Monday, January 18, 2016

ES1-111M-P2YU: cheap, expandable laptop i really like

I am not afraid to pay for hardware. I built my gaming desktop/VMware lab, and I have a high end ASUS gaming laptop - both have i7's and 32GB of ram and are years old. However, I also really appreciate value. I wanted a light, small laptop for travel that had good battery life and was fanless so i could use it in bed or other places where a fan could be a problem - something convenient for when I didn't want to move my 7lb G750JX.

After much researching, and after months with this laptop, I can say the Acer ES1-111M-P2YU is one of the best pieces of hardware i've bought. I got it for $200 in amazon - you will need to put it in the cart and wait as it varies widely on price, or check other places.

This is an excellent in-depth review with lots of pictures: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/acer-e11-es1-111m-p2yu-laptop-review-by-htwingnut.779767/ and this one was what I originally read when researching this model http://techforpennies.com/acer-aspire-e-11-es1-111m-p2yu-review/


My friend Paul Braren actually made a video on this laptop with me when we met in VMworld 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1FBhtlIfyU
  
Pros:
pentium quad core
expandable ram to 8gb
actual HDD slot (upgraded to a SSD)
great driver support in linux/unix
Windows with Bing 8.1 upgrades to Win 10 home (which i didn't do but nice upgrade)
Both wireless and wired network
HDMI
FANLESS

Cons:
#2 key acts weird
only one dimm slot
not so easy to find now

I haven't yet installed Linux on it (right now playing with OpenBSD) but I found this post which has a lot of information from a user on a similar model (the 2 core instead of 4 core)

http://blog.mdda.net/oss/2014/11/16/acer-e11-es1-111-c3nt-linux/