"New" HP laptop

[BV206]

I don't know what a ₱ is but I hope it's way less than a $.

[Huckleberry Finn]

Jay, that's the same with my sister's laptop on which I installed MX. (Especially when I insert my 2GB usb with 32 bit MX live-session it "flies" indeed. So fast that I can't understand when it booted and started :)

It's also the same that ours also have dead spots on screen. (I guess there's been some pressure when carrying in its bag or so, you know, it's adapter is like a brick, and when you put it in the bag, too... )

I just entered the Bios and disabled the fan always on.

And even when original drivers were loaded ok, the touchpad was not working correctly on Win 10 (especially sliding) and no horizontal sliding no matter what you install.. So that people she asked were thinking it might've been broken :) And when I installed MX, "Voila".. It's perfect ootb :)
_________________________________________

By the way, (though this is out of the topic) I'd like to suggest you (and everyone since winter is approaching) "Salty Water". And if possible "Salty and carbonated" warm water (imitation of seawater) . Face up to the ceiling and drop (squirt) in your nose, both holes. Let it flow to your throat. And let it stay there without rinsing the inside.. It "nuke"s the reproduction center of microbes and make one recover faster.. also not harmful for it's natural..

[Stevo]

Jay is in the Phillipines, so winter cold there is not so much a concern.

Jay, did you ever manage to check if the Atom machine supported va-api hardware accelerated video? I used it on my laptop on battery to watch the Youtube live-streamed MLB game of the week a couple nights ago with accelerated video, using SMTube to find the stream and then having it play in SMPlayer using its mpv backend.

I don't know much about the HW acceleration for Nvidia cards, but that's also supposed to be possible.

[JayM]

I don't know what the problem is with HP and their screens, but both my HP laptops have white spots on the screens :( That is a unique black spot on your screen though, maybe at one time something got between the clam shell when it closed and killed some pixels?
Nice step up from a netbook, especially more powerful. Capacitors cause lots of issues, especially in power supplies. One of the main issues with TV's that quit working.

@KBD: I've been wondering how whatever the accident was that caused the dead spot happened. I was imagining someone whacking the screen with the end of a mop handle while walking past, like a careless janitor at night while the previous owner was working late, but I think you've nailed it. It's perfectly round and slightly bigger than a 5 peso coin, so someone must have shut the lid when there was money or a bottle cap or something on the numeric keypad. (Yes, it has a separate numeric keypad.) I didn't even think of that idea, someone closing the case on some foreign object.

There's a white halo of what looks like normal LCD compression damage around the black circle, so whatever got pressed into the screen apparently got pressed so hard it not only destroyed the liquid crystals for the display but also the backlighting in that area. It must have smashed everything down to the metal. I bet it was Kim, my younger sister-in-law. Cherry (the previous owner) takes very good care of her computers as she depends on them for her work (she's an architect so she brings home a lot of AutoCAD work.) Plus Kim was just a teenager when it happened, and I remember that Cherry used to let Kim borrow her laptop a lot when she, Cherry, came home from Singapore to visit.

[JayM]

@Huckleberry: thanks for reminding me. I have a pump-action squirt bottle of sodium chloride solution here, meant for that very purpose, that I forgot I had.

I don't know why they're called "colds" because the germs proliferate in warm, humid environments (and the weather here's been very warm, cloudy, with around 80% humidity.) The reason so many people in temperate climates catch them in the winter is that people tend to close their windows and crank the heat up high, then when they come in from outdoors after having been rained on it gets very steamy and close inside. People would do better to keep their buildings a bit cooler and open a window slightly for fresh air.

@Stevo, are you saying that i can open a YouTube video's link in smplayer? I've never tried that, I just usually watch them in palemoon or firefox. They play on the netbook, except for stopping and resuming at the 15 second mark every time, but I just can't be running anything else while the video's playing due to the high CPU utilization. That's not true on the HP, but I still try not to do too many things at once on it to try to keep the processor from getting too hot, though I read that Core i5 mobile processors can go as high as 105C before they start doing a thermal slowdown/shutdown. Mine typically runs in the 50s with only Firefox open and gets up into the mid-80s under more load. I do have an old USB-powered two-fan cooling pad under it too.

[Stevo]

Sure, we include SMTube on the ISO to make it easy to watch their videos in a variety of players, or even to download them with uGet.

[JayM]

Sure, we include SMTube on the ISO to make it easy to watch their videos in a variety of players, or even to download them with uGet.

Huh, so it is, right there in Multimedia in the menu. I've never noticed it or tried it. Maybe I will, the next time I happen to use the netbook.

[JayM]

I don't know what a ₱ is but I hope it's way less than a $.

Philippine peso. The current exchange rate is roughly US$1=₱51. I no longer think of prices in terms of how much they are in dollars. That's a good way to spend all of your money in a hurry here, which I guess is OK for tourists but not if you live here. Ex-pats call it the "it's only a dollar" syndrome.

[seaken64]

@JayM, I don't even bother trying to use a browser for YouTube on my older systems. I always use SMTube or youtube-dl, or Streamlite, or something like that. I can select the resolution and control the results enough to keep from crashing the system. On my P-III systems I usually use 360p. On some P-IV I choose 480p or 720p. On my Atom I can usually use 720p or 1080p (and I can use the browser on the Atom but I like SMTube better.)

Seaken64

[JayM]

Aint worth doing. I got lucky and fixed a panasonic cf-48 screen with a new/used inverter with lcd cable attached assembly. Lots of reasons for screwed up lcd screens though.

I used to roll with that panasonic in the motorcycle shop as a music jukebox and pdf manual storage unit using a crt monitor via the vga cable. Ran and displayed AntiX like a champ.

Congrats on the newish gear.

Well, I think it would be worth it, just to make this computer right again. It's just not worth it to me right now. Maybe later, after I have another decent computer to use while this one's in the shop. I think it'll be ₱3k to 3.5k to get the screen replaced, compared to ₱40k-45k for a brand-new laptop with similar specs (15" screen, i5 CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, DVD burner.) I'm not planning to travel with it so there's not much danger of it getting damaged again.