16GiB RAM module works in Aspire 3

I have posted about the Acer Aspire 3 Ryzen 5 experiments:

• Radical experiment to cool the laptop — December 20, 2022
• Enhancing the Acer Aspire 3 Ryzen 5 laptop — December 13, 2022
• Acer Aspire 3 Ryzen 5 3500U laptop — December 12, 2022

As reported, it has 8GiB soldered onto the motherboard and 8GiB in a SODIMM card.

Online searching revealed very little information whether the laptop will support anything larger than 8GiB. The Acer official docs state that 8GiB is the maximum. One user reported a 16GiB SODIMM module worked, but he had problems with 32GiB -- no details provided.

I would like to report that a 16GiB module works, or at least has worked with limited usage. Bought this one, described as "Kingston 16GB DDR4 valueRAM SO-DIMM 2Rx8 CL22 3200MHz":

https://www.ple.com.au/Products/647696/kingston-16gb-ddr4-valueram-so-dimm-2rx8-cl22-3200mhz

And for the record, my laptop is Acer Aspire 3 Ryzen 5 3500U A315-23-R7UL, model N18Q13.

The 'free' utility shows total RAM is 21.46GiB, so I suppose 3.54GiB has been carved off the 8GiB soldered-on RAM for use by the GPU.  

Tags: tech

Radical experiment to cool the laptop

I posted about an OpenEmbedded compile with the CPU set to "powersave" mode and all CPUs running at 1400MHz:

https://bkhome.org/news/202212/enhancing-the-acer-aspire-3-ryzen-5-laptop.html

Just let it run, compiling the entire 1,620 packages... it took 4 days and 3 hours!

As mentioned in that post, OE was set to use only 3 threads, also compiling of each package was with "make -j2", that is, only using 2 threads.

Decided to try a radical experiment, bought a tilted fan stand from Kmart, only AU$15 (about US$10):

https://www.kmart.com.au/product/laptop-stand-with-fans-43026623

The stand is plastic, however the fans are covered with a metal mesh, so applied closed-cell packaging foam top and bottom to provide some separation:

Took the back plate off the laptop, so that the fans will be blowing directly onto the components inside the laptop.

Wanted to recompile Chromium, as made some changes to the build recipe. Chromium takes the longest to compile and is a severe resource hog. It eats up the RAM. 16GB is needed, though the Aspire 3, my one anyway, shares that with the GPU, so more likely only about 14GB available.

I read one guy reported running out of storage when he had 32GB RAM, but he had set a high number of threads -- don't recall the number. Anyway, decided to leave "make -j2", given my laptops low RAM.

This time, set the CPU to "userspace" mode and set all CPUs to 1700MHz. Then started the recompile of Chromium. In the tray, CPU temperature was ranging from 70°C to 79°C. Summer here, and ambient temperature was probably varying between 25 and 28 -- not sure, as didn't actually measure it.

Chromium took about 20 hours to compile.

How to improve this? Increase that "make -j<n>", but the laptop will probably need more RAM. According to the offical Acer docs, it is already maxed-out, with 8GB soldered on the motherboard and 8GB on a SODIMM card (Samsung 8GB 1rx8 PC4-3200AA).

After an online search, did find posts some guys were able to increase that. One guy said that a 16GB RAM card worked, but there were problems with a 32GB card. No details were provided.

For example, what would be best, a 16GB 1rx8, 2rx8, or 1rx16? I read that x16 cards are bad news. My local computer parts shop has a 2rx8, so will probably try that. That will bump the laptop to 24GB, take off about 2GB for the GPU.

Right, so likely that will be the next experiment. Put the cover back onto the laptop, but still use the fan-stand. Bump the RAM with a 16GB SODIMM card, and try compile Chromium with more threads.

There is very good reason why I set "make -j2" globally for OE. In the past, a higher figure caused some package builds to fail. However, it can be set on a per-package basis, so I could try, say "-j4" for Chromium only. That may considerably speed up the build, but may also result in the CPU running hotter.

One interesting note: most Aspire 3 laptops only have 4GB RAM soldered onto the motherboard. I looked at aliexpress.com, and all the replacement motherboards for my Aspire 3 Ryzen 5 A315-23 only have 4GB RAM. The Aspire 3 family has incredible variability. Acer have used a common housing, screen, etc., with an incredible variety of models.

It is very interesting to experiment with this Ryzen 5 3500U CPU. It supports 1400, 1700 and 2100MHz frequencies, but also has a turbo, or boost, 3700MHz. I think, before had set the CPU to fixed frequencies, that turbo-mode was kicking in, which pushed the temperature to 90°C and over, and the fan to maximum speed. Note that turbo-mode can be turned off, by doing this:

# echo "0" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost

...I noticed that my Intel i3 CPU doesn't have that "boost".   

Tags: tech

Enhancing the Acer Aspire 3 Ryzen 5 laptop

Posted about buying this yesterday:

https://bkhome.org/news/202212/acer-aspire-3-ryzen-5-3500u-laptop.html

One reason it was bought is to do OpenEmbedded builds, freeing up my main workhorse Lenovo desktop computer. It is doing that right now, and indications are the build will take about three days.

I never timed the build on the Lenovo, as it stopped many times and had to fix recipes. Now it looks like will run right through. This is the new OE Kirkstone build, and compiling a whopping 1,620 packages, including biggies such as Chromium and LibreOffice.

When the build started yesterday, the CPU temperature crept over 80°C, which was a concern. I read somewhere that at 90°C there will be possible CPU damage. EasyOS has Wcpufreq, launched via the "System" menu, and I played with some frequency scaling. Settled on "powersave" mode, running at a constant 1.4GHz. CPU temperature dropped to around 50°C.

Then I remembered that I had configured OE to use only 3 cores. That was because the Lenovo desktop has an Intel i3 CPU. But this new Ryzen 5 has 4 cores and 8 threads.

Don't want to abort the build now, let it run through on only 3 cores. next time, will bump to more cores and see what happens to the temperature.

Watching some videos about how to cool down a laptop, learnt something very interesting. In one video, the guy exlained that he had used three different fan cooler stands, but abandoned them in favour of just a passive tilted stand. He got significant temperature drop just by having the laptop on an angle.

I propped the rear of the Acer up about 1 inch, and CPU temperature dropped 2-3°C. Very interesting, so have ordered this:

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/275298813162

Watching a few more videos on the Aspire 3, model A315-23, it was a very pleasant surprise how easy it is to open up and access everything. There is a teardown here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3dNA03Uqjo

Also extremely interesting is that a second SATA drive can be added. Yes, it came with a NVME SSD; however, the box contained this bracket:

This video shows how to insert the extra SATA drive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kueqpeO3dJI

Never had a laptop like this before, where can get at everything so easily.

Weight is about 1.9kg, quite heavy. But, the Aspire 3 is a budget mass-produced family, excellent specs for the price.   

Tags: tech

Acer Aspire 3 Ryzen 5 3500U laptop

Purchased this today. Had pretty good reasons, but even so, thought about it carefully. What decided me is the specs for the price. Outlining the specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3500U
GPU: Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx
RAM: 16GB
SSD: PCIe NVME 1TB

Got it for AU$797 (about 540 US Dollars) from these guys:

https://www.harveynorman.com.au/acer-aspire-3-15-6-inch-r5-3500u-16gb-1tb-ssd-laptop.html

One reason for buying it is to use for OpenEmbedded builds, so as not to tie up my main workhorse computer. Builds are taking over 24 hours, so I can just leave this running, as long as it takes.

OK, the Ryzen 5 is not the latest AMD CPU, but it is no slouch either. Speed comes in similar to an Intel i5, shown in this link:

https://laptopmedia.com/laptop-specs/acer-aspire-3-558/

Another reason for buying it is to test EasyOS. All of my other computers are Intel-based. Except for one that has an Intel GPU on the motherboard and a Radeon card plugged in.

I was half-hoping that there might be some issues with the hardware, that I could work-on, but EasyOS 4.5.3 runs fine, no issues whatsoever. Video works nice, automatically using the Xorg amdgpu driver.

For OE, a 1TB SSD is required, and being builtin, it should compile faster, compared with the USB SSDs that I have been using so far. Also, 16GB RAM is essential, 8GB just doesn't cut it, not even with a swap partition -- well that would be OK, except now compiling Chromium and that really does need the 16GB RAM.

Using Windows Partition Manager, shrunk the C: drive down to 72GB, leaving 882GB free. Then booted Easy from USB and created a 32MB fat16 esp partition and the rest a ext4 partition. Then installed Easy to the ext4 partition, with Limine boot-loader in the fat16 partition.  

Tags: tech

HEADWOLF HPad 1 tablet ordered

I am planning to go camping early November, and want a very portable computer to take along. Also likely to be going on a journey by train, again want something very portable.

Previous years, camping trips, I have taken my Asus laptop. This was purchased in 2012 and is heavy and high power consumption. I have a lithium battery, charged from a solar panel, and I found had to severely restrict hours of usage of the laptop. The solar panel could not keep up.

OK, I was also powering a 12V camping fridge, and lights, and sometimes a 12V fan. I suppose could buy another solar panel. Anyway, one step to reduce power consumption is to take along a more energy-efficient laptop.

Have done a lot of comparisons of different laptops and 2-in-1s, Windows and Chromebooks, as well as Android tablets. Anyway, fast-forward, today finally hit the "buy" button...

Have ordered a HEADWOLF HPad 1 tablet, 8GB RAM 128GB storage, LTE, with keyboard:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004613216868.html

Huh, HEADWOLF? -- never heard of them. I am a bit scared buying an unknown brand tablet from Aliexpress, as some vendors tell lies about the specs and display bogus photos. Also, there are no reviews at that link!

However, did some research, and the specs and quality look to be genuine. Really good quality, look at these reviews:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1G0sCHK5zY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQkpT1LCdqw

There are reviews on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Android-Headwolf-Octa-core-Processor-Expansion/dp/B09Z6GH1W9/ref=sr_1_1_sspa

...note, after customer complaints, they now state on Amazon that it doesn't support a sim. The reason for that is mobile Internet in the USA is a mess. The tablet does have the correct LTE frequencies for my telco in Australia, so I am optimistic that it will work.

I can live without sim support, just a nice thing to have.

Another item on my checklist is the pogo-pins and matching keyboard. I consider this to be superior to a bluetooth keyboard -- so good not have to separately charge the keyboard! And bluetooth itself can be a pain to use.

More items ticked: high quality quad-speaker audio, quite nice 20MP camera, 8GB RAM.

Anyway, we shall see. Will post a review after it arrives -- Aliexpress have estimated by end of October, and I have found their "Aliexpress standard postage" to be quite fast -- the fastest ever was about 9 days, but I think that was a freak, every leg of the journey must have synced.

The review might be from my tent on the South Coast of Western Australia!

Note, HEADWOLF is a fairly new Chinese company, I found their English website:

https://www.headwolf.net/

EDIT 20221003:
Good, 4G LTE does work in the USA, as reported by Larry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nqt5JSPfBE

A Verizon Wireless sim works. As one person has reported in the comments, the tablet does not work with AT&T. This is a situation that you have in the USA, big telcos having a strangle-hold on consumers. At least there is good news with one telco in the US.      

Tags: tech

Holding rack for external SSDs

This is an interesting experiment. I have a lot of USB SATA HDDs and SSDs. It wasn't a deliberate plan, things just evolved that way. I have external drives for particular purposes, for example, a drive for OpenEmbedded Dunfell compiles, revision-9, target x86_64 and aarch64 -- which needs a 1TB SSD.

So, have an awkward stack of SSDs and plugin whichever one want to use:

Awhile ago, wondered if this could be tidied up on the desk. Ordered this, a toast rack:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002576967894.html

Arrived today. It is tiny, holds just four slices of toast, and does tidy-up the desk:

Nice, except the gap is only 14mm, and won't take some of the wider caddies. I have one SSD that is too wide, at about 15mm, and some HDDs that are about 18mm. Anyway, will use it.   

Tags: tech

First test WD Elements SE SSD 480GB and comparisons

I posted yesterday about local availability of fast flash drives. I am in Perth, Western Australia. I mentioned in that post that perhaps would buy a WD Elements SE SSD USB drive:

https://bkhome.org/news/202205/local-availability-of-fast-flash-drives.html

480GB external SSD for AU$59, seems like a good deal, on paper anyway. That's about 42 US Dollars. That price is including our 10% sales tax.

Couldn't resist it, went to a local Officeworks store and bought one.

For the initial testing, I thought it would be good to compare with other flash sticks, from the worst to the best.

Regarding the worst, well, I threw that one away:

https://bkhome.org/news/201901/bottom-rung-usb-flash-stick.html

I do have a few others that are similar speed, but for the "worst" one to test, chose something slightly better, an Emtec 8GB USB2 stick.

Anyway, before the tests, some photos and initial observations. So small and light! It weighs only 26g (0.92oz) and the cable 21g. Photo:

You could slip that in a pocket and not even know it's there. So yeah, a great contender as a portable EasyOS.

The interface is "only" USB 3.0, my guess is that was because WD have a cheaper USB 3.0 based controller chip. Because, the company have obviously produced something at the lowest possible price. Showing the socket on the drive:

It doesn't even have an LED activity indicator -- not essential, but it would have been good to see an LED flashing, so you know when the drive is being accessed.

I have previously done comparisons of USB flash sticks, for example, this post, that also compares with HDDs:

https://bkhome.org/news/201812/thoughts-on-hdd-and-ssd-speed.html

Speed tests

A few people have reported to me that EasyOS is slow to bootup, the first time it boots. A couple of reasons for that...

Firstly, the ext4 working-partition is expanded to fill the drive. The bigger the drive, the longer that will take. More important is the write-speed of the flash drive.

Secondly, 'easy.sfs' is copied from the boot-partition to the working-partition. This to support future rollback. Easy has very sophisticated rollback and roll-forward support; you can rollback to an earlier snapshot or an earlier version, and the same roll-forward.

'easy.sfs' in Easy Bookworm version 0.1 is 648MB, and the time taken to copy can vary enormously. This is where users are reporting a bad experience. So, let's start with the worst flash stick...

Emtec 8GB USB2

What I have done is written the EasyOS Bookworm version 0.1 image file to the drive, then booted it. I took the opportunity to try different block sizes when writing the file. Note, EasyDD is a frontend to the 'dd' utility, and it uses a block size of 1M. Here goes, drive plugged into a USB2 socket...

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 189.806 s, 4.3 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=2M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 191.586 s, 4.2 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 191.153 s, 4.2 MB/s

Next, booted the Emtec drive, and mentally counted the seconds for 'easy.sfs' to copy from boot-partition to working-partition: 321 seconds ...over 5 minutes!

Wow, no wonder some users have complained.

Let's move up a notch. SanDisk have a range of USB flash sticks. The budget one is their "Cruzer Blade". Next-up is "Ultra" and next-up again is "Extreme". The first two are readily available in your local chain store. The Extreme range will be in more specialized stores. Starting with the Cruzer:

SanDisk Cruzer Blade 8GB USB2

Drive plugged into a USB2 socket...

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 73.2658 s, 11.1 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=2M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 67.4644 s, 12.0 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 65.4665 s, 12.4 MB/s

Getting better. Next, first-bootup, time to copy 'easy.sfs': 63 seconds

One minute is still far too long to wait, staring at the screen.

SanDisk Ultra 16GB USB3.0

This is the one I recommend as the lowest price yet reasonable performance. Officeworks here in AU have it for AU$13.65, capacity 32GB. Plugged into a USB3 socket...

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 18.2753 s, 44.4 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=2M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 20.2607 s, 40.0 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 19.3337 s, 41.9 MB/s

Bootup, time to copy 'easy.sfs': 20 seconds

Twenty seconds is not too long to be staring at the screen!

SanDisk Extreme 64GB USB3.0

This is not their latest model, they do have a USB3.1 model.

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 4.32428 s, 187 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=2M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 4.27782 s, 189 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 4.51486 s, 180 MB/s

First bootup, copying 'easy.sfs': 11 seconds

Now we're cooking!

Moving on, to the main purpose of this post, evaluating the new WD SSD...

WD Elements SE SSD 480GB USB3.0

Oh man, this was so fast, it took slightly more than the blink of an eye...

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 2.59653 s, 312 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=2M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 2.7536 s, 294 MB/s

# dd if=easy-0.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress oflag=sync
810549248 bytes (811 MB, 773 MiB) copied, 2.59714 s, 312 MB/s

First bootup, copying 'easy.sfs': 6 seconds

Conclusions

The speed differences testing different block size with dd, is interesting, but not huge differences. I was curious whether there might be a significant difference, due to flash technology. If you were to write a 1KB file to a flash drive, the controller chip actually has to re-write an entire "block" of memory, not just 1KB. I think that I read somewhere, that "block" size is 2MB.

The first-bootup time varies from 321 seconds down to just 6 seconds. That's a factor of 53:1, incredible difference in performance.

It is not just the speed that is important; some bargain-basement USB-sticks may be unreliable, prone to early failure.

Furthermore, a "proper" SSD will have advanced features such as wear-leveling. As far as I know, none of the above USB-sticks have wear-leveling, except probably the WD SSD does. I am not even sure about the SanDisk Extreme -- have read conflicting comments online whether it does or doesn't.

Wear-leveling is important to extend the life of the drive.

Now that I have Easy Bookworm on the WD drive, I will set it as the default bootup, and use it every day. Might even use the working-partition to compile packages, such as the Linux kernel. Then, maybe six months later, post an update to this evaluation.

I looked for reviews of the WD drive on YouTube, only non-English, but did find this teardown. Can't see the chip numbers though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WreZ5CMD1BA

So far, this drive is a very good buy!

EDIT:
If you would like to post some feedback, I have started a forum thread here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=5968    

Tags: tech

How to clean your phone screen and camera lens

This is an interesting subject. Many times I have read to not use wet-wipes or other wet cleaners on a phone screen. For example, here:

https://www.phonearena.com/news/Oleophobic-coating--what-it-is-how-to-clean-your-phone-what-to-do-if-the-coating-wears-off_id65974

There are other similar articles. There was a link I came across awhile back, that claimed that alcohol or any wet cleaner fluid, can seep in the edges of a LCD screen and eventually ruin it -- can't find that link now.

However, these links explain that use of some types of wet cleaners is OK:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/your-phone-is-nasty-heres-how-to-give-it-a-proper-clean/

https://www.choice.com.au/electronics-and-technology/phones/mobile-phones/articles/how-to-clean-your-smartphone

There is another link, that says do not use ethyl alcohol, use isopropyl alcohol (70%), as the latter is less damaging to the oleophobic layer on the phone screen:

https://www.kaspersky.com.au/blog/smartphone-physical-cleaning/27112/

So, what to buy? There are lots of products, but I have ordered these:

MERRY'S Lens Cleaning Wipes Cleaning for Glasses Lenses Sunglasses Camera Lenses Cell Phone Laptop Lens Clothes 100ct Pack:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001581262427.html

100 Pcs/Pack Glasses Cloth Lens Cleaner Dust Remover Portable Wipes Non-woven Fabric Phone Computer Screen Accessories F3MD:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000318277687.html

100pcs / lot Swap Prep Pad Wet Wipe Alcohol Wipe for Antiseptic Clean Skin Care Jewelry Cell Phone Clean:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000751716965.html

So, perhaps the Merry's lens wipes for the camera lens, and the alcohol wipes for the phone screen? The Merry's wipes have isopropyl alcohol and benzethonium chloride -- the latter is an antiseptic, but how will that affect a phone screen?    

Tags: tech