Gadgetory

let's play a little make-believe game shall we let's say that I'm your grandmother and here I am on my computer that you put together for me oh I don't know 10 12 years ago and the hardware was pretty good then but these days it's run in a tick slow so you know I'm just doing grandmotherly things like firing up the Internet's to browse the web oof catching up on my tech tech news maybe I open up a couple of tabs gotta get that news from all the sources oh boy he's still loading is this tab still loading maybe I'll watch a video in the meantime with the VLC look at that right-click delay didn't add a thing of beauty fairness and while I'm waiting for that maybe I'll enjoy a nice little game of pinball in 3d okay I think you see where we're going with this it's time for grant to finally give in to your incessant nagging and upgrade the old machine but then just as she's about to do it she's browsing the Facebook and she finds an ad for oh thank you the extra PC which claims to breathe new life into old computers for anywhere from 49.99 to $79.99 but could it be the magic bullet that it claims to be or is it just another predatory product designed to take money from the elderly and tech illiterate there's only one way for us to find out Oh after this message from glass wire with glassware you can instantly see your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on windows and android news offer code linus to get 25% off glass wire at the link below all right so my understanding is there's a few different Oh Anthony's in the video alright my understanding is there's a few different versions of the extra PC so I'm holding the extra PC pro 64 gigabyte and this is the one we spent 80 US dollars on right and then you've got I've got the turbo 32 which is much smaller and I spent I think $49.99 on it okay not too bad now something that's immediately noticeable about these things is that these are just I mean this one they didn't even cover up the branding this is just a SanDisk Cruiser blade Cruiser blade 32 gigs so that's a USB 2 and this would cost you somewhere in the neighborhood and I can't be more than like 10 bags yeah roughly and then this I mean they did they put a sticker on this one at least I'm just gonna okay oh there we go and this one's a cruiser glide 3.0 64 gigs so that's USB 3 but for our particular old computer we're not gonna get any any benefit out of that anyway yeah we only have 2.0 okay but I mean they're probably I mean I'm sure they sort of tell people that no really nope they just say that it gives you speed large storage capacity and file res what is file res software I'm guessing it's some kind of recovery software also check out these was prices anywhere from fifty to a hundred and sixty dollars you know this thing better be amazing alright so should we just should we just crack it open let's fire this thing up sure let's do it uh-oh oh yeah you know what and you're done bud okay so do you want to do the turbo one anyway just cuz then we get we can see what that file red soccer is all about I think it's identical otherwise okay cool well what what is this like a Core 2 quad or something uh no it's a pentium d well let's let's see if it can make this feel snappy then maybe there's something to it all right extra PC they've got their own boot logo they did an FS check on the actual hard drive please choose a password for your administrator account Wow I'm gonna go with password I need something I can remember in order to begin using all the great features we need to set up a few additional applications these applications require that you are connected to the internet something can be downloaded and installed and it looks like oh I assumed that that was Network but it oh it is wired connection one it looks like it picked up both our wired and Wi-Fi NICs yep ok both real dick alright let's go ahead and do this to accept the EULA for VLC media player rhythm Vox media player move on to restricted add-ons it'll be flash ok this is all stuff that I would probably install yep ok ok so everything gets installed to the extra PC USB stick and it does not use your hard drive fascinating well based on how long it's taking to install fonts we might be asking for a lot so you would probably recognize this what is this based on probably Lubuntu which is a lightweight distro of Ubuntu based on that giving linus linux is already looking like a bad idea yes we'll talk more about that a little bit later thank you David ok we're tired of waiting for the TrueType fonts to install yeah we want to cancel we're done ok it looks like it's not gonna prompt us to do that again so why don't we poke around in here it's totally grande oriented so we've got Thunderbird email client is that even still up it it is it got discontinued not picked up again it's got a dedicated link to Facebook which presumably will open in Firefox web-browser here and that is an old Firefox logo yeah so there is not a whole heck of a lot to this is there no there's lebra --this there's Firefox and for Grandma anyway there is no obvious way to add more applications not really usually in a user friendly operating system like Ubuntu or Manjaro or what-have-you there'll be like an add or remove software yeah but in this case I mean I know what it is but now let's try file res ready to find and save your files with one click I'm gonna try this with one click approach go I hear the hard drive ticking yeah it's you can see that it's it's mounted the drive and Program Files oh it's just finding everything now did it actually grab the pictures that you put on specifically to test it um look sleep it's all Program Files here we go here it is oh ok what we don't know is how it handles if you have more data than will fit on a USB stick hmm but that's a little bit beyond the scope of this investigation I think so I guess the point we're getting at here is that if gran is God has got the wherewithal to learn Linux which you know what if all she's ever gonna look at is Facebook and email and Kindle and Pinterest maybe isn't even that hard mm-hmm no probably not but if you're gonna put the effort in to learn how to use Linux maybe you should put the effort into learning how to create your own bootable Linux USB which Anthony has created for us complete with high end graphics how long did it take you to create this thing Anthony about an hour about an hour okay okay so what am I looking at here this is Manjaro Linux it's a relatively lightweight modern Linux distribution based on Arch Linux got it that's our hard drive hmm so getting into our documents and settings and any pictures we left behind is basically as simple as just navigating for them yep did you pre configure it with Firefox or does that just come it comes with Firefox out of the box great well let's have a look at our YouTube experience then since that was the last thing we looked at on extra PC again Firefox is not going to be hardware accelerated so a couple drop frames here and there and yeah oh wait wait yes oh yeah yeah it's a hot mess what else did we try do we just want like some general responsiveness fire up some OpenOffice you know yeah we fire up some OpenOffice I mean it's still it's all gonna be USB - so it's gonna be comparable as far as load times go but sure so let's create a writer document where do you put what you want to call it here okay sure beautiful did you have to install any drivers or anything or no the auto detection is pretty good okay cool oh look at this it's got chromium and everything is this all pre-installed stuff I didn't i pre-installed chromium you did yeah okay everything else is pre-installed including steam heating steam yeah how about that normally steam is only available in Ubuntu in terms of overall responsiveness no maybe it isn't actually much worse let's just open up our news no it's probably about a slow yeah you can only ask so much of a pentium d okay why don't we try and why don't we try and do one more thing let's play some grand friendly games on Steam okay that framerate though yeah well it's running at full HD but it's running I realized now that I've never actually played peggle what yeah Oh Ted rocks its pachinko oh yeah extreme fever you're dead okay all right Anthony let's go head-to-head how do we head-to-head with one mouse take turns oh okay all right what oh that was the tutorial level no forget it and we're done extra PC your closing thoughts it's not as bad as I thought it would be that file a record whatever it was called programs far res yeah actually worked pretty well I wasn't expecting it to but it did it pulled off all the files that would be considered important to most people aside from the fact that it's really old and the it wouldn't install the fonts which would have given grant a little bit of trouble yeah I mean it's it's just straight Xubuntu with some extra fluff on it and it's not too bad but for the price now I'm actually going to take up a contrary position here because I think the price is really reasonable the extra time it would take them to faff about creating a bootable Linux USB 42 $80 is perfectly reasonable the one thing I do take issue with here is that it's advertised as a resurrector of old machines when as we've clearly demonstrated it's not a magic bullet you don't go from not being able to play youtube videos and open documents to suddenly being able to do that you are still very much limited by the hardware that you have and there is going to be a learning curve for grande and that's something that I feel like they could be a lot more transparent about in their advertising so my issue here is not with the product but rather just with the claims the product itself I actually don't mind it yeah I thought I would hate it I was I was expecting this video to just be crapping all over extra PC but you can I think probably see the tone shift as we make 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