My weekend project...

Sarra · August 18, 2020

Well, it's 'over' now, but it was... Difficult.

I've got a 11" convertible HP laptop, which basically was the cheapest POS that BestBuy had in stock, and I even got it for like $50 off because I was polite when I asked the Manager if they had any deals to offer... I think I paid $150 out the door for this thing?

I bought it for tuning my car. Computing performance was the lowest priority for me at the time. Small size, battery life, and USB was top priority for me, but it had to be a Windows machine, because Chromebooks wouldn't do what I needed.

So, fast forward a year, and my media PC died. All I did with it was watch YouTube, and store whatever files I needed to access, backup my music and such, and it was a print server for my house. Since that machine died, I've been using this laptop for watching YouTube, and sometimes doing basic maths in Calc.exe (best game ever!). However, just watching YouTube pegs the little Intel Pentium Silver CPU to 100%, and pausing the video and going to a browser tab to do a basic web search would require a 3-5 minute wait while the YouTube video was cached on the slow spinning platter drive, and the new tab was read off and put into the pathetic 4GB of onboard RAM. Which was shared for video.

So, finally, after watching a video put out by JayzNonSense, I finally looked up a guide for teardown, and after not finding it on IFixIt, then finding it on IFixIt, I finally tore it down and ripped out the HDD, and replaced it with a brand new SSD.

Installing Windows, patching and updating windows, and installing the drivers took all of 14 hours. Windows Update is ABSOLUTELY useless for finding drivers. HP doesn't seem to have any software to automate driver search and install, so I had to manually install all of the drivers.

But its the next day, and whoo, it was worth it. It's 'faster', but the stupid wait when going from tab to tab, or window to window, has been massively reduced. I can handle a 3-5 second pause, a 3-5 minute pause was frustrating and stupid. I was going to use ThrottleStop and undervolt the CPU, but it's so low end that ThrottleStop doesn't actually give me options for changing voltage. o.o; Best part, I was able to actually copy all of the junk off my old drive, which I completely forgot to do before ripping it out, so now I have a 500GB scratch drive that I can use via USB for moving crap from machine to machine, if the WiFi is down for whatever reason... Which reminds me, I should get a USB to Ethernet adapter, so I don't have to rely on the garbage onboard WiFi on this thing. Realtek can suck a pickle.

Edit: I totally forgot, this is the first time in my life that I actually disconnected and reconnected the ZIF mini-tab connectors in an electronic product, without completely destroying it in the process.

SupaKomputa · August 18, 2020

No build in ethernet?

Yeah you can use a usb ethernet, make sure it has the driver suppoted by the os.

SupaKomputa · August 18, 2020

9 minutes ago, Sarra said:

Realtek can suck a pickle.

btw. most usb ethernet use realtek.

Sarra · August 18, 2020

If I had realized it didn't have built in ethernet, I would have grabbed something else instead. I'm actually considering a newer laptop now, maybe with Thunderbolt 3 or something... For now, though, it's fine to watch YouTube on it.