learned that this computer can have up to16 gb of ram, but you have to take it apart completely toget to the ram slots, so i haven't done that yet,whereas to replace the hard drive i only had to take it apart halfway.but 8 gigs is fine for the things i do. and yeah, it runs perfectly.to get it to work, i did not use a hacked modified version of mac os x.i used the official one downloaded from the mac app store on my real macbook,and i followed this guide online. i'll put the link to this guide in the description,but i basically followed all the steps to make an install usb drive,and it booted up just fine, so i installed

it on a secondary partition, and there yougo! i don't have much else to say.apart from my macbook and my 2005 acer laptop, all the computers i've ever owned were hps.so i like this computer even for the brand. this computer hasn't been perfect, but it'smy best computer yet, and i'm quite happy with it.a lot of people might hate it, but i don't, and it's my computer.would i recommend this computer to someone else?well, i don't even know if they still sell it.i bought it in may 2015 and it has some parts from december 2014 or january 2015,so it was already a few months old by the

time i bought it.but these specs are great for someone who doesn't need an advanced workstation or agaming laptop or something. of course the hard drive that comes with itis quite slow, but you can run a good amount of programs,and with 8 gb of ram, even google chrome, which is known to be a ram hog, runs justfine. and the ability to get hackintosh workingon it with relatively little hacks is also a bonus, because...i installed mac os x 10.11 in october 2015, and every time an update came out, like 10.11.1,10.11.2, etc... i had to update the clover efi bootloaderfirst, but then i was able to install the

update just fine, just like on a real mac,so that's also quite cool. the main defects about this computer, wherethey cut corners to make it cheaper, are the sub-par display with only 1366*768resolution, and it's glossy, and also one thing that doesn't bother mebut is worth mentioning is that it doesn't have bluetooth.so if you want bluetooth on this computer you have to buy a little usb adapter, similarto the wi-fi one i bought. i use this computer really heavily.the touchpad button broke, the wi-fi card kinda broke...if i boot up a linux usb drive and run "sudo rfkill unblock all", it starts working again,but every time i reboot i have to do it again,

so i just bought that usb adapter.so, i think i've run out of things to say about this computer.if you have any questions, just ask in a comment, and i'll be glad to answer.if i missed something, i might add it to the description, so be sure to read it.and that's it. thank you very much for watching. oh, yeah, another thing is that mac os x onthis computer does not support sleep mode, so it still runs even when the lid is closed.

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