I blogged about this laptop previously but since then things have gotten better.  When I first bought it, it was $499 however Walmart lowered the price to $449 but wouldn’t give me a price adjustment so I returned it and bought a new one.

Since that time the price has been reduced further to $399.  Let me tell you why that is such a great deal.  Not many laptops are upgradeable these days but this laptop has an accessible NVME M.2 drive (that you would need to clone, or do a fresh install, if you upgrade the drive).  It comes with a 256 GB drive however I have a 1TB drive laying around here that I may slap in mine.  I just need to figure out how to clone it first.  I might have to buy an NVME enclosure as the laptop has no PCIe slot to plug an adapter into.

In addition to that there is an unpopulated SATA drive bay where you can add an additional hard drive.  There are 8GB of RAM, 4 of which is built into the main board and a 4GB (PC4-3200) stick in the DDR4 slot.  You could change that out to a 16GB stick for a total of 20GB.  Lastly you could change the wifi chip if you wanted to.

A514-54-501Z Upgrades (click pics to enlarge)

Let’s summarize:

• Upgradeable NVME Drive
• Can add a second SATA drive
• RAM upgradeable
• WiFi chip can be changed out.

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This blog is mostly for me to remember what I did to fix the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) problem with my new laptop.

First of all I HATE Windows with every fiber of my being.   However, I have a CNC machine and the best design software in the world comes from Vectric which is Windows only.  So I bought a cheap laptop.  An Acer Aspire 5 A514-54-501Z from Walmart.  Not sure when it happened, but probably after an update or installation of some program but I started getting the dreaded BSOD with only a KMODE Exception Not Handled.  The computer would boot loop with the BSOD every time but if I did a hard shutdown and restart it would boot however, then it would start without Wifi Drivers.  The next reboot would clear it up.

That’s too much frustration.  Googling the KMODE error basically just said “It”s probably a driver issue” with no more details.  Since it seemed the Wifi driver wasn’t getting loaded after a BSOD I guessed it was that one.   I did a Search For New Driver in Device Manager and it said I had the latest.   Yeah.  Not true.  Seems there was a new Wifi Driver put up about 2 weeks ago.  Probably for the BSOD issue.  My device showed as this in the Device Manager

Wireless LAN Driver (MT7921)

Acer WiFi Driver

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First let me say, “I AM A MAC GUY”.  We can also say that “I AM A LINUX GUY”.  I am most definitely NOT a Windows guy.  All this being said I am also a Maker, or we used to say in the old  days…….a Geek.

I have a lot of hobby type hardware such as Lasers, Vinyl sign machines, 3D printers, and CNC machines.  These things all have Mac or Linux software of some kind but the cream of the crop software is written for Windows.   While I can function on most of the hardware platforms with Mac, the straw that broke the camels back was my newly found love of CNC.   The best CNC software, hands down, comes from Vectric, and the new CNC machine I bought comes with Vectric VCarve Desktop.  The only computers I own with Windows on it are an old 3rd generation Intel i3 laptop with a tiny amount of RAM and a copy of Windows 10 on Parallels for Mac M1.  By the way, Parallels on a Mac M1 runs about as efficiently and trustworthy as the Government.  And it isn’t portable as I have it on a Mac Mini.  My CNC is in a back yard shed which is either too hot or too cold and I want to do all my prep and design work in the house and run out with the laptop just when it is time to set up the job on the machine.

A new Windows laptop was really my only choice here.  Here were my working parameters:

• Cost –  Always the first consideration.  I only want to use this to run VCarve Software.
• Availability – I wanted a computer I could run to the store and get and return if necessary.  Buying a computer by mail can be a horrible PITA if something goes wrong.
• Upgradability – The laptop I chose can have RAM, and the M.2 SSD upgraded and it has an un-used place for a 2.5″ SSD SATA drive.
• At least an Intel i5 chip
• Upgradeable to Windows 11

I ended up buying an Acer Aspire 5 from Walmart, specifically the:

I hit all 5 of the wickets I listed above. Now lets go a little deeper.
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