November 23rd: Thanksgiving Day and Upgrading My Laptop

Today was good.

In the morning, around 12, my family went to the local dim sum restaurant for Thanksgiving. We ate lots of good food. One that stood out to me the most was the durian flakey pastry, which was especially delicious, and I was craving after seeing chefs make it on the TVB channel my grandma was watching a week ago.

Anyways, after we went home, I got started upgrading my laptop. I'm hoping I can make this laptop perform well enough for possibly a hackathon and for the SAT, but I'll need to find a way to increase the battery life to around 6 hours if I want to do so. Otherwise, for the hackathon, I might do what I did last year, which was remote into my main PC.

The Laptop is an old Gateway NV57H48u, which is around 14-15 years old. My auntie originally bought it so that when I was at her house, I wouldn't be so bored. But now, it's mine. During the pandemic, I upgraded it so that it had 8 gigabytes of ram, so it could perform a little bit better, but it was still too slow for normal use. The processor is also rather slow but it gets the job done. It's an Intel i5-2430M with 2 cores and 4 threads. Right now, the battery life is horrible and it doesn't even last 2 hours. 

Anyways, I first formatted the hard drive so I could use it later. Then, I disassembled the laptop so I could take out the hard drive, and I replaced it with the SSD I bought yesterday. If anyone is curious it's the Crucial MX500 SATA SSD, which will be great for all of the devices I have. Anyways, after that, I prepared a Windows 10 installation USB and installed windows. While I was setting up windows, I prepared a Ubuntu USB. I intend to use Windows for compatibility reasons for programs, and Ubuntu for actual work through dual booting. 

Anyways, after I finished setting up the computer, the improvements were immediately noticeable. Prior to the upgrades, Windows was so slow that it refused to load many system icons, and it took around a minute to load in completely. But now, It doesn't even take 10 seconds to be logged in! All I have left now to solve is the battery issue, which should be easy to fix if I just buy a replacement battery from Amazon.

Yikes! Looks like I've gone into a bit of a side tangent. I'll leave what I wrote for anyone that is curious on the steps that I took to rejuvenate my laptop.

For Thanksgiving dinner, my family did Hotpot, and my father bought a roast goose. Everything was delicious, and it was fun to eat with my family.

I hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving!

Thanks for reading,

Issac