Growing up, I didn’t have my own computer, it was always shared and it was placed in a space where my siblings and I took turns using it for whatever reason. So you can imagine how nasty and crusty the keyboard and mouse were when placed in the hands of 3 kids so many greasy keys. It wasn’t until I hit high school that I had my own real personal computer. A laptop. A hand me down that my mom wasn’t using anymore. It wasn’t the best, but I used it, and I used it til it died. I mean it. Like, that thing wouldn’t charge anymore, the chasiss was falling apart and the trackpad was all scuffed up. Bad memories. But used computers can be great, especially if the previous owner took care of it well. It also can actually be much cheaper to renew an old machine over just flat out buying a new one.
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This is an ASUS laptop that my girlfriend’s older brother isn’t using anymore. I asked him if it was okay if I gave this to my younger brother who needed a computer for school. So quick shout out to him. Thanks Tyler. And before we hand this to my brother, I want to show you guys, how a quick clean up and hard drive swap, can really make a laptop feel like new. So let’s get started.
First let’s discuss what this thing is rocking to understanding what needs to be done to get this thing into shape. It’s an 15in laptop with an intel i7 4500U which actually does quite well in benchmarks and is actually really nice to use, then there’s the intel HD 4400 graphics, 8 GBs of ram, a 1TB hard drive, and the laptop has a battery life of roughly 3 hours probably because the battery is old, and a 1366 by 768, which definitely isn’t the best but will do for this. The machine itself has some cosmetic wear and tear, but other than that the laptop is in excellent shape with no major problems. So, from there’s a few things I want to fix on this thing to make it feel like new or at least newer.
First, the internal hard drive, has got to go. This thing is slow, it takes over a minute to boot up the machine and to be honest, who has time to wait over a minute? I’d rather wait 2 minutes for a hot pocket. So, we’ll shove in this cheap $25 240GB SSD from Micro Center. Second, there’s some stickers, tacky branding on the machine, and some grime that I want to clean up to make the laptop look better overall. So, sticker removal and light cleaning are definitely gonna happen, now, let’s get started.
We want to replace the hard drive, but since it had data belonging to my girlfriend’s brother, I didn’t want to wipe it or clone it to the new SSD. So, I loaded a windows 10 installation onto a flash drive. Replacing the hard drive was easy, remove the screws on the back of the machine, and the hard drive was then clearly exposed. Many laptops will be this easy to upgrade, unless you have certain machines like a surface, or macbook. Sorry guys. Anyway, just another screw removed and the hard drive just easily slides out. We then have to unscrew the old hard drive from its tray, and replace it with our SSD. Then plug the SSD back in, put on the back over of the laptop and wa-la. A masterpiece. From there, I tried installing windows via the flash drive I made multiple times but all failed, because I was stupid. If you’re installing windows, it’s best to use a USB 2.0 port rather than a USB 3.0. For this laptop, 3.0 didn’t work at all with installation. After went through all of that trouble, it booted just fine into windows 10, then I spent around an hour downloading updates and drivers and the laptop runs great. It boots way faster than it did before, and everything is super snappy. I think it was well worth it.
But, how does this old machine compare to a brand new machine. Well. This machine has similar specs and performance to laptops you’d find brand new for around 300-400. But, some of those laptops don’t include an SSD or an SSD this large. All we really did was spend 25$ to upgrade the SSD, wipe the OS clear of any bloatware, and cleaned the machine making it overall better. I’m sure my brother will get plenty of great use out of this machine now. And I hope this inspires some people to take another glance on used electronics rather than just buy something new each time.
Anyway, what do you guys think?