Gav's World : Inspiron 14 5485 Laptop

Inspiron 14 5485 Laptop [worf]

During the bizarre year of 2020 I bought myself a full-sized (but smallish) laptop (not as small as my previous netbooks though: Eee PC 4G (701) and Eee PC 901 from several years previous) as there are several times that a tablet or smartphone just won't cut it.

I opted for an AMD processor to avoid All the major Intel vulnerabilities. In a cheap laptop format, that now comes as an APU (a combined CPU and GPU).

I currently have "worf" running the 64 bit version of Xubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), although it does dual boot with Windows 10 (only because it came with it, so I have the license anyway).

Interestingly, when running Linux, the fan barely spins up, and the CPU cores run very slowly (about 1.2GHz) when idling, but running Windows has the fan spinning almost constantly!

There's not a great deal that you can do to a laptop (modification-wise) but I've re-partitioning the NVMe to allow a dual boot of Linux (default) and Windows 10 (also removing BitLocker so that I didn't have to re-enter the huge decryption key any time Grub updated). I've added a 500GB SATA SSD split 50/50 between ext4 (/home for Linux) and NTFS (D: for Windows) for large storage space. I've also max'd out the RAM to 32GiB.

Anyway, here are worf's specifications:

Specifications:

Laptop:	Dell Inspiron 14 5485
Processor:	AMD Ryzen 5 3500U (2.1GHz; 3.7GHz boost)
RAM:	2x Samsung M471A2K43CB1-CTD (16GiB DDR4, 2666Mbps) (32GiB total, but APU can only access at 2400Mbps)
Storage:	Samsung PM991 (256GByte M.2 NVMe root file-system) Samsung 870 EVO (500GByte SATA home file-system)
Mouse:	Logitech VX-Nano