hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4031.txt

Episode: 4031
Title: HPR4031: ClaudioM's Laptops - Evoo EVC141-12BK Review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4031/hpr4031.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:51:12

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,031.
Today's show is entitled Claudio M's laptops review.
It is hosted by Claudio Miranda and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Claudio talks about his Evo EVC 141 12BK laptop.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q.
We are airing it now because we had free slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, this is Claudio M recording an episode for the Reserve Q.
So if you're listening to this episode right now, that means that Hacker Public Radio is
very low on shows, extremely low on shows.
So we are asking that you please, if you hear this episode, record an episode of
Hacker Public Radio on anything that interests you and that you believe might be of interest
to hackers.
So today I wanted to talk to you about one of the laptops I own, which I purchased within
the last year or maybe a little over a year.
This laptop is an Evo EVC 141-12 laptop.
Now you're wondering what is Evo?
Evo, which is spelled Evo, and is also considered to be the acronym for Extro-Version olive oil.
Is a brand of laptops and computers owned by Walmart.
So you'll find them in their stores.
I also managed to find this laptop, which is how I came across this laptop originally.
You may find it at a brand's mart, but you will also find it at least a laptop design
under a different name like Motile.
Motile is another one that if you look at it and you look at this one, it's the same design.
So that should tip you off that these companies or these makes of laptops are not designed
by their namesake.
They're actually just a generic design from China that is being sold off to companies
like Walmart and Brandsmart and they go ahead and they just slap their names or whatever
other brand make of name that they want to.
But yeah, I did come across this at a Brandsmart, I believe before the pandemic and just the
look of it is, it's nice thing, it's very MacBook-like in its appearance, which is what
caught my eye because I wanted something that was going to be affordable and something I
could use as a beater laptop to replace what I believe at the time was my Toshiba Porta
J M400 laptop.
Now I do have another laptop that's faster than that one, but I really wanted something
more current.
So this one actually is pretty nice for what it is.
It comes with, I'll read the specs off to you.
This one actually is the EVC-141-12BK because the BK stands for black and this is, I guess,
if we go back to the MacBook and Apple color designation, it would be a space gray or
midnight gray or whatever they call it, but it's actually a charcoal gray, it's something
like what you would see in a pink pad, that kind of color.
So it's BK for black because they have one that ends in SL, which is silver, which is
actually the one I had originally seen.
But otherwise the specs on this one are and the on the BK and the SL are the same.
They don't sell this anymore, but at the time when I looked at it, it was actually pretty
good.
The price for it was, I believe, originally around $250, $250 US dollars when I saw it
before the pandemic.
Since then when I bought it, I ended up buying it off of Walmart online and I spent, and
this was a refurbished one.
So it wasn't brand new ones because they shot up on price due to their popularity and
you'll see why when I read out the specs.
They kind of doubled in price.
So I ended up finding a refurb on the Walmart website for $2.75 US dollars.
So the reason why you can't find these anymore is because these come with an AMD Ryzen 5
3500U processor and radion Vega 8 graphics.
So for that price, it's pretty, you got a pretty beefy processor, granted it's the third
generation of Ryzen chips, but those were pretty good actually.
And yeah, it has the Vega 8 is the integrated graphics, but it's not too bad.
There is actually a review of this laptop since it comes with Windows 10 home.
There is a review on YouTube that I'll post also in the show notes that talks about it.
It was very hard to find information on this device, but I actually was able to come
across it after doing some serious searching online.
So yeah, I'll be posting the video and the specs on this, but I'm going to go ahead and
read off the specs.
So this this laptop comes with Windows 10 home.
It's a 14.1 inch full HD display at 1920 by 1080 at 60 hertz.
It comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U mobile processor with radion Vega 8 graphics.
It goes, it's clocked at 2.1 gigahertz and supposedly it goes up to 3.7 gigahertz.
It comes with a built-in 256 gigabyte solid-state drive, 8 gigabytes of memory, an HD webcam
on the front, on the top of the lid, up to 10 hours of battery life.
So they say, Bluetooth 4.2, one HDMI port, it has one USB 2.0 port, two USB 3.1 ports,
and a USB type C port, but only for data transfers.
It also has an Ethernet port and it has a Kensington lock and no optical media drive.
So if you if you look at the links, you'll see why it's very thin.
So I'm actually pretty impressed with it.
I played around with it with Windows with Windows 10 and it's actually pretty snappy.
Even for it being having Windows 10, I actually went ahead and tested Slackware on this laptop
and it flew Slackware 15 current, I think, is what I was running what I tested it with.
It's currently running, it's actually running OpenBSD7.4 current as of this episode.
And I'm actually, I didn't actually, I didn't wipe the Windows partition or Windows drive
on this because surprisingly this actually has, and it's not mentioned in the specs here,
but this actually has an available M.2 NVMe slot for a second solid state drive.
So I've found myself another 256GB SSD that's NVMe and M.2, and I popped it into that
and that's where I'm running my OpenBSD install.
So I'm not, I guess you can say I'm dual booting, but each operating system is in its own
drive.
So I'm actually using the BIOS, the boot selector from the BIOS to select which drive I
want to start up from, which is, yeah, I'm digressing here, but it's probably the way
I would only do a boot at this point.
I don't know if I'm up for dealing with partitions and bootloaders and any more.
This point is just one simplicity, so this works for me.
So yeah, so that's actually a big plus for this laptop considering how much it costs.
Now the downside is the most you can upgrade this to, at least officially, is 16GB of RAM.
Why?
Because it only has one RAM slot, which means you'll be running in single channel mode, unfortunately.
So that's a pretty big bottleneck right there, but considering the price and considering
that even for a beta laptop, it runs all right, I'm not going to complain.
So yeah, I guess if you ever come across these, they're super light.
The battery life, I can tell you that it's not up to 10 hours.
I think, and it could be because this is a refer model, maybe the battery's lost some
of its life.
I know it's lost some of its life since, I think it got me about six hours, and that's
on the window side.
On the OpenBSD side, I would say maybe four hours at best, but your mileage may vary.
So yeah, so I thought this was a neat little laptop, and I'm very happy with it.
You know, all things considered.
So that's my mini review of this laptop.
If you do come across it, it's just check it out, it's something that you might want to
have as a beta laptop, that you don't care if it gets banged up or whatever.
That's an option.
Anyway, that's going to do it for this episode.
Talk to you soon.
Bye-bye.