I just bought a Dell Inspiron 11 in December. The reasons I chose this model were simple: It was inexpensive and claimed long battery life, which was not hard to believe with its up-to-6 watt CPU TDP. It has a 32 GB eMMC drive, 4GB RAM, 11.6 inch TN display, and not much else of note. For $180 on sale, though, it was a good deal, even if it did come with Windows 10 (which I quickly removed and replaced with Linux Mint). I like the little laptop a lot, and it does have impressively long battery life.
Well… last month I was in a certain Arkansas-based big box store getting groceries, and I decided to go have a look at the laptops to see if if any of them showed precision touchpads in Windows 10 (having just found out that precision touchpads were a “thing,” I wanted to look up their models later and learn more). While there, I saw a sale on the Acer Swift 1 (SF113-31-P5CK) for $249. Quad-core Pentium N4200 CPU, 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC,all-aluminum case, and most compellingly, a FHD (1920×1080) 13.3 inch IPS display.
I really don’t care for TN displays much these days. The viewing angles on a TN are just awful… but this little PC came with IPS.
I wish this deal had been around when I got the Dell… I would have bought it instead. For an extra $70, I get two more cores (and each one is ~30% faster than each of the cores in the Dell), twice the eMMC space, and full HD IPS!
Even though I just bought a low-end, last all day laptop six months ago, I didn’t want to let this one pass. The rated TDP on the N4200 is the same as in my Dell’s N3060, but it’s much more powerful. And that IPS display!
It was late at night (best time to shop… no crowds), so I had to look for an employee, and when I found one, she just wanted to know the sale price of the laptop. She went in back and returned empty-handed, saying there were none left. I was going to ask if rainchecks were still a thing (I haven’t done one in decades) when I noticed that the tag next to the display model said “Closeout.” Well, if there were rainchecks, there wouldn’t be on a closeout… bah.
I returned to my grocery-getting, then began to think. While floor model laptops tend to get savaged by savage customers, this one looked okay… all keys intact, no visible damage. I asked the employee about the possibility of buying the floor model, which is something I last did around the same time I last had a raincheck. She said to come back when the electronics manager was in, which would be after 8 am.
I did return. I asked the woman who was now on duty for the dept. manager, and she asked if there was something she could help with. I never did find out if she was the manager of the department or just playing gatekeeper. I told her I’d wanted the Acer laptop but that they were out of stock, so I wanted to maybe get the floor model, if it was in as good shape as it appeared.
She shook her head, saying that it was not permitted by the store policy. She said some customer had bought a floor model and was not able to get the demo software off of it, and it caused problems, so now the rule is that all floor models get returned to the company, and that’s that.
Hmph! I bet could get that demo software off of there! It didn’t matter, though; she was not budging.
I asked forlornly if she could verify the things were out of stock, and she asked if the person I had asked before had scanned the UPC on the card to check. I said no, and told how she had only wanted to know the price, not even the model number. She called another employee over to assist me, and he used his little handheld pricing gun to scan the card. “We miiiiight have one left,” he said, then stood there motionless. The entire premise was that I wanted one, and now I hear that they may have one, but he didn’t think that was reason enough to do anything but stand around!
“Could you go look?” I asked.
He did, and returned a few minutes later with a box.
There had been one left, probably there all along, and Ms. Look It Up By Price had missed it. It was unopened, so probably it wasn’t a return.
So, now I am the owner of two lower-end machines that essentially try to fill the same role.
The Acer has a precision touchpad (clickpad style, with no discrete buttons). It does have a nicer feel overall than the other touchpads I’ve used, including the clickpad in the Dell. There’s a setting in the UEFI setup to switch it to legacy mode, but I’ve not had reason to try that yet.
Precision touchpads are a response to the observation some people have made that an Apple laptop tends to have a much better touchpad experience than in a Windows laptop. Apparently, Synaptics (maker of most laptop touchpads, though not the one in my Acer) and MS got together to design the precision touchpad standard, where the touchpad would send its raw touch data to the OS, which would then interpret it and translate it into useful commands and pointer movements. The way it’s always been done in Windows laptops was to have the driver handle all of the interpretation and translation of that data, sending the processed data to Windows as simulated mouse movements. I’m not sure how that translates to it having worse “feel,” though, as the driver can do this just as effectively as the OS. Still, it exists, so I wanted to learn more, which is how I ended up owning one example of a precision touchpad, with a whole laptop around it.
Windows 8.1 setup hasn’t worked so far. Microsoft’s apparent deal with Intel to create an embargo on pre-10 drivers for later architectures has worked… while I was able to get the chipset “driver” (really an INF file) installed, I could not get the I2C serial IO drivers installed, and without those, the touchpad does not show up in the Device Manager at all. The I2C drivers for Apollo Lake don’t work in 8.1, even if I force install them (they do install, but “cannot start because there is a problem.” The I2C drivers for 8.1 don’t cover the Apollo Lake I2C PCI IDs, and when I force install them, same thing– cannot start. MS and Intel really did their homework on this one… it seems that when putting the screws to the user (customer!) is the goal, they will spare no effort.
I could get the touchpad working in legacy mode if I set it that way in the UEFI setup, but I’d still have more than half a dozen dangling things in the Device Manager that don’t work. I’m working on moving away from Windows in the first place, and my Dell doesn’t even have Windows at all anymore, so…
So, Windows is a no-go on this thing.
I put Mint on it, and as usual, everything worked right out of the box. I2C drivers found and installed, precision touchpad working precisely, wifi finding various networks and asking if I want to join one right from the live session, all of it. Why can’t Windows be that easy?
I got Mint set up on it, and it works really well. The one exception is the fingerprint reader (not something you typically see on a laptop in this price range), but its maker has not followed through on any of its promises to produce a Linux driver, and it hasn’t been picked up by the open-source fingerprint driver guys yet. It’s not a huge deal, as prints are really not all that secure, so I’d still have a strong password be the main security method.
The 64MB eMMC is far better than the 32MB in the Dell. 32MB is not enough for Windows 10 to even update without issues, but 64 is. You won’t have a lot of room for programs, but at least it’s workable with Windows. Not that I would be using Windows, but I’m not every customer for this model.
My Dell has a micro SD slot that completely envelops the card, so it can be left in there semi-permanently to increase its storage. The Acer has a full-size SD slot, but half of the card sticks out. I was reading about the possibility of cutting an SD card down (most of them are empty except for the 25% nearest the contacts, length-wise; the rest is empty). The Acer, like the Dell, only has a poky USB2 connection between the card reader and the PC, but slow storage is still storage.
And then I found out that this little thing is supposed to have a M.2 SSD slot internally.
At first, I was cautiously optimistic. The service manual for my Dell says it has an upgradeable eMMC module too, but I’ve opened it and seen the motherboard where the SATA port is supposed to be… it’s not there.
Everything I read about the Swift indicated that this was different, that it would have the SSD port. I went to the hardware store to get a Torx T-6 screwdriver (really tiny, about 1.6mm in diameter from point of star to point of star) that I would need to open the thing, and I opened it.
Wow. If you get one of these, be careful… the aluminum cover’s edges are razor sharp! After cleaning up the blood (it’s salty, corrosive, and conductive), I could see that the SSD slot was, in fact, present.
I immediately ordered a SSD for it. Even though it’s a cheap laptop, I went with a 1TB, same size I have in my Core 2 Duo laptop (which was high end-ish when I bought it, but now it’s a cheap laptop too). SSDs are easily repurposed, and if I do repurpose one, big is better than small. Go big or go home!
It’s a Samsung 860 Evo M.2 (SATA) 1TB, 2280 form factor. The 850 Evo in my Core 2 Duo has such long endurance (rating wise) that it will last a decade at the rate I have been going (or more), and the next-generation 860 doubles it, if I recall. No need to worry about using up this thing’s rated life!
I installed it when it arrived and it installed with no issue at all. It was immediately recognized, and when I moved Mint from the internal eMMC to the SSD, it automatically started booting from the SSD. I soon found that the InsydeH20 UEFI in the Acer is… well, terrible, but it works, for the most part. Legacy boot doesn’t work, and the boot selection internally shows three copies of Windows Boot Manager and no Ubuntu (which is how Mint usually appears in UEFI). At least one of them actually is Mint, and when that one is selected (as it already was when I put the SSD in), it boots into Mint (or the GRUB menu to dual boot Windows, if you wish) just fine.
I’m pretty impressed with the little laptop. Its memory (4GB) is smaller than I would prefer, but I’ve been able to do some stuff with it that might not be expected (more on that in another post I will write momentarily).
Now I found out why the retailer was closing out this model. Its replacement is the same hardware with the exception of the N5000 Pentium Silver CPU, which is ~30% faster than the N4200 (both quad cores). Still only 4GB, though. If Acer made an 8GB version, I’d grab it now even though I already have a Swift 1… between the N5000 and the 8GB, it would be too good to not have. Acer, you listening??
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
