Labels

My 3 year old laptop, upgraded!

The Background:

For many of us, the laptops we bought pre-Covid were mainly for our personal entertainment and/or periodic work requirements - at least mine was. I never bought my machine in 2018 with the intent of using it as my workhorse. However, to be fair, it lasted me a good while (what with over 16 months of working from home). But come 2021, the chinks in its armor began to show. Therefore, a month or so ago, as I was getting seriously bogged down with my ageing HP Pavilion 15-CS1000TX laptop, I started considering a new laptop purchase from Amazon which would be able to fulfill my increasing needs from my machine. 

Each laptop I considered was upwards of ₹80,000/- which was a fair amount considering that it was going to be a more modern, and a brand new laptop - however for me, it didn't make sense to put so much money into another machine for maybe 3-4 years. Also, it didn't help that I was getting only about ₹12,000/- in exchange for my laptop from Amazon. So, I started exploring my options to upgrade my current laptop itself, instead of a new purchase.

What to upgrade:

I pored over the manual of my laptop, went through dozens and dozens of reviews and products online, checked compatibility matches, speed, durability, price and finally narrowed down my decision to the following pretty obvious choices:

  • I needed to upgrade my RAM.
  • I needed to install a faster disk drive for my core OS operations.
  • Since my budget allowed for it, I went ahead with a third (optional) upgrade to swap my existing SATA HDD to a newer, faster SSD.

Which compatible components to buy:

Now the question was which RAM, which SSD, what capacity, what frequency, etc. and etc. That is where the HP manual for my laptop came as a lifesaver. It provided me with all the details I needed to know, and therefore, to purchase, the components I would need for my laptop upgrade. The list came down to the following:
The above items cost me roughly ₹20,000/- which was a lot less money than what I would have spent to purchase a new laptop. Business sense, check!

How to actually install the hardware:

Second part was to decide how to install, how to clone my current disk contents (including OS, programs, configs, data, etc.) into my new disk. And that's where YouTube came as a lifesaver for me. Following are the videos I referred - right from how to open up my HP laptop, to how to install the RAM, how to clone, how to boot - pretty much, the whole sha-bang. PS: the sequence below is how I went, so it is, in a sense, in an order of execution.
After following all the above videos and steps on my laptop, I guess I can say it has been a successful upgrade for me because:
  • My laptop boots in 30 seconds now, as compared to 6 minutes before.
  • My existing OS, programs, configs, data remained as-is - nothing had to be reinstalled.
  • My applications launch faster and respond quicker to commands.
  • Any file application is blazing fast (since I have both SSD disks).
  • My old HDD is now connected via a SATA drive cover and is being used as an external storage.

Some pictures:

Laptop internals before upgrades

Crucial SODIMM DDR4 8GB RAM

Crucial RAM installed in the free RAM slot

Samsung 870 EVO 2.5" SATA 1TB SSD

Crucial P2 M.2 NVMe 250GB SSD installed

Laptop internals after all upgrades

SATA HDD vs SATA SSD vs M.2 NVMe SSD comparison:

Speed tests done using the CrystalDiskMark 8 utility - higher numbers in the test results mean faster speeds.



Conclusion:

I am super happy with my decision to upgrade my existing machine instead of purchasing a new one. My laptop has the 8th gen Intel CORE i5 CPU - so that may be the only hardware letdown I see in the future. Otherwise, the current "custom configuration" laptop that I have, is definitely beast enough for me!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Liked it, loved it, loathed it... Would be great if you let me know!

Popular Posts