hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3521.txt

Episode: 3521
Title: HPR3521: Upgrades to Acer Aspire 5 Slim
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3521/hpr3521.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:56:13

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3521 for Monday 31st of January 2022.
Today's show is entitled Upgrades to Asyr Asyr Asyr Slim and is part of the series
Hardware Upgrades.
It is hosted by Archer 72 and is about 6 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is Upgrades to Asyr Asyr Slim and is part of the series Hardware Upgrades.
Hello, Hacker Public Radio, Archer 72 and in this episode, I upgrade my Acer aspires
to Asyr Asyr Asyr Slim, a model number A15-43.
It was a replacement for my Acer aspire 5, which I had for 10 years.
So I thought it was something, time for something lighter.
And I said, unlike Spire 5, opening it multiple times, the hinges started to break on it.
So I decided I'll try and limit the amount of times I open it to clean it, which I still have to do occasionally,
because I have it sitting on the stand under the couch so I can still access it by SSH.
The specs on this modest laptop are that it has an AMD Ryzen 3 CPU 3200.
The GPU is the ADM AMD Radion RX Vega 3.
Display is a full HD 1920 by 1080.
The built-in storage drive is 128GB NVMe SSD.
The RAM that comes standard is 4GB of DDR4.
You can upgrade that to 32GB.
And that weighs 1.9kg or 4.2 pounds.
And the ports, there's 2 USB 2.0s.
And the 1 USB 3.2 Gen 1.
And the HD of my port.
So why did I want to upgrade anything on this?
Well, at the point that I needed to, the system would randomly kick me out back to the login screen.
When I poked through the system log files and found out that it was kicking me out,
because it was too little RAM for all that was Firefox was using.
A couple of searches later I found that it was only 10 screws to undo the back of this plate.
And I didn't realize that there was an extra bay or either an SSD or a spinning drive.
So at first I just put an extra 16GB stick and to add to the existing floor.
And I found out from talking to a few people that actually should be matching.
So I returned those and got a 28GB sticks of RAM.
And the process of ducted creating the RAM, I made the mistake of I didn't realize where the power plug was.
So I almost was unable to boot.
And I pulled the power and I'll point out where that is in the show notes.
And I got a tip to press the power button for about 10 seconds to see what I could do to drain the power from the rest of the board.
And apparently worked because I'm recording from the laptop that I did the upgrade to.
And since I found out that I could add extra drive, I had to get the screws first from eBay.
Because I didn't, I couldn't locate them, but I'll put a link to how that is done from YouTube.
And also pictures of my own laptop as I had been doing the process.
I only use a spinning drive because that's what I had to spare.
There's 500GB and I plan on putting virtual machines on that.
I know that if I was to run better, I would be better off with an SSD, but that may come later.
And also when I was doing all the upgrades, I found a better way to, or better places to pry up more towards the back where there's, in the back, there's less surface area.
And I'll point that out in my notes also.
Also, one last thing I had to clean out the fan at this point too, because it gets a build above dust.
And that's also the reason I had to pull apart the older laptop so often in order to keep everything running cool.
That's all I have for now.
Thank you for listening.
Until next time.
Bye.
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Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareLike3.0 license.