Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[User 6582]

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So I fixed the firefox crashing problem by flashing Ubuntu+Mate img to MMC with Wizzard's great instructions. However page loading in Firefox and chromium is very slow. I waited for 11 minutes to load www.pine64.org in firefox and gave up. Reading the "connection information" in the wifi icon on the top menu I get values between 0 and 26 Mb/s on the PBP and 60+ Mb/s on my Asus laptop running Ubuntu+Mate  in the same location in my house and even more in my Mint netbook. Since I bout the PBP mainly to surf the inte4rnet, read email, etc online, this makes the PBP virtually unusable. Thunderbird times out while downloading 4 emails! Does anyone else have this problem?I'm guessing it's either a problem either with the wifi hardware, firmware, the or kernel. I like the PBP other features and look but this is a deal breaker for me. What can I do about this?

I noticed putting processor speed to performance helps a lot...

That worked, Rick! I turned up the processor speed to 2.02 GHz. Thanks you so much. I was on the point of of turning my PBP into a trivet! Internet speed is  better.I thought the processor speed was dynamically set to save power? I had it on "interactive" whatever that means.

YAY!!  Good show!!
Perhaps down the road, software will better compliment the hardware. Some work to be done before "throttling up" may not be necessary though, at this point

Enjoy your new "trivet"!! :-)

Although the wifi speed has improved somewhat with the increased CPU speed, web pages still load much slower than my other laptops. The connection information is still a quarter to half less in the PBP than in the other laptops that I use. I knew that the PBP was a work in process when I bought it but I did expect a machine! that could at least surf the internet, download email, etc. This is a disappointment.  

I'm running Ubuntu with Mate now. I'm wondering if changing to bionic lxde would fix this problem? Any suggestions? (I booted biopic lode from microsd and could not connect to my gateway. Starting to think I got a device with wifi hardware problems).

Question. Is there any actual tech support for these devices?

I think that answers will be more "community supported" than some tech person with a dedicated job.
And to be more specific, we're the test drivers.. So with that comes all of us working together for answers.

WiFi is not a strong point with these devices, BUT there's been discussion earlier of software improvements to make WiFi better. We'll see.

In the meantime, please read through the forum posts and you may get some info that will help with some of this.

And to any question that starts out with "Should I try..." ABSOLUTELY!!! As we're all learning here, anything that helps move us toward greater enlightenment has gotta be a plus....And maybe, get us closer to a Pinebook Pro smooth operation :-)