Surface Laptop 3 review

My last laptop was a sweet Thinkpad with an onboard GPU and sizable RAM. Yet I sold it already because it was a bit too big and heavy for me to lug around. For the replacement, I’ve thought of getting a MacBook but since my office already gave me one to use for work, I thought it would be redundant. Besides, my office changes our laptop (MacBook) every 5 years at least so I would be using one of the latest model. So I thought, why not get another Windows laptop?





So I researched high and low and compared many different models and specs. One thing for sure, this new laptop has to be lightweight and thin. That narrows it down to just a few mid range models but the ones that caught my eyes was the Surface laptop series. The Surface laptop Go was small and reasonably priced. However it was a tad underpowered and since I plan to play some games on it, it’s a no go. The next one in line is the Surface Laptop 3. It’s Microsoft’s flagship laptop at a pretty expensive price. The trick is of course to get a second hand unit.





There’s two sizes for the Surface Laptop 3, the 15” and the smaller 13.5” that I got. The second hand unit that I got comes in dark matte black colour. Powering the laptop is a Quad-core 10th Gen Core i5 processor with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. It might not feel heavy but the actual weight is 1.28kg. First impression - it’s a pretty sleek minimalist laptop. It’s casing is fully aluminum and the touchscreen display goes right to the edges. Apart using your finger, you can use a Surface pen to write on it. On the left side you get one USB-A port and one USB-C (no Thunderbolt) port which can be used for charging. On the right side is the proprietary Surface charging port.





The chiclet keyboard feels a little bit mushy or rubbery. Booting from this Surface laptop was fast, almost as fast as an M1 MacBook. As a flagship Microsoft laptop (during release), it’s a capable laptop. It runs my work software and games smoothly. Even the resource intensive Football Manager and Rise of Industry games works without any glitches. That said, the fan can get quite loud during heavy processing. The battery lasts reasonably long, 3-4 hours with regular use. 2 hours while playing Football Manager 2020.





Can I get a more powerful laptop at this 3.000 ringgit price point? Definitely. But if you know me, I value good design over power or specs. And the Surface Laptop 3 is one beautiful machine. I’d settle for any of these Microsoft line of laptops over any Dell, HP or Lenovo if I had to choose a Windows machine.

D-Link DWR 932 mobile router review

You know I’m a big fan of portable mobile routers, for the moment 4G/LTE only because 5G is still crazy expensive. I have a dual SIM subscription with Maxis which means I get another SIM card based on my main number with data only connectivity. Just insert the SIM into a mobile router and boom! Instant portable Internet. And since I have an unlimited plan with Maxis, the possibility is endless.



My previous mobile router was the trusty TP-Link M7350. Since it borked into an infinite loop after start up recently, I had to get a new one. For my next mobile router, I need something small yet have most of the features of a regular mobile router. The D-Link DWR 932 fits the bill perfectly. It’s small, light and fits snugly into your palm. Despite the size, it still has a simple LCD display for basic information like network strength, battery level, wi-fi SSID and password.



There’s only 2 buttons on this mobile router - one for power and another for WPS setup which I never use. Setup is pretty simple and straightforward. Most of the time it works automatically out of the box, the moment you turn it on after inserting the SIM card with no setup necessary. Just make sure your mobile line supports hotspot and you’re set. If you need to configure any advanced settings, you can go to the default configuration page which is 192.168.0.1 after connecting to the default SSID. There’s also a micro SD card slot in case you would like to stream videos or music from the router. I didn’t get the time to test this feature because whoever still downloads music and video files anymore today?



Since this mobile router is small, you don’t expect the battery to last the whole day. From my experience it can last 3-4 hours of broadcast from a single charge. So far this mobile router from D-Link has been working fine for me, at least most of the time. There was a time (or two) when I had to reset the router because it had no Internet connectivity at all for some strange reason. It works fine again after the reset. The second time I upgraded the firmware as well so we’ll see how it performs after the upgrade.

If I had to nitpick, the micro-USB port is a bit ancient in this day and age. I wish they would provide a way to disable the WPS button cause it occasionally gets in the way when I want to turn on or off the device. The startup time could also be improved cause I had to wait a full minute before the router is usable. Other than that, the D-Link DWR 932 is a perfectly capable mobile router.