forbidden (BIGASUO N100 Laptop)

I received this laptop for review. It was sold under the brand 'BIGASUO', but the paperwork references eitack.com, and the machine itself is marked "Shenzhen Kejinming Electronics Co." Model K160.

A few things are less than good such as:

• Windows 11 license wouldn't activate, nor would the replacement key they sent me
• Creaky flexible case
• Rumbly fan
• Stereo speakers, but in a tiny 7cm module
• 4500 mAh battery rather than the 5000 claimed
• 1x1 WiFi (433Mbps max)
• Mini-HDMI despite being a pretty large machine
• 2.5" bay, but no SATA flat flex cable

Still it has a few niceties.

• The N100 is newish and can be pretty performant for a quad core low power CPU.
• 16" 1920x1200 IPS display
• 1TB SSD, 16GB DDR4
• Type C charging
• Real Gig Ethernet

It's not a machine really worth buying. You could get much better machine for the price, but it's also got some decent specs relative to the hardware class it is in.

Here's some internal photos:

Drive bays opened (2.5" missing cable)

Internals

Motherboard

RayMX RM1135 SSD Controller

16GB DDR4 SODIMM and Colorfire 1TB SSD

Beneath the battery

Tiny speaker module

Keyboard and touchpad with ruler

AMI BIOS screen

I swapped out the 1TB SSD (it's going into an enclosure to be with super) for a 256GB one.

I put some Debian on it. Surprisingly most hardware just works. I went ahead and upgraded to testing (trixie) to see if anything improved, but I didn't notice anything. Later I found out that the mini-HDMI port on N100 does not work without a 6.6 kernel, so that's a win I guess.

One issue I had was the audio pops on during boot. I 'fixed' it by disabling snd_hda_intel's powersave mode. I did still notice a pop when resuming from hibernate, and I expect suspend will have the same issue.

options snd_hda_intel power_save=0

I wanted more RAM in pixy. This had a 16GB stick. Things were swapped, and now it has 8GB.