Why are Laptops so expensive in Mauritius

I can’t understand why are Windows 13″- 14″ laptops so expensive in Mauritius.

 

The performance of the M1 is simply unmatched in the laptop sphere. How come they charging so much for older windows laptops? Sell them without the Windows licence and give a Rs 5000 – 6000 discount. Anyways, you’re looking for a new laptop around that price range, I’d recommend to go for the Apple M1 if you need performance.

If you have reasons to buy the non-Apple laptops, please feel free to share them with us.

My Huawei Y9’s screen got cracked :(

 

I thought the screen was unbreakable but I was wrong. I owned this phone for more than 1.5 years. It fell multiple times: on the road, on the carpet, on the floor in my room. But it didn’t get a single scratch on the screen. I was impressed. And yeah, I didn’t put any screen protector nor a casing during this time.

However one day, the phone fell on the floor in the gym changing room. It was marble tiles and boom! The screen cracked 🙁

I am however able to use the phone like this, it is not presentable if you’re doing a demo in front of a client.

Mobile repair shops in Curepipe and Rose-hill are quoting me Rs 2500 – Rs 3200 to replace the screen while the official Huawei support centre for Mauritius told me it would cost around Rs 3200 to replace. However the will have to order the screen which will take 2 weeks.

Should I get a cheaper replacement screen in a shop or get the original one from the official repair centre? With the specs of the phone, it can easily be used 2 or even 3 years more. 4GB of RAM is quite good.

Anyone else got shocked by Mauritius Telecom Bills? Rs 600 increase!!! (MyT)

How the hell did our MyT bill become so high all of a sudden? We used to pay around Rs 1,000 per month. But now, it has become around Rs 1600!

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We don’t have the “Smart Box” thing. How the hell did they start charging so much? Plus, on the website, the 4K package is at Rs 1200 per month. Where does Rs 1,316 come from? VAT is added before the total again.

The aim of this article is to raise awareness of such issues. Now we need to mentally prepare to go fight these people for our rights 🙁

AMD vs nvidia vs Intel

2020 is kinda exciting year for computer hardware. AMD has been killing it.

But would I recommend an AMD for a laptop? Hmm, I’ve been looking at eGPU systems lately. It does require a thunderbolt port to work with. Unfortunately thunderbolt is an Intel exclusive technology for now. You will thus not be able to use your ultra light AMD laptop as a real gaming monster. I don’t know if USB4 works with eGPUs. Anyways, always confirm that your Intel laptop does have a thunderbolt port. My Asus Zenbook has no thunderbolt.

On the GPU side, the 6900XT seems to be on par with the RTX 3090. But most machine learning libraries such as tensorflow are optimised to be running on CUDA/nvidia. I hope the machine learning community start using AMD GPUs as well. Maybe it is AMD which is keeping some APIs close or something. But I hope machine learning takes on AMD GPUs as well. It’ll be awesome.

Will I be able to afford all these techs? I don’t think i’ll be building a PC anytime soon as I don’t have the money and space in my house to be able to get a huge TV for entertainment.

Enabling Nvidia Hybrid Graphics on Linux

I was going to activate my NVIDIA 940MX to play some Tomb Raider when I saw that nvidia-settings has a new option: on-demand.

Activating the option allows you to run only selected applications on the discrete GPU. How to activate that on Steam?

Let’s take an example of Tomb Raider:

Step 1: Open steam and go to Library

Step 2: Go on game settings:

Step 3: Set launch option as follows:

__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command%

And voila! Next time you open the game, it’ll run on your discrete GPU. You can check it with nvidia-smi