Author Topic: Jacked up my laptop today...  (Read 567 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline roamer_1

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 43,289
Jacked up my laptop today...
« on: December 25, 2020, 05:52:05 pm »
This has been a fun day for me... I did some weird things to my laptop and thought I'd share - In this day of cutting back and making do, it ain't a brag - More about helping folks to see some satisfaction out of making something 'new again' by upgrading rather than running out and buying new. Sorry for all y'all that find this boring or unintelligible, but I am geeking out.

I start with some pretty good bones - an HP Elitebook i7 in a large form factor (17") laptop. I already jacked up the ram - It came with 4g, and I almost immediately gave it 16g, which is the sweet spot for me... More could be better, but 16g. seems to be where a modern machine smooths out and starts flying right.

I also already converted it to an SSD drive something I have recommended to folks all the way along. Just more ram and an SSD drive is going to be eyebrow raising performance increase in a normal condition.

But that SSD is indirectly part of why I did what I did today - When I did it, I threw a 250g SSD in... I don't remember exactly, but a 250 was running about 50 bucks at the time. But I had to split it to accommodate my standard backup routines, and to allow for my DEV partition... So I wound up with 80g in the front, and the rest all out back... Doable, but tight for the system partition... But I needed a lot of junk in the trunk.

SO anyway, the DVD pooped out on this thing, and I been fixin to try replacing it with a hard drive caddy - And that's the first thing I'll get into here.

It worked perfectly. I spent somewhere around 10 bucks for the caddy on ebay - And you basically remove the optical drive, throw a HDD in this caddy, and shove it right in where the optical drive used to be. For testing purposes, I threw any old thing in there, and wound up with a 500g back drive for now... Got rid of the old back end on the front drive, moved that all onto the back drive, and extended my system partition to use all of the front drive, to give me a nice bit of breathing room. So now 250g SSD system drive with a 500g storage drive. Eventually I will shove a good 2T drive in the back instead, but plenty good for now.

The one complaint I have is cosmetic - The caddy came with a face plate but it does not follow the contour of the laptop edge, so there's a bit of a cave where it sits... No real trouble - I will dissect the old drive, and get the front of it off, and JB it to the front of the caddy and all will be well - It is a bother. But over all, for 10 bucks and some elbow grease, what a great thing to do to an old box to give it serious new life.

The next thing, and this is a no brainer that no one ever does... I bought a battery. I know, right? Every laptop I know of just winds up staying plugged in all the time, because the battery has gone bad... I don't know why - The battery was fifteen bucks. I don't know why I have gone all this time with just enough battery to get between stations. I mean literally, unplug and hurry just to get to the power out on the porch, or over at the desk... Now I've got 2 hrs to get there. How dumb. So easy.

Next is the wiffy nic. 12 bucks for an AC WIFI w/ bluetooth. Network is mobedda for sure... But the bluetooth is the thing. As a laptop operator, the single biggest bitch I have is speakers. They suck. No, I mean they REALLY suck. And it ain't so bad if I am actually going to listen to something - I'll haul out the earbuds and plug em in. But about 800 times a day, someone will send me some little snippet and I have to go through the whole ritual for some stupid 5 minute blurb.

Well, no more. Now I have bluetooth... And the only real expense this go-around was for a bluetooth enabled speaker (about 50 bucks) that sits here by my chair and pairs to the laptop automatically. now, for everything, I just HEAR it. This is amazing. A-FREAKING-Mazing. I don't know why I put up with it for so long. This is probably the best thing I did. The thing that will matter the most a thousand times a day.

Next was the docking bay - This is a business laptop, and the thing is built for a docking bay, which I always figured was too much to worry about (and they used to be). But I got a brandy spankin new one - HP in the box - for 30 bucks. There it is. Sittin all pretty in the middle of command central... Now I just plug in the laptop and it automagically ties right into my existing KVM stuff, all done - To include speakers, the same KB as everything else, and a toggle away from the big monitor any old time. *SO* nice.

So yeah - It's been a good day for the laptop, and for Bubba-tech. Comfortably under 100 bucks and really the 50 dollar speaker don't count. I know it's weird... Funny, dumb stuff. But it's something to consider... A little bit of money can buy some happiness, and solve headaches you don't even know you're putting up with.