Laptop for my son

The other day I was sitting in my favourite couch reading a novel, my twelve year old boy comes up with a smile and hugs me. I instantly know I am going to be tricked, but not to miss the sudden affection shown towards me, I was all ears for him.

Appa, you know how good is Windows 10 and I am not able to use it in my five year old laptop. I am not asking for a new laptop, but if you get me one, it will be good for me to do my school work. I promise I will write more if you get me a new one.

How I couldn’t agree with this. I searched on the web, couldn’t find anything that interested me. A friend through Facebook recommended I look at the newly released 2-in-1 Notion Ink “Cain Black Signature”. It’s a lovely machine and a steal at Rs.20,990. I was disappointed it has only 2GB RAM and I was not convinced that the machine can withstand a young boy’s rough handling. Next day I called up our regular IT supplier, gave him a budget of Rs.35,000 (USD 500) and a minimum of Core i3 Processor, Windows 10 and 4GB RAM. He came up with few models from Lenovo and HP, I went with HP Notebook 15 – ac1010TU Laptop.

The machine costs Rs.35,490 and has a specification of

• 5th Gen Core i3-5005U 2.0 GHz
• 4GB RAM
• 1TB HDD
• Windows 10
• Optical disk drive (DVD)
• 15.6” Display 
• 2.14 Kgs weight
• Ethernet Port, WiFi
• SD slot
• 1 x USB 3.0 and 1 x USB 2.0 ports
• HDMI Port

HP Notebook 15-ac101TU Laptop

The machine performance is good, running individual apps it’s fast and audio and display are great. I would have preferred HP not to ship junkware OOB, I had to spend more than an hour removing all the unwanted apps including McAfee 30 day trial, wildtangent games, couple of card apps, link to Agoda.com and so on. It was a serious of steps – first uninstall what you can from Control Panel applet, then uninstall the Universal Apps, remove the icons from Start, go to user profile (and then to default user profile) delete the file resides, go to Program Files delete the remaining files.

The first machine (shrink-wrapped in the box) that I got and setup by spending 3-4 hours turned out to be a wasted effort as the machine didn’t boot after some time. I suspected boot record corruption in the hard drive. I returned it to the supplier, after 4 days he got me a brand new box as replacement. This one turned out to be without issues and working fine.