This is my laptop. And there are many. Well, okay, to be fair, there's actually
not that many. I don't think ASUS bamboo laptops actually sold that well. But
this one is mine. And even though I haven't been using it for a while, it's
been serving my parents well for about a year now. That is to say, well, not
fast. Even though the Core i5 M450, 4
gigs of DDR3 and 1366 by 768 TN screen
might still be suitable for browsing and word processing and other light tasks.
Back in 2010, most laptops, even thin ones, unless your name was Apple, still
had mechanical hard drives, so doing anything on it, is painfully slow these
days. But sentimental value is a thing.
And this baby got me through many of video export. Carrying it around campus
at BCIT between classes, not even able
to close the lid because my Windows install was so borked. So, I'm not ready
to put her down just yet. Let's operate.
Tunnel Bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and
enjoy a more open internet. Try Tunnel Bear for free at the link below. So,
just in case you didn't catch that, I'm going to install an SSD in here in order
to breathe some new life into it and keep it away from the recycling heaps.
If you want to see how electronics recycling can actually be devastating to
the environment, check out this Tech Cookie episode up here. But before we do
that, let's explore what it's like to use this thing with the hard drive in
it. To give it the best possible performance I could, I've reformatted
the drive. This is a very fresh version of Windows 7. And we'll just try
restarting it, opening up some programs, just general usability things, which is
what this laptop would actually be targeted at for now, and see how it
stands up. Restarting the computer took forever. from pressing the restart
button to having Firefox loaded with the line of text homepage on it. Took two
minutes and 13 seconds and then it didn't get much better from there. Foxit
reader took a very long time to show up to the point where I was a little bit worried if it was going to show up at
all. Steam I was actually 100% convinced wasn't working and then had switched to
try to demo something else by the time that it actually freaking loaded.
Loading up any browsers took a really long time, but navigating through
Windows wasn't too bad. And once you had
a browser actually loaded and you were going through various websites, it did
actually work pretty well because the DDR3 RAM is actually surprisingly fine.
The only thing pulling this laptop down that much is the hard drive. So, time to
swap it out. What I'm going to swap in is a Vertex 4 128 gig SSD from OCZ, a
company that doesn't even exist anymore. I mean, it's it's advertising into links
on the front. This is actually from a pretty similar era that this laptop is
from, and it costs like 50 bucks off Amazon, so you can get it pretty cheap.
No big deal. I'm going to throw this in here. Not the best SSD I could if I
wanted to like really destroy that hard drive. And this one has been used a
bunch and has a ton of clutter on it. So the hard drive had a best case scenario
and the SSD has like a almost worst case scenario. Let's check it
out. You like this? I actually lost the original tray that I had for um mounting
my drive in here. So I used a little mod
by just wrapping up some paper. And I
mean it it actually works completely fine. That was so much better in my
opinion. It only took one minute and two seconds to go from restart button all
the way to browser open with the Linus detectives page playing. Opening up any
program, Foxit, various browsers, Origin
because I didn't have Steam installed on there. It's not my computer anymore.
Don't worry about it. Um, it was easy. None of it took very long. I didn't get
frustrated actually trying to figure out if a program was going to open at all
after I clicked on it. It was just there. Perfect. And that's from a very
old laptop. This isn't difficult to do
either. You saw me swap the SSD in for the hard drive. It was not a complicated
process. And then the Bamboo even has an optical drive. So, if you go to the
store and try to buy one of those Windows key things that comes with the
disc, you can even just do it that way. Plain and simple. It's cheap at only
$50. It's easy. Just a hard drive swap for an SSD, not a big deal. And
installing Windows. If you have trouble with that, you can check out this video up here, which is like an NCIX tech tips
video from way back. Arguably, there isn't really an improvement for the
browsing experience. If you're going to spend most of your time in a web browser, uh there is an improvement
getting to the browsing experience, but once you're there, it's pretty much the same for hard drive or SSD because
that's RAM based. I don't really think upgrading the RAM is a huge value ad
here as it's already rather fast. So, yeah, cheap, easy, not a big deal. Also,
one thing to be careful of if you're looking to buy a laptop for this type of
upgrade is that not all laptops are very
user upgradeable. I would try to find a tear down maybe on iix it or some other
website of someone taking the laptop apart so you can see how easy it is to
access the hard drive or SSD area and
possibly the RAM. Crunchyroll is a site
created by anime fans for anime fans and they offer the most current episodes of
new shows straight from Japan like ReZero or Dragon Ball Super. And they
have a large collection of the most popular anime series like Nudo and
Bleach. All of the content on their site is professionally subtitled. So head
over to crunchyroll.com/Linus and you can sign
up for a 30-day free trial of Crunchyroll Premium. If you enjoy the
many benefits of premium, like 1080p streaming, getting new episodes of shows
straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere, and being able to stream
anywhere, anytime from a variety of devices like your phone, tablet, game
console, computer, whatever. You can continue your premium membership for not
the price of a train, but $6.95 per month. So again, head over to
crunchyroll.com/inus and check them out. I would highly recommend doing it if you
have an old laptop laying around. But what do you guys think? Let me know in
the comments down below. Like the video if you liked it. Dislike if you disliked it. Get subscribed. Check out the links
that we have below where you can buy stuff like old uh not very currently
recommended SSDs that are really cheap uh or older laptops maybe, but you might
be better off on eBay or Craigslist for that or Kijiji as we have in Canada.
Anyways, also down in the description down below, you can see a place where
you can buy our shirts in the how to support us section and uh other
affiliate links and whatnot that are down there. If you want to see another video, check out this video where I
detail how to make a test bench for basically free.