A brother gave me a Dell Inspiron n5110 that used to belong to his mother-in-law. She passed away about a year ago and my sister-in-law didn't want it. This thing doesn't even have any scuff marks on it.
My wife's laptop hard drive failed a couple years ago. I'd have replaced the HD in it, except for one thing...SHE NEVER MADE THE FRIGGIN' RESTORE DISCS FOR IT. I gave her DVDs I had already labeled for the purpose when it was brand new. All she had to do was run the program and insert the numbered discs when prompted, but noooooooo.
If I had known this, I could have made an image of her drive just in case.
Ah, well...
She used it as an excuse to get a new laptop...and was hell-bent on getting a Chromebook. Which I warned her she was going to end up not liking. She hates cloud based storage, which these things are big on, and if she used the 32 GB HD to store much of anything, she'd run out of room for updates.
Which is where she's at now, frustrated with her Chromebook.
Anyway, the Dell has Windows 7, which is my wife's preferred OS. Hates Windows 10. The laptop works fine in all aspects...except that, after replacing my own laptop HD a couple years ago with a SSD, it's abysmally slow on boot-up.
So I picked up a Samsung EVO 1 TB drive to replace the 640 GB drive in the Dell. Simple swap, right?
Well, if it were like my HP it would be. But to get to the drive on this one:
- Remove all the bottom screws, remove the optical drive.
- Remove the keyboard, more screws, disconnect som ribbon connectors, then pop the top off.
- Disconnect and remove the display.
- Disconnect more connectors from the motherboard, remove the motherboard.
- Remove the HD from the motherboard, swap drive mounts to new SSD.
- Reverse the above.
Went smooth...didn't miss any screws, didn't lose any screws, didn't crack any plastic parts. Pretty easy, in fact, for all the disassembly required.
Imaging went smooth, too. Ran Disk Management and expanded the C-Drive to use the full capacity of the new SSD.
All told, about 2 hours start to finish.
Boot-up to password page: 16 seconds.
Time from password to desktop: 10 seconds.
Now to order the 2 x 4 GB RAM sticks for it. (I didn't do that earlier, just in case I did something stupid, like crack the motherboard.)
QUESTION: I wanna know who the eff designs a laptop to max out at 8 GB of RAM and then ONLY PUTS 6 GB OF RAM IN IT! Not 4 GB...6 GB!
I mean, REALLY?!? You're 2 FRIGGIN' GB AWAY FROM MAX AND THAT'S WHERE YOU WANT TO STOP?
My wife's laptop hard drive failed a couple years ago. I'd have replaced the HD in it, except for one thing...SHE NEVER MADE THE FRIGGIN' RESTORE DISCS FOR IT. I gave her DVDs I had already labeled for the purpose when it was brand new. All she had to do was run the program and insert the numbered discs when prompted, but noooooooo.
If I had known this, I could have made an image of her drive just in case.
Ah, well...
She used it as an excuse to get a new laptop...and was hell-bent on getting a Chromebook. Which I warned her she was going to end up not liking. She hates cloud based storage, which these things are big on, and if she used the 32 GB HD to store much of anything, she'd run out of room for updates.
Which is where she's at now, frustrated with her Chromebook.
Anyway, the Dell has Windows 7, which is my wife's preferred OS. Hates Windows 10. The laptop works fine in all aspects...except that, after replacing my own laptop HD a couple years ago with a SSD, it's abysmally slow on boot-up.
So I picked up a Samsung EVO 1 TB drive to replace the 640 GB drive in the Dell. Simple swap, right?
Well, if it were like my HP it would be. But to get to the drive on this one:
- Remove all the bottom screws, remove the optical drive.
- Remove the keyboard, more screws, disconnect som ribbon connectors, then pop the top off.
- Disconnect and remove the display.
- Disconnect more connectors from the motherboard, remove the motherboard.
- Remove the HD from the motherboard, swap drive mounts to new SSD.
- Reverse the above.
Went smooth...didn't miss any screws, didn't lose any screws, didn't crack any plastic parts. Pretty easy, in fact, for all the disassembly required.
Imaging went smooth, too. Ran Disk Management and expanded the C-Drive to use the full capacity of the new SSD.
All told, about 2 hours start to finish.
Boot-up to password page: 16 seconds.
Time from password to desktop: 10 seconds.
Now to order the 2 x 4 GB RAM sticks for it. (I didn't do that earlier, just in case I did something stupid, like crack the motherboard.)
QUESTION: I wanna know who the eff designs a laptop to max out at 8 GB of RAM and then ONLY PUTS 6 GB OF RAM IN IT! Not 4 GB...6 GB!
I mean, REALLY?!? You're 2 FRIGGIN' GB AWAY FROM MAX AND THAT'S WHERE YOU WANT TO STOP?
