Posted by Sergio Islas
- June 25, 2023, 12:36:08
After eleven years of owning a notebook equipped with the processor in question -although, mine was made by Asus, I can say for sure that's the ideal use-scenario for this machine: word processing, slideshows, light to medium spreadsheet calculations, and 720p video playback. I can see Lenovo's product being used back then by a real estate agent, a salesperson, or perhaps a clerk/secretary for an old-fashioned executive in the early 2010s.
The AMD E2 served me well for that purpose during my college years since I had to read PDF papers and write word documents, do presentations -sometimes I had to connect the machine to the lecture room's projector, make spreadsheets for my statistics courses, and even for doing some entry-level 2D design! I'm talking about CorelDraw, Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator from CS5, Quantum GIS and AutoCAD drafting. Sure, the experience was far from ideal, but I can attest that the Atom and Celeron laptops most of my classmates had at the time were far worse at design duties: those ones just crashed with such a workload. I want to believe the Radeon graphics helped the programs to some extent.
Outside from playing DVDs, leisure was not something I would really do with this machine: I still preferred to play MP3s on my Nokia feature-phone, I routinely downloaded my photo shoots via bluetooth to post them on Facebook from the laptop -something that required time but was quite doable, until I switched to an Android smartphone at around 2015. From then on, I just used the laptop whenever I had to do serious typing: letters, resumés, long emails, blogging, drafting simple brochures, you name it. But browsing the web, social networking, doing online purchases, reading the news, listening to music and podcasts... overall, consuming multimedia content somehow felt more pleasurable on my smartphone than on the AMD E2 at that point, so the laptop was stored away most of the time. Gaming? no way!
When the COVID lockout arrived, I handled this very laptop to my nephew in 7th grade, not without doing some system upgrades: an SSD swap with a fresh install of windows 10 and an 8 GB stick of ram, as well as new thermal paste for the CPU's cooling assembly. The aging machine served him really well for that purpose, and I was glad he used it instead of a Chromebook or an HP Stream. In my opinion, those thigs are e-waste right out of the factory.
I still dread its slowness when I choose to use this laptop, but -call it nostalgia if you wish, I do appreciate the system's stability to this very day, even under Windows 11 once the bloatware is stripped-off, the background processes are optimized, and MS Edge is adjusted accordingly. It would be utterly stupid to run the OS with all the bell and whistles, as it was back in the day with windows 8, yet it rarely shows any "program not responding" messages.
My nephew stored away the old E2 again once he was back to the classroom, then I managed to get it back, and now I use it to play movies on my 32" tube TV. Guess what: paired with a decent HDMI to RCA adapter and a wireless keyboard-mouse combo, it still beats the built-in OS from most smart tv's, yet I have the option of using it as a spare, backup computer, just in case my much newer PC ever decides to break down.