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 running a tick slow so you know i'm
just doing grandmotherly things like uh
firing up the internets 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 are these 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 isn't that a thing of beauty there it is 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 grand 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 glasswire with glasswire you can instantly see
your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving
apps on Windows and Android use offer code Linus to get 25 off glasswire at
the link below
alright so my understanding is there's a few different oh Anthony's in the video
hi 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 gig so that's a usb 2 and this would cost you
somewhere in the neighborhood it can't be more than like 10 bucks yeah roughly
and then this i mean they did they put a sticker on
this one at least i'm just gonna okay
ah there we go and this one's a cruiserglide 3.0 64 gig
so that's usb 3 but for our particular old computer we're not going to 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 software
what is file res software i'm guessing it's some kind of recovery software
also check out these uh was prices anywhere from 50 to 160 dollars
yup this thing better be amazing all right so should we just should we just
crack it open let's fire this thing up sure let's do it uh oh
yeah you know what
and you're done bud okay so do you want to do the turbo one
anyway just because then we get we can see what that file res software
is all about i think it's identical otherwise okay cool
what what is this like a core two quad or something uh no it's a pentium d
well let's uh let's see if 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 well i'm going to go with password
because 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 so they can be downloaded and installed and it looks
like oh i assumed that was network but it oh it is
wired connection one it looks like it picked up both our
wired and wi-fi nicks yep okay
both real tech all right let's go ahead and do this do
you accept the eula for vlc media player
rhythm box media player ubuntu restricted add-ons
adobe flash okay this is all stuff that i would probably install yep okay
okay 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
uh we might be asking for a lot so you would probably recognize this what
is this based on uh probably uh ubuntu
which is a lightweight distro of ubuntu is it just me or does uh giving your
grandma Linux seem like a bad idea
based on that giving Linus Linux is already looking like a bad idea uh yes
we'll talk more about that a little bit later thank you david
okay we're tired of waiting for the true type fonts to install
yeah we want to cancel we're done okay it looks like it's not going to prompt
us to do that again so why don't we poke around in here it's
totally grand oriented so we've got thunderbird email client is that even
still updated it is it got discontinued and i think it got 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 yeah there's libreoffice
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 going to try this 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
looks like that's all program files oh here we go here it is
oh okay what we don't know is how it handles if
you have more data than will fit on a usb stick
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 got 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 yeah 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 uh what am i looking at here this is manjaro Linux
it's a relatively lightweight uh modern Linux distribution based on arch Linux
got it that's our hard drive 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 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 uh yeah
oh wait wait yes oh yeah yeah it's still a hot mess
what else did we try do we just want like some general responsiveness fire up
some open office you know yeah fire up some open office i mean it's still it's
all going to be usb 2. so it's going to 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 oh
stop 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
uh everything else is pre-installed including steel including steam yep huh
how about that normally steam's 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 as 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 frame rate though yeah well it's running at full hd but it's
running i realize now that i've never actually
played pickle what yeah oh peggle rocks it's pachinko
oh yeah yeah i know
god of tetris there it is
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 uh take turns oh okay
all right what
oh that was the tutorial level you've got
oh no you have to beat it all the time no forget it and we're done
extra pc your closing thoughts it's not as bad as i thought it would be
um that file wreck or whatever it was called uh programs far res yeah uh
actually worked pretty well uh 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
ubuntu 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 40 to 80
dollars 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 grand 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 our way through it yeah a lot
happens at your front door without you ever even realizing it and ring is on a
mission to reduce crime in communities the video doorbell 2 can help you get
that done thanks to its 1080p hd resolution with 160 degree vision
including night vision it's got motion sensing so that it'll alert you if
anything is happening in the field of view of the camera by the way that's
adjustable if you live on a busy street and it features two-way audio so you can
talk to whoever's at the front door it's wi-fi capable so you can check what's
going on wherever you are and it's powered by 8 to 24 volt doorbell wiring
or the battery bank so you've got lots of choices in terms of power it connects
via an app that can work on your smartphone whether it's iOS or Android
and has compatibility with mac and Windows 10 and today they have a special
offer at the link in the video description for their doorbell camera
kit that includes the video doorbell 2 a spotlight cam and a solar security sign
so check it out at ring.com LTT so thanks for watching guys if you
disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured
at the link in the video description i really didn't think that was going to
happen also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this
one and our community forum which you should totally join also speaking of
shirts your tag's been sticking up the whole time oh dang it
why would you tell me now it's a good segue
into what