Episode: 3282
Title: HPR3282: HP Laptop with AMD Ryzen 3 Mobile with Radeon Graphics
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3282/hpr3282.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:08:38

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3282 for Tuesday, 2 March 2021.
Today's show is entitled HP Uptop with AMD Ryzen 3 Mobile with Radiant Graphics and is part of the series Hardware Upgrades.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet and is about 27 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, I talk about the specs of the laptop and a brief upgrade.
This episode of HP R is brought to you by Ananasthos.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at Ananasthos.com.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm your host, Darwin, also known as some guy on the internet.
Today is a little bit different.
Today I'm talking to you on a different rig.
I have a laptop that I bought and that's what today's episode is going to be about.
Also, I'm going to be using a different recording setup.
I'm going to try it out in this episode and hopefully it works out.
I'll try to give away for you guys to leave some feedback for me as well.
I currently don't have a way of you leaving me some feedback,
but I'll try to put something together like an email address or something real quick.
But right now I'm using a on headphones set from Walmart.
It is the surf on three and a half millimeter headphone microphone combo.
I believe Walmart sells it for like $9.88,
which actually get up to roughly about $10.30 something cents.
It's not a high quality thing and that's why I needed it.
I didn't want to spend a ton of money because I didn't know if it was going to work.
I did want something that would be useful on the go.
Also, I wanted something that didn't require a bunch of special drivers or anything
because it needed to work with Linux.
I needed it to just be plug and usable.
No need to configure, mess with anything, configure anything.
Just get recording and it just needs to give me decent sound quality
that I can then hop in and edit to make better.
And that's what I'm hoping for with this setup right now.
So I went in and tweaked some settings, adjusted the microphone,
setting a little bit because I think it has like tremendously high gain.
So I went ahead and dealt with that because clipping was happening
and I didn't want that to be a part of the episode
where it feels like it's blowing out ear drums
even though I do edit the audio to reduce some of that.
But yeah, that's basically what we got going on.
So let's go ahead and hop right on in.
Now that we got the introduction out of the way
and some information on the headphones that I'm using,
headphone microphone that combo that I'm using.
So let's go ahead and jump right on in.
Okay, so the laptop that I bought,
it's a small 14 inch HP laptop
with Ryzen 3 mobile processor and radion graphics.
I basically have an identical one that this accepts in Intel i3
and it's older about two years old.
But I really wanted a Ryzen laptop for Linux use.
You know, I carry it with me to work
and these things take a little bit up a beating.
I'm kind of rough on the network.
So I didn't want to spend like $900 on break.
You know, break it, lose $900, $300 is more of something
I can lose and not be too hurt by.
Even though I don't want to lose any money,
it's just 300 is much better than nine
and the idea of losing money.
All right, now let's talk about the model number
of this bad boy.
We're gonna be using the natal phonic alphabet here
when we're talking about letters with numbers
because the model number, you know,
it's an alphanumeric string.
So if you don't, not familiar with the natal phonic alphabet,
that's that alpha bravo Charlie thing.
I'll leave a link down in the description.
And hopefully you can get to it.
I don't know how to mark down works on hacker public radio yet.
Hopefully it's just vanilla mark down.
All right, so the model number for this HP laptop is 14,
which is one, four hyphen, D is in delta, K is in kappa,
one, zero, two, five, W as in whiskey, M as in mic.
So that's the model number.
The product ID, it is one is an alpha, four,
nine, one, you, Utah is alpha,
hashtag is alpha, B is bravo is alpha.
All right, so I got the other notes and stuff down
in the description down there.
I'm not gonna read out too many more of these numbers
or whatever, but I figured if you're just driving down
the street and listening or if you're visually impaired
and you wanted to hear the numbers,
I would read out a few of them there for you.
I got a couple of links down in there
from Walmart.com as well.
I went to Walmart where I purchased this one at
and the first link in the description there
is the one that I actually purchased
is the 14 DK1025WM.
That's the model that I actually own.
The other model is, it's similar,
but I think it just comes with it.
I think it has a different processor in it
and it may also come with an SSD instead of the HDD.
But they're very similar as far as the body
and you can crack them both open and upgrade them.
Now, one of the things about this that was kind of weird,
I was checking it out, trying to,
I thought this was a new processor
like something that they recently dropped.
Turns out this thing may have been out
for a little while like six months.
I think it launched back in about June the last year,
June of 2000, I'm not June our January of 2020.
So January 6, 2020 is when this bad boy may have came out.
That's the information I could find
and I saw some videos prior to me buying this
that were dated about six months or so ago.
So I figured, hey, it's not exactly brand new,
so hopefully there'll be some drivers out there
where it won't cause me any problems
with the type of distro I want to run,
but we'll get into that in just a bit.
All right, so for that Ryzen 325,
it's the Ryzen 3 and the model number of the Ryzen 3
is 3250U as in Utah.
It's a 2.6 gigahertz base clocked CPU
up to a 3.5 gigahertz max boost clock.
So it's decent for a mobile CPU, understand.
Two cores, four threads,
and it has the GPU because it's an APU,
but it's the GPU on this chip is three cores.
So you're not gonna be doing any serious gaming
or anything with it, but it's enough to get you going
for what I want to use it for,
which is, hey, podcasting,
I'm currently podcasting on this system.
So yeah, it gets the job done.
Yeah, and the system specifications
when I was checking out the CPU,
I think it showed it'd be able to handle memory
up to 2,400 megahertz.
I'm not sure if you were able to go into the BIOS
and tweak that at all or any.
Now, I'm not even sure if you'd even want to.
This is a low spec device.
You basically just want to use it as is,
just upgrade a few components,
which is what I did upgrade to RAM.
And now let's go ahead and move right on
into the RAM section of this power boy.
It came before Gigabyte's a DDR4,
2,400 stock, a single sold-down
into the module slot.
For Gigabyte's handled well under Ubuntu
with the GNOME desktop.
I'll also try sentiment for a little while
with just that for Gigabytes.
And it brand the OS well.
Now, when you start getting into Thunderbird
and throwing up about 10 or so tabs,
yeah, you're going to have some problems there.
So the forward, and I normally don't work with 10 tabs.
I just did it just to kind of see what was going to happen.
Yeah, you're going to have problems.
So I upgraded that RAM,
but I had to wait for the RAM to come in.
So it wasn't like I just had 16 gigs lying around,
had to order it.
And I think they were having a shortage
or something, I'm not entirely sure,
but I had to wait for that RAM to come in,
which is unusual.
Normally I can get it like two days or the next day,
but this time it took about four days to get that in.
And when I got it in, I thought it was having an issue.
So I ordered in two eight gig sticks of Crucial.
And I've used Crucial in the past.
Matter of fact, the older model of laptop
that I'm using of the same HP,
but with the Intel chip,
that also has 16 gigs of Crucial RAM in it.
Runs just fine.
It registers all 16 gigs.
Here, however, I put 16 gigs in,
it only registers 14.
Now, I'm not sure if it's the laptop,
I'm not sure if it's something to do with the CPU,
I'm not sure if it's maybe just GNOME, I don't know.
I wiped cinnamon off the thing
and I hadn't tried cinnamon yet with the Linux Mint.
So I need to, I'm probably just gonna run the US,
a live USB pop cinnamon in there real quick
on a live session and test it out to see if it'll actually
read all 16 gigs.
But for mine, it's only reading 14.
And I thought, wow, that's odd.
Maybe my RAM is bad or something, right?
So I contacted the seller to send the RAM back
and I ordered up some more RAM, the P and Y.
And this P and Y RAM, I think,
clocked a little bit higher than what the laptop can handle.
Let's see, it clocks at about 2666 megahertz.
So, you know, just a little bit higher than what it'll use.
And that's not anything that'll actually change
how the system reads the RAM or anything.
So I figured both crucial and P and Y can't be wrong.
You know, they can't both send with like two bad cells
on a memory module or whatever, right?
So it's gotta be the system.
And yeah, I'm gonna test out cinnamon later on.
I just wanted to drop that on you
in case you were trying the same thing.
And like if you want to go to Walmart,
purchase just bad boy, that's just a little heads up
that I'll leave a note down in the show notes
as well about that.
It's only gonna recognize or at least mine,
my copy of this laptop only recognize 14 gigabytes.
I haven't seen anybody else point that out,
but I'll take a look for that as well.
Also, let me talk to you about the distros, right?
So when I installed cinnamon the first time,
it was kinda wonky.
Like it was really weird trying to get that thing to go.
And I tried Zubuntu with the XFCE desktop.
I tried Coupon to KED desktop
and then I tried Ubuntu proper.
Now the Ubuntu proper booted up just fine.
Everything else didn't.
So I was trying to figure out what exactly was going on.
Cause like XFCE just,
it was the most broken and shattered thing I have ever seen.
And this was during the live session.
I even tried to install it.
Just, I couldn't even use the mouse on the screen.
It was so shattered and broken.
I had to kinda tab multiple times to get to
what I believe was the section.
Like I am not kidding guys.
This was terrible trying to get this thing installed.
And I finally got it installed and when it,
I figured like this during the live session
there probably wasn't all the drivers
and things that it needed.
So if I installed it and you know,
make sure I click on the third party drivers
and all that good stuff.
It'll, you know, be better on install, wrong.
Like XFCE both Zubuntu and Linux Mint
with XFCE Desktop completely broken.
Turns out it was a secure boot.
And it had me a little bit, you know,
I was kinda wondering.
I was like, you know, Ubuntu proper installed
with no problem with secure boot enabled.
So I turned secure boot off,
booted up Linux Mint with the XFCE, no problem.
So I then I tried the KDE Desktop
with Kubuntu, no problem.
It booted up into a live environment,
no issues whatsoever.
Except XFCE still could not get that thing to just view.
Maybe it's the Vega graphics on here
because this does have Vega three graphics inside of it.
So I don't know if, you know, those drivers are
something Zubuntu like the KDE Desktop can handle.
I mean, not KDE, excuse me, XFCE.
I'm not sure if, you know,
it's coded to handle that yet or whatever.
Or maybe I don't know.
I'm not gonna speculate too much farther than that.
But, yeah.
And I started thinking about it.
I was like, man, you know, Ubuntu proper.
I think that it was able to work so well
is because you know, canonical has that
really tight relationship with Microsoft.
So there's a good chance that their kernel
was, you know, signed and able to boot with secure boot
whereas all the derivatives, they may not have a signed,
you know, kernel or whatever.
But they seem to be using the exact same one.
But I've had an issue like that in the past.
Like maybe, I don't know, a few months ago or something like that.
I didn't update on Linux Mint on one of my other laptops.
And after that update, all of a sudden,
it was just like I could not boot back into the damn thing.
Once I shut it down, they kept telling me
that something was up with the kernel.
And, you know, I hopped online and basically,
that's what they were saying is, you know,
secure boot causing the problem.
I turned secure boot off and I was able to boot right back
into the system.
Now, all my installs are encrypted, by the way.
So I wanted to point that out.
Yeah, so let's go ahead and move right on along here.
That's just a little side note for you
if you're gonna buy one of these and install.
Just to let you know, Ubuntu proper will install right out
of the gate with secure boot enabled.
No problem.
You're gonna have that wonderful GNOME 3 desktop.
At first, I wasn't a big fan of GNOME 3,
but since I've been using this thing for about a week now,
we'll just, you know, stock GNOME 3,
knowing no extensions or anything,
just turn on the dark mode, snap down a bunch of stuff
and start using it.
It's usable.
It's usable.
At least I don't feel so bad about it like I used to.
I felt, you know, I didn't want to criticize it.
So harshly, but it was just,
it was rough for me to get adjusted to GNOME,
but now it's better.
Yeah, it's better.
All right, moving along here is bad boy.
The one demo that I have,
it came with a one terabyte hard drive spinning rust
at 5400 RPM.
And for those of you who don't know the reason
why laptops normally, you know,
shift with that 5400 RPM drive,
instead of like a 7200 RPM drive,
is because the slower this thing spins,
the less likely of that read right head,
causing a problem like digging into the platter or something,
when you're walking around with your laptop and using it,
or if you set it on the table while it's reading
or writing data, you know, that little bit of,
uh, I guess instability or shock,
from you placing it onto a hard surface,
or just walking around bouncing it around or whatever,
you won't, you won't actually cause any damage,
that'll, you know, mess up the, uh, the platters.
So you want it to spin a little bit slower.
Not only that, it is also good for, um, for power usage.
So, you know, in order to spin it faster,
it requires a little bit more power,
spin it slower, you know, all of that stuff affects battery life.
Now, because I've taken out that hard drive,
like I didn't even activate the windows,
as soon as I got home, I snatched the laptop out of the box,
took out my screwdriver and start,
well, I had to peel the little stickers off the back first,
not the stickers that we call them the rubber table grips or whatever.
Peel them bad boys off of the utility knife,
just dug it up under one corner and slowly began to peel it back.
And then once I removed those nice and carefully,
because I want to put them back,
I, uh, took my screwdriver and start taking out all the screws.
It's like six screws, real easy, super simple.
Pulled them out, um, started peeling the,
the laptop case off, nice and easy.
And a little tip that I can give you,
I don't know if it'll this'll work with you or not,
but I can just tell you from my experience.
I started peeling from the side with the, um,
uh, what's that, the, the ethernet from that side,
where the ethernet and the, um, HDMI and the two USBs,
I started peeling from that side all the way around to the side
with the type C and the memory card reader.
The type C, if you tried to, uh, at least on my system,
when I tried to peel it open,
that, you know, the bottom of the case,
so that I can reveal the RAM and everything underneath,
when I tried to peel it open from the side with the type C,
it got a little hung up on that type C.
And I didn't want to accidentally rip that on, you know,
the, they want to break it, the, the first moment,
I got it home, so I, uh, I just went and start from the other side,
which allowed it to peel open a little bit easier,
you know, with these plastic cases,
like the entire chassis is just really, really thin plastic.
I mean, it's not going to break easily or nothing,
but you still don't want to put too much force on it to break it.
So that's, that's what we did there.
We went ahead and peeled it open from the side of the HDMI
toward the side of the, uh, type C.
Now, once we got that bad boy open,
then you're going to see your, uh, RAM slots right up front,
right beside the, uh, two and a half hard drive,
right down there.
Went ahead and took that two and a half spinning rust this out.
Like I said, it didn't even power it up
or activated the windows or anything.
I'm just going to throw it to the side.
And if ever I need a windows key for a VM or something,
I'll probably just pop it back in just to activate it,
get that key and then, uh, yeah, you know,
load up a VM with windows and then, uh,
not on this laptop, of course, because, you know,
two cores, you really don't want, you don't want to do that.
I have a beastly desktop that has a Ryzen 9 3900 in it.
And, uh, that's why I do a lot of,
I use Linux Mint on that on my desktop.
That's my, uh, what you call that's,
that's just my real machine where I do gaming
and the actual video editing and other stuff on that.
So that's the production machine, so to speak.
All right.
So the hard drives that I put in this baby,
I put a Western did both of my hard drives
are Western did your blue because they're great consumer,
uh, great drives.
They're both SSDs.
They're both 500 gigs.
One of them is an M.2 2280 SSD.
So, you know, the M.2s and it's just keyed 2280,
the length of the, uh, the drive.
You know, it's, I guess that's the standard length of them
for, um, M.2 SATA, not the MVME,
but M.2 SATA, uh, also the,
the other one is the, uh, 500 gig two and a half inch SSD,
SATA 36 gigs.
So I got a, I got a couple of links down in there
to help you out as well.
If you didn't know what an M.2 was or whatever,
you can just check them down there.
Hopefully, again, hopefully the mark down
is just vanilla mark down and it'll give you the links
like how I prepared them.
You can go ahead and check that out.
All right, so, um, hopefully the sound of that ambulance
or a fire truck or whatever that is going crazy out there
is not, uh, I think it'll pass.
Yeah, it's always passing.
The Wi-Fi, uh, I did not get the Wi-Fi working.
So, let me just give you the, uh, the number,
I mean, the model of the Wi-Fi,
that, that fire truck's got me a little bit distracted.
I apologize, but it's the real tech.
The Wi-Fi, uh, Modulant here,
it's both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless combo.
And it is the real tech, R, as in Romeo, T as in Tango,
L as in Lima, 88, 21, C as in Charlie, E as in Echo.
And of course, you know, it's an 802.11, BG and AC,
all that extra stuff, Bluetooth, uh, combo
and a Bluetooth is, uh, 4.2.
Even though it didn't work right out of the box,
as you should already know, DKMS saves the day.
So, Ubuntu, I just, you know, pulled up the,
I think it's called additional drivers.
Let me go ahead and check real quick.
I think that's like the first app inside the app menu,
uh, yeah, additional drivers.
Went ahead and just pulled that up
and by the boom, by the bang,
it recognized that I had Wi-Fi, uh,
device in there that did not have drivers.
So it pulled them up real quick,
asked me if I wanted to use open source drivers.
Hey, yeah, jump right on in there at, you know,
download the drivers.
And if you have secure boot enabled,
I think you got to go through a password process.
I turn secure boot off on my system.
But, um, I probably should have turned it back on,
but I'm just going to leave it off.
It's fine.
I was something else I was about to go on
about with the secure boot.
There's discussions as to why you should leave secure boot on
things like that so you don't end up running malicious code
or whatever people don't install,
like, you know, kernel level malicious code on your system.
I don't do any banking on these type of devices.
All right.
As a security measure,
I only do serious things like banking
and dealing with other, uh,
accounts that have any kind of financial ties
rather just be a credit card or whatever.
I do all of that on one system.
Therefore, if, if an, if an issue occurred,
it would have had to have been on that one system.
And that one system is monitored a little bit better.
You know, I can actually check and see what's going on on my network
if anything unsuspective's happening with that system.
And it's not like that system's just turned on all the time.
Just running, you know,
it only runs when I need to do things on it.
So, yeah, that's kind of the security measure I have.
With this right here,
the system that I'm on now, this laptop,
I'm on the go doing a lot of Libre office type work.
I'm doing some emails on here,
which I mean, don't get me wrong.
Email is important,
but there's no password going around on it.
I use Bitwarden from a password manager.
And yeah, I feel confident that nothing terrible is going to happen.
Unless they ship their malware and a snap,
I'm really not going to worry about it.
Yeah. So I already talked to you about the different distros that I used.
And yeah, and let me talk to you a little bit more about the, uh,
issue that I had with the distros when I booted them up with secure boot.
Cool bunch of and sentiment both would not show the desktop.
You would only see the, uh, panel and you could open up the menu on the panel.
It would open the menu and reveal it.
You can select an application, but because them application,
I guess it was the window manager or something that just would not load.
So when you would click on things,
it would appear to have opened, but it will be invisible just like the rest of the background.
So you couldn't really couldn't see anything except for the panel.
So that was the issue I have with both of them, but, uh, like I said,
a bunch of just work right out of box.
New issues must be that partnership with Microsoft, whatever the case is.
What I'm going to try later on though, uh, I am going to try window manager on this,
baby, and, uh, I don't know which one I've never used a window manager before.
Like, like, seriously, I tried installing awesome played with it for about 10
the minutes, trying to do some configurations.
And then I realized, holy crap, I can't hear anything.
And, um, apparently the thing that they don't tell you about when you're
getting into window managers is all your services.
You got to kind of load all that yourself.
So, you know, I thought that it was just going to kind of, you know, uh, yeah,
when it's a window manager, it is literally just a window manager.
Like you, you, you, you got to load all that other stuff yourself.
So, uh, I got to figure out what the, uh, commands or, or the, the files are
called to try and tie all that into the, uh, load config or whatever to start up
config. And then it's just, it seems like a lot of work.
I don't even think I want to do it again now that I'm talking about it.
It's, it's worse because nobody really prepares you for that.
It's just like, oh, yeah, window managers make everything so much more efficient.
You should really try one of magic.
Then you go and get the window managers, like, wait a minute.
Certainly it is easy to install like everything they talk about on windows.
Easy install, all you do is just, you know, pseudo app, get whatever and you got it.
So install super easy, but configuring that's the part that they normally
leave out. Yeah, you're going to be spending some time configuring.
All right.
So enough ranting about window managers.
Let's move over to battery life.
Yeah, but the battery life, uh, this bad boy says nine hours.
However, I seriously doubt you're going to get nine hours in Linux.
I never actually like used it for, you know, nine hours straight or whatever to
try and get that. Um, the battery life is pretty good because it's a brand new laptop.
I see it, you know, I would be really upset if it was bad, but, and, you know,
I use it in bursts. It's not like I'm, I don't do have a job where I'm on a laptop
straight all day. I, uh, I'll pop it out, jump on it, type up some things for a report,
you know, drop down some notes, probably check some email real quick.
And, uh, and, uh, now I'm going to also be popping into it to do a little bit of
podcasting and editing the audio for the podcast.
So, um, yeah, I get decent battery life.
I can't complain about the battery life is just like every other laptop I've used with
Linux, you know, decent.
I think that's just about everything I can really point out to you about the laptop.
Yeah, I haven't tried any gaming or anything like that on it.
And the keyboard's okay. I mean, for a $300 laptop, I hope you're really not expecting
a excellent keyboard. I hate all track pads I've ever used.
So I use a mouse. I have a vertical mouse that I, uh, a wireless vertical mouse that I plug in.
I also have not tried Bluetooth just because Linux and Bluetooth is always, uh,
it is, it is really a pleasurable, simple thing for me.
Every time I've ever used Bluetooth and Linux, I've always, you know,
been just sort of frustrated with it.
So that's about it for this episode, guys.
We're running a bit long here and I hope you enjoy the episode.
If you do and I manage to get an email address or I don't know,
can you guys message me on here?
Like on hacker?
Like do they have some sort of thing that just, well, I guess you,
you have to sign up for that. So I don't know.
I'll figure something out and get an email address to you.
But I hope you guys enjoy. Take care.
See you in the next episode.
Some guy on the internet.
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