Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I'm here with some fun bit of DIY but of a different flavor! The computer side.
DIY Laptop Modification
When it comes to DIY things, if you are familiar with my historical work, you know that I like to build things out of wood and fix cars and stuff. I love all of that but on the same token I also love computers. I've built several computers of my own over the years and have done all kinds of things with them. It has been quite a long time though since I've been able to get into that type of stuff until recently. I had a need to swap out the hard drive of my laptop!
This HP laptop I have is really great, it's got a lot of speed and a great motherboard for me to use. I don't need all the fancy stuff for gaming and all that since I just blog on Hive and want to do some programming stuff on it so I figured it would be a good idea to get rid of the tiny 128 GB hard drive and upgrade! I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking at reviews since I had a bit of a time crunch to get this thing back up and going but the hard drive I chose, a Samsung 1 terabyte solid state drive, seemed like it was a pretty good choice for the money. I was eager to get this thing installed!
I have never done anything with a laptop before though so it was all new to me. I was a bit nervous doing it since everything inside it is so small and I didn't want to break anything. Thankfully with the aide of the owners manual and a quick internet search for how to correctly open a laptop, I was off to the right start.
I had to first unscrew and remove these screws from all of the corners of the laptop as well as the middle. What I didn't see originally were the small black screws. I had gotten lucky with the screwdrivers I have. I didn't have one the correct size initially when I was trying it and one of the screws is just a tiny bit rounded. I'll have to figure out how to get one online or from a different laptop so I don't run into issues later down the line lol.
There ended up being quite a bit of screws to undo! One in each corner, two in the middle and the two black screws near the top. Thankfully none of the screws actually came out so I didn't have to worry about losing them lol. They just loosened up so you could get it off.
What I was having a bit of difficulty was trying to figure out what one was the hard drive lol I mentioned that I wasn't familiar with laptop internals, right? So after scrutinizing the different chips and all that I finally figured out that on the left side, the long computer chip that is next to the edge was actually the hard drive. It was really fun for me to figure that out! The middle chip is a stick of ram and I have another slot for more ram so I might buy some more in the coming weeks, it depends on how the computer handles running Python on it. Should be good, I hope! If not, more RAM it is.
Thankfully you get a great confirmation when you remove the card, that what you did remove was in fact the hard drive! lol It says underneath, SSD. Solid State Drive which is the same kind that our cellphones have nowadays. Really great technology improves the startup speed and other functionality of the laptops.
I was going back and forth for a little bit on if I bought the right drive or not. Thankfully I figured out that what I did buy was correct so I inserted the drive correctly, the same way that I saw the other one come out, back into place. It kind of felt like Christmas morning for me lol
This is the old drive that I took out. It served its purpose but 128 GB is just far too small for me to use effectively.
Now that I had put the drive in, I was thankfully ready to put everything back together! I was glad that I figured it out because this was something I wasn't looking forward to entirely and put it off for a few months. Thankfully though, I stuck with it and successfully gave it an upgrade! Now the big question was, will it start up?!
After a bit of trepidation, I was able to figure out how to get it going! I had purchased a fresh copy of Windows so I needed to just install it. The BIOS beeps, let me tell you, were not a pleasant sound lol. There was some configuration I needed to do here and there but it worked out. I'm typing this post up on my brand new laptop!
What is your DIY project you've finished lately? I'd love to hear about it!
Do you want to get paid, in crypto, for searching the internet? Try using and signing up for Presearch to earn some great crypto! I've currently got 2,539 PRE tokens, with a market value of $609.28. It doesn't sound like a lot but when you search using sites like Google you get paid $0! Join Presearch to break Google's stranglehold on the internet searches. If you'd like to sign up, use my referral link!
https://www.presearch.org/signup?rid=513043
That is really great . There are lots people who does not know how to upgrade laptops without buying new unit of laptop. This is a great idea. Actually, I have been imagining things like this even though I don't have one. i planned on catching the old laptop my sister had when she sets it aside if she decides to buy new one. there's a junk computers my husband bought in his business and I still want to save one. but the thing is that I don't know anything about it.
Thanks for stopping by! It’s actually not very difficult, especially with the advent of YouTube you can learn anything nowadays! Best tip I can give is just spend a little bit of time looking to see what kind of laptop or computer it is. Is it a hard disk drive or a solid state drive? Each of those are important to figure out and distinct from each other. The other thing is to just play around with it. Taking the cover off and looking at it and getting familiar with it is a big help!
Great work done man. you did well and I never tried this type of DIY before but can think of doing something like this. I have one laptop with low storage and will see if I can do this upgrade.
That's great! It's a lot of fun and not too difficult. You just have to figure out what kind of hard drive you have among other things. What I think would be a good idea is to take the cover off gently and see if you can explore around visually. It was great to do for me!
This is awesome!! I want to upgrade my desktop myself which actually was upgraded twice by a professional. It has my old hard drive in one slot, and my new one in another one with plenty of space for more but the entire rig needs to be updated with more power.i have no idea how to do that but this gives me inspiration. What do you think? You want to come over bro and figure this thing out?
Yeah man, I would love to help. The desktop stuff is a lot easier lol. The laptop was sketchy because of how small it was!
What size power supply do you have? Pop the cover open and let me know. A good power supply used to be 900 watt but I haven’t looked in a long time. Then we need to figure out if you have the more modern PCI express board or something older.
Congratulations @cmplxty! You received a personal badge!
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
Check out the last post from @hivebuzz: