A few days ago I bought a Lenovo Ideapad 320-15AST. I had a budget of €400 and, after browsing a few stores for a couple of hours, I found this one for a bit less than €350.
At the hardware level, the computer has reasonable specs. They are (retrieved from inxi):
CPU: AMD A9-9420 dual core (1397MHz/3000MHz | boost: 3600MHz)
GPU: AMD Radeon R7 M260/M265
HDD: 1000.2GB 5400RPM
RAM: 8GB DDR4
This is the first time I’m buying Lenovo. I’ve always had a preference for Asus that dates around two decades, either in laptops or in desktops and components. Also, I haven’t used AMD for probably 10 years or more, but I have good memories of their CPUs at the time, so let’s see how this goes. The expectations are high.
Somewhat sadly, it came with Windows 10 preinstalled and the store clerk said they wouldn’t refund me for the license. I wasn’t that much disappointed (although it would’ve been nice to save a few dozen euros) because this will come in hand in the situations I have to give support to computers with this OS installed.
After completing the initial Windows setup, I downloaded and installed Firefox, proceeded to transfer Manjaro and wrote the ISO file to a USB drive. Don’t know why, but it got a kernel panic everytime I tried to boot it.
Next in line was Ubuntu and everything went smoothly. It’s still going. The computer has a good performance with this OS, even when I’m playing Football Manager 2018, browsing the web and listening to music on Youtube, all at the same time.
I do notice, however, the lack of performance of the hard drive, compared to the SSD I have in the old laptop. I have to switch it soon and get a caddy.