[Preston] PCSpecialist Lafite II and Mint 18

[Mark Walton]

Just thought I would share with you my current experience with Mint 18 
on a great little laptop...

Last autumn I purchased a Lafite II from PCSpecialist, specifically 
because they offer their machines without a Windows install.
It's an all aluminum 13" Macbook clone in terms of looks, but sold 
primarily as a Windows 10 machine.


https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/lafiteII/

I've been waiting for Mint 18 to drop in order to take advantage of the 
4.4 kernel, and the hardware accelerated graphics needed by the Cinnamon 
desktop, having run LMDE Mate over the winter as a stop-gap.

https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_sarah_cinnamon.php


The new set up takes full advantage of the latest hardware on the Lafite 
(Intel i3 6100U, Intel 8260 Wireless and Intel HD 520 graphics) I used 
the money saved on the Windows license to pay for a Kingston SV300S 
120Gb SDD and an extra 2gb of RAM.

I've had to detune the screen resolution to 1600x900 to save my 
eyesight, but otherwise this beauty "just works" straight out of the box 
and absolutely flies!

I have a £79 Gigabyte Brix strapped directly to the back of my wifi 
router that acts as a home NAS box and use Deja-Dup to backup and 
restore what little data I have to the Lafite. All done in no time at 
all, once I pointed the Lafite to the SSH address and clicked "restore". 
Since my whole family are using Linux they all have the same solution, 
which triggers every 7 days so they don't even have to think about 
when/how to take backups.

I also have an account with the Swiss based Woelkli.com who offer a far 
more secure and private cloud storage solution than Dropbox, which 
hooked right up via the Owncloud client, again with no fuss or hassle.

Overall this has turned out to to be a fantastic set up; rock solid, 
stable and very, very slick!

Cheers for now.
Mark

-- 
Sent from my Linux PC | www.linuxmint.com | Mint 18
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