Putting a 980 Evo into a Acer Aspire E15, very cool

[the_onlooker]

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to the computer shop!

My name is Grimet, and today, I'm going to be upgrading a Acer Aspire E15

This laptop is fairly upgradable, which is very convenient because it comes with windows installed on a hard drive! As you could have guessed, this makes the computer very very slow! What we will be doing today is putting Windows onto a Samsung 980 Evo Pro, 500GB version. And we will set up the existing hard drive to be slow storage, while windows will run much faster on the NVME M.2 SSD.

Our first step is to make a recovery drive of our current operating system using a USB stick and Acer care center. Which is a piece of software which comes pre-installed with Acer computers, and helps keep the computer in good shape.

And yes, Acer had a quality control problem with this laptop, so the screen easily broke and is damaged slightly...

I have attached all of the photos in order of 1-15

 

STEP 1: Open up Acer Care Center.

STEP 2: Choosing Our USB Stick in the recovery drive menu.

STEP 3: Making our recovery drive, (this took multiple hours because of the slow hard drive.)

STEP 4: Wait another hour for windows to update on a slow hard drive...

STEP 5: Open up the guts of the computer and look at the beautiful guts of the computer! Also, we take out the Hard Drive at this stage.

STEP 6: Epic unboxing of the beautiful SSD!

STEP 7: Placing the SSD inside the laptop, Acer conveniently figured out that people may want to upgrade from putting windows on a Hard Drive to a SSD who knew?

STEP 7: Screwing the SSD into the motherboard, we actually kind of messed up the screw, so this took some time. (Epic camerawork on this photo, credit to my Dad)

STEP 8: Booting up from our beautiful USB stick which we put our backup of windows on.

STEP 9: Going into our BIOS and selecting our USB stick in the boot order to boot to our backup of windows, and re-install it. And since our Samsung SSD is in second in the boot order, windows will automatically be installed on it.

STEP 10: Recovering windows from our USB stick!

STEP 11: Installing Windows!!

STEP 12: Oh no, not this screen, NOT THIS SCREEN!

STEP 13: Well we know what to do!

 

Microsoft is not tracking us!

 

STEP 14: Well, Windows has been successfuly installed on the SSD! But now we need to open up the back again and install the hard drive, so we can use it as 1TB of slow storage!

STEP 15: Entering the BIOS and making sure windows always boots off of our SSD not our HDD.

 

It works! By the way, the error message is onedrive not set up, we didn't want that anyway.

 

Now we have a hard drive as storage, and windows is running much faster on the SSD.

Before the bootup time with the hard drive was 2 minutes, and now with the SSD it is 14 seconds! Massive improvement!

Thank you all for visiting the computer shop!

See you next time when we hopefully replace the RAM, cause this laptop only has 4GB.

Goodbye!

 

-Grimet#9620

 

I thought this would be cool to share. :))

 

[the_onlooker]

BTW the 980 Evo was $100 CAD

[adarw]

a $100 ssd for a $200 laptop...

 

laptop probly doesnt even have the speeds to match the ssd, you could have went for something much cheaper.

 

Anyhow, cool guide

[jaslion]

7 hours ago, Grimet said:

BTW the 980 Evo was $100 CAD

Thats a 970 evo.

 

Kinda funny to put a 100$ drive into a 100$ laptop :p.

[the_onlooker]

13 hours ago, adarw said:

a $100 ssd for a $200 laptop...

 

laptop probly doesnt even have the speeds to match the ssd, you could have went for something much cheaper.

 

Anyhow, cool guide

Hmmmmm, I guess that is sort of true, but the hard drive was a PAIN.

It made the computer almost unusable.

 

Thanks!

 

Grimet

[the_onlooker]

7 hours ago, jaslion said:

Thats a 970 evo.

 

Kinda funny to put a 100$ drive into a 100$ laptop :p.

It's a 970 evo? Ok, I guess I can't remember anything.

It just makes it so much faster.

 

Grimet

[adarw]

5 hours ago, Grimet said:

Hmmmmm, I guess that is sort of true, but the hard drive was a PAIN.

It made the computer almost unusable.

 

Thanks!

 

Grimet

you could have went with something cheaper, take this as a lesson for next time. :)