Episode: 3766
Title: HPR3766: ACER Nitro 5 laptop review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3766/hpr3766.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:08:37

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3766 from Monday the 9th of January 2023.
Today's show is entitled Acer Nitro 5 Laptop Review.
It is hosted by Bookworm and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Acer Nitro 5 Laptop Review.
Hello, Hacker Public Radio Bookworm reporting.
Wanted to check in for the first time in a couple of years.
Been formulating a couple of things to record.
Never got around to it until now.
I apologize, I promise to make up the difference.
So, today's recording is a review of my brand new laptop.
I have been using an ASUS i3 laptop for many years and it finally decided to give up the ghost.
So I found myself having been researching laptops and all of a sudden in desperate need of a new laptop.
So, I went into a Best Buy.
I know that was a mistake.
I apologize. I hate Best Buy.
But I was out of town away from home and I desperately needed something.
So I go into Best Buy.
And I ask the sales monkey.
Monkey, what can you do me for in a good laptop?
And of course, she starts showing me all the generic garbage, the HP's and the Dell's.
Now, some Dell's and some HP's are very good laptops.
And I don't begrudge them that Dell and HP now are selling Linux laptops.
But not in retail stores like Best Buy.
So I'm like, well, I do want to record, I do want to play games.
I do want to do a couple other things on it.
So let's see what you got for that.
So, he starts showing me a couple of 15 inch laptops.
No, I want something just a little larger.
I like the additional retail or the additional landscape on my screen.
So he's like, well, we've got these 17s.
And he said, this one's a particularly nice one and it's on sale right now.
It's an Acer Nitro 5.
It comes with a 500 gig solid state drive, an M2 SATA,
an extremely narrow bezel, of course, Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6 compatible,
full HDMI port, and DTX audio, Core i5, 10th Gen processor,
and the discrete Nvidia G4 GTX GPU.
After looking up some more of the specs online,
it has two additional spots, one for an SSD and one for hard drive.
So I went ahead and purchased the laptop.
$780, $800 and changed out the door.
My credit card cried for a couple of days after that one,
but we'll get that taken care of in due time.
So I get home and I start scavenging pieces and parts out of my old,
dearly departed I3, including a 500 gig SSD.
And I had a 120 gig M2 SATA laying around.
And so I put those in the Nitro 5 and they went in,
take 12 screws out of the bottom very easily, bottom just pops right off.
We'll need a guitar pick or some other sort of separator to get the bottom frame to separate.
But it came off very easily.
The two new drives slotted in perfectly.
So now I have 120 gig shared drive between my windows and Linux installs.
And I have two 500 gig, one M2 and one SSD for my operating systems.
So the next step was obviously to get the next going.
So I went to my good old stand by Katie Neon, ran the installer.
The weird thing was during the install, it did not see the windows hard drive at all.
Typically in a dual boot situation, you'll have to install a grub in the root or in the boot drive
so that you can select what operating system you want at boot time.
It didn't see it, didn't even see the hard drive, didn't even give it as an option.
So all the other two just fine.
So I went ahead and installed it onto the 500 gig hard drive,
reboot the laptop, nothing, right into windows.
No grub menu, no grub options, nothing.
So reboot the laptop, go back into the BIOS and make sure that the hotkeys enabled at boot time to select boot device.
On this laptop it's the F12 button.
So a reboot again starts spamming F12, come up to a boot menu, the only option is windows boot partitions,
which is a little curious because I just installed Katie Neon.
So I'm like well, maybe something didn't go in properly, let's try it again.
So reboot, back to my Katie Neon boot USB drive, reinstalled Katie Neon, same thing.
Lather rinse repeat, did not see it under the boot menu or the boot options at all.
So all right, let's drop back and punt.
Picked up, downloaded the latest version of Fedora, and I know that it uses the known desktop by default,
but I'll just have to deal with it for a few minutes until I can get a Katie Neon desktop or Plasma desktop.
So I installed Fedora, 33, went on just as easy as you please.
But again, once I rebooted after the installation of the operating system, no grub.
The installer didn't even see the windows hard drive at all, curiouser and curiouser.
So I reboot again, spam the F12 to get the boot drive options.
Ah, I see there's a Linux boot option.
So I select it, Fedora came up, no problem at all.
I haven't dug any further to see why the Linux aren't seeing the windows drive and drive partitions at all.
I suspect it has something to do with the UEFI settings, and I'm not going to change those.
I'm working in Linux and Fedora, and I have no problems with that.
I've got my KDE desktop, and I'm happy.
But other than that, it's been a very good laptop.
I do plan on at some point probably upgrading the default 8 gigs of RAM to 16,
and according to manufacturer's spec, it will take up to 32 gigs of RAM.
So I think no matter what, giant stumpy robot game I want to play,
this should be sufficient for me for quite some time.
So if you're in the market for a laptop, and you've got about $800,
I really recommend this one.
Performance wise has been very good, no qualms, no issues.
The only minor issue I have is in the construction.
The entire case and frame of the laptop is plastic.
There's no metal reinforcing, except for a frame inside that their motherboard is fixed to.
So overall, you know, it could be a little sturdier, but it's not so flexible
that you can bend it with your hands.
It doesn't bend, it doesn't flex.
So it's a very sturdy laptop without any metal components in the frame.
But like I said, that's all I've got for now.
I'm happy with this laptop, and if you need one, I hope you would be too.
Thanks again, and have a happy day.
Hello again, HPR users, Bookworm again.
I just wanted to give you a brief update on the status of that laptop.
It's been about two years since that audio was recorded.
And I've still got that laptop.
It's still a great little device.
I've traveled pretty extensively with it at this point.
I did recommend one to a friend within six months after I got mine.
When they received theirs, when booting into Windows for the first time,
it went into an infinite boot loop.
They were able to get that issue resolved with tech support.
But within a week, they're developed an issue with the graphics card
and the graphics drivers.
And it would just crash every 30 minutes or so.
So after that many troubles within 30 days, they decided to return it.
Again, I've had no problems with mine, booting into Windows or Linux,
but I still do have to use the F12 hotkey in order to be able to select
the operating system at boot time.
But I still like mine.
They moved on to something else.
So it's just something to keep in mind when picking a laptop.
Also of note, since it has been two years, the prices dropped pretty dramatically.
I think by about $250.
So at this point, it's going into the budget laptop range.
And so keep that in mind in your options as well.
Thank you.
And have a good day.
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