Revive your old laptop
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,351 words · ~6 min read
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This is my laptop. And there are many. Well, okay, to be fair, there's actually
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not that many. I don't think ASUS bamboo laptops actually sold that well. But
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this one is mine. And even though I haven't been using it for a while, it's
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been serving my parents well for about a year now. That is to say, well, not
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fast. Even though the Core i5 M450, 4
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gigs of DDR3 and 1366 by 768 TN screen
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might still be suitable for browsing and word processing and other light tasks.
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Back in 2010, most laptops, even thin ones, unless your name was Apple, still
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had mechanical hard drives, so doing anything on it, is painfully slow these
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days. But sentimental value is a thing.
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And this baby got me through many of video export. Carrying it around campus
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at BCIT between classes, not even able
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to close the lid because my Windows install was so borked. So, I'm not ready
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to put her down just yet. Let's operate.
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Tunnel Bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and
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enjoy a more open internet. Try Tunnel Bear for free at the link below. So,
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just in case you didn't catch that, I'm going to install an SSD in here in order
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to breathe some new life into it and keep it away from the recycling heaps.
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If you want to see how electronics recycling can actually be devastating to
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the environment, check out this Tech Cookie episode up here. But before we do
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that, let's explore what it's like to use this thing with the hard drive in
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it. To give it the best possible performance I could, I've reformatted
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the drive. This is a very fresh version of Windows 7. And we'll just try
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restarting it, opening up some programs, just general usability things, which is
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what this laptop would actually be targeted at for now, and see how it
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stands up. Restarting the computer took forever. from pressing the restart
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button to having Firefox loaded with the line of text homepage on it. Took two
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minutes and 13 seconds and then it didn't get much better from there. Foxit
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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
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all. Steam I was actually 100% convinced wasn't working and then had switched to
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try to demo something else by the time that it actually freaking loaded.
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Loading up any browsers took a really long time, but navigating through
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Windows wasn't too bad. And once you had
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a browser actually loaded and you were going through various websites, it did
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actually work pretty well because the DDR3 RAM is actually surprisingly fine.
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The only thing pulling this laptop down that much is the hard drive. So, time to
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swap it out. What I'm going to swap in is a Vertex 4 128 gig SSD from OCZ, a
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company that doesn't even exist anymore. I mean, it's it's advertising into links
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on the front. This is actually from a pretty similar era that this laptop is
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from, and it costs like 50 bucks off Amazon, so you can get it pretty cheap.
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No big deal. I'm going to throw this in here. Not the best SSD I could if I
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wanted to like really destroy that hard drive. And this one has been used a
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bunch and has a ton of clutter on it. So the hard drive had a best case scenario
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and the SSD has like a almost worst case scenario. Let's check it
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out. You like this? I actually lost the original tray that I had for um mounting
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my drive in here. So I used a little mod
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by just wrapping up some paper. And I
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mean it it actually works completely fine. That was so much better in my
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opinion. It only took one minute and two seconds to go from restart button all
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the way to browser open with the Linus detectives page playing. Opening up any
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program, Foxit, various browsers, Origin
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because I didn't have Steam installed on there. It's not my computer anymore.
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Don't worry about it. Um, it was easy. None of it took very long. I didn't get
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frustrated actually trying to figure out if a program was going to open at all
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after I clicked on it. It was just there. Perfect. And that's from a very
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old laptop. This isn't difficult to do
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either. You saw me swap the SSD in for the hard drive. It was not a complicated
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process. And then the Bamboo even has an optical drive. So, if you go to the
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store and try to buy one of those Windows key things that comes with the
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disc, you can even just do it that way. Plain and simple. It's cheap at only
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$50. It's easy. Just a hard drive swap for an SSD, not a big deal. And
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installing Windows. If you have trouble with that, you can check out this video up here, which is like an NCIX tech tips
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video from way back. Arguably, there isn't really an improvement for the
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browsing experience. If you're going to spend most of your time in a web browser, uh there is an improvement
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getting to the browsing experience, but once you're there, it's pretty much the same for hard drive or SSD because
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that's RAM based. I don't really think upgrading the RAM is a huge value ad
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here as it's already rather fast. So, yeah, cheap, easy, not a big deal. Also,
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one thing to be careful of if you're looking to buy a laptop for this type of
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upgrade is that not all laptops are very
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user upgradeable. I would try to find a tear down maybe on iix it or some other
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website of someone taking the laptop apart so you can see how easy it is to
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access the hard drive or SSD area and
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possibly the RAM. Crunchyroll is a site
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created by anime fans for anime fans and they offer the most current episodes of
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new shows straight from Japan like ReZero or Dragon Ball Super. And they
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have a large collection of the most popular anime series like Nudo and
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Bleach. All of the content on their site is professionally subtitled. So head
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over to crunchyroll.com/Linus and you can sign
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up for a 30-day free trial of Crunchyroll Premium. If you enjoy the
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many benefits of premium, like 1080p streaming, getting new episodes of shows
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straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere, and being able to stream
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anywhere, anytime from a variety of devices like your phone, tablet, game
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console, computer, whatever. You can continue your premium membership for not
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the price of a train, but $6.95 per month. So again, head over to
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crunchyroll.com/inus and check them out. I would highly recommend doing it if you
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have an old laptop laying around. But what do you guys think? Let me know in
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the comments down below. Like the video if you liked it. Dislike if you disliked it. Get subscribed. Check out the links
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that we have below where you can buy stuff like old uh not very currently
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recommended SSDs that are really cheap uh or older laptops maybe, but you might
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be better off on eBay or Craigslist for that or Kijiji as we have in Canada.
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Anyways, also down in the description down below, you can see a place where
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you can buy our shirts in the how to support us section and uh other
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affiliate links and whatnot that are down there. If you want to see another video, check out this video where I
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detail how to make a test bench for basically free.