New laptop

Daerandin

Daerandin

Well-Known Member
Today I picked up my new laptop. I spent quite a few hours today installing Arch Linux and getting most of the important packages installed. This weekend I intend to set things up more or less exactly how I like it, and start testing games. The laptop is a ASUS G751YJ, the specs are quite nice:

CPU: Intel Core i7 4710HQ
RAM: 16 gb
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M
Storage: 500 gb SSD and 2 tb HDD

I am running fully updates Arch Linux now, with the 4.0.1 kernel and newest nvidia driver from Arch repos and things seem to work very well. I have not had the time to test gaming performance yet and I don't expect to have the time for that until this weekend.

As was expected with a brand new laptop model, there are a few issues. I got some weird error messages on boot, which seems to be related to the macro keys on the keyboard. But a few seconds of googling led me to a boot parameter which removes the error message. Another issue is that I am unable to switch to a TTY after starting X. This is also true for exiting X. After having launched X, TTY just appear as a black screen, so I need to type in commands blindly. I had this exact problem with my previous laptop when it was new, but it got fixed after some months with a newer kernel.

I will post some updates once I get around to do some proper testing of gaming performance.
 
Thats awesome! how the heck did they fit two hard drives in that thing?
How many fans are in there?

Pics please...
 
I had two hard drives in the last one too. Laptop hard drives are much thinner than hard drives in desktops.

There are two fans, same as the previous model I had. But the cooling system on these Asus laptops is very efficient. I just tested The Witcher 2 with all graphical settings on the absolute maximum, and I could barely hear the GPU fan. Most of the time you don't hear anything at all, you really need to push it for the fans to become audible, and even then it is not really that noticeable.

Below are a few pictures. I am not at home at the moment, I am at my mom's house as she is away until Sunday and I am here to watch and walk her dog while she is away. It's easier for the dog if I just stay here with it instead of bringing it home to my apartment, besides I'd rather not have dog hair everywhere at home. So keep in mind that the pictures below are not my home setup.

IMAG0329.jpg

IMAG0330.jpg


I am currently in the process of copying all my stuff back from the external hard drive where I copied all my games, playonlinux virtual drives, and all my other stuff. I have also landed on different look than my last computer, and I might keep it like this as I actually quite like it. Besides, using a theme that fully support new GTK3 apps was kind of a relief. A lot of the themes I tried in the past didn't fully support GTK3 apps, which led to some ugly looking apps.

new_arch.png

new_arch2.png


I am not using ext4 as my file system, but I instead decided to use btrfs. It is still considered experimental, but I have not heard any indications that it is dangerous to use anymore.

I still have quite a lot more to do before I get everything set up again. I need to set up Samba sharing again, configure CUPS, and probably a lot more that I don't remember at the moment. Thankfully I can just use a lot of my previous config files.

I have not just copied my old home directory to my new system, because chances are I will want to use some fewer applications or maybe even have different configurations. Setting things up from scratch avoids potential clutter of old configs and files that I don't use anymore.

In case it's not obvious to everyone yet, I am a control freak when it comes to my computer :p
 
Wow, that thing is big! I'm sure the motherboard and video card take up most of the space, so I was surprised it could still fit (and power) two 2.5" drives.

You are going to have dog hair in your laptop after today :(
 
booman said:
You are going to have dog hair in your laptop after today :(
Click to expand...

Haha, yeah. I suppose that is inevitable.

As for the space, this thing can be easily opened so I can do that later and take a pic inside so you can see how things fit inside.
 
Easily? Really? Almost every laptop I've ever cracked open required removing the keyboard, casing and many screws.
How easy is it?
 
What I mean by easy to open is that there is a panel underneath that can be easily removed. It gives access to change hard drives and RAM. I think most newer gaming laptops are built with an easily removed panel underneath.

You don't have access to everything from that panel. If you want to do something like change a fan (like I had to do with my previous laptop) then you need to start taking it apart completely, which is rather difficult.
 
Thats what I thought
I opened an Acer laptop once and they did it right!
Removing one panel allowed access to hard-drive, memory, wifi card, CPU and GPU heatsinks.
It was awesome!
 
Is that conky on the side there? Can you send me the template you use?

Also, awesome laptop. :D

Asus rocks!

Personally I stick to a gaming desktop and a weaker laptop.

I got myself a Evga Geforce 960 GTX today. Going to get a new CPU soon as well. I will be getting the AMD FX 9590 4,7 GHz, then clock it a little.
 
I'm with you Aryvandaar
Desktops rule, but I certainly can't pack it into a large back and take it with me.
Well I could, but it would be a really large bag and pretty heavy.

How much did you pay for that GeForce 960 GTX?
What did you do with your old GPU?
 
I've always had a lot of respect for Asus, they make quality products.

I attached my .conkyrc as a text document here. I originally grabbed this from the Arch forums and modified it slightly to work better with Xfce.
 

Attachments

I was a little tired yesterday when I was tweaking the .conkyrc, so line 62 have two identical listings of the network interface. Just delete one.

You can also get a semi-transparent background for this conky, which would probably look better if you are using a background image that might make it difficult to see all the text. Here's a link to the the config before I modified it:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1403702#p1403702
 
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