March 19, 2024

Laptop repair and upgrade

Not too long ago I acquired laptop for after helping set up a network and new computer for one of my dads friends, it was a hp laptop with a decent CPU and a new battery in it. But it have some issue’s with sticky key’s and some didn’t work at all. Unfortunately this laptop has one those’s laptops where, the keyboard is riveted onto the frame. There’s two choices, one just replace the keyboard; which is a pain as I would need to remove the rivets and reattach the keyboard back on to the frame somehow; Or replace the whole frame with the keyboard already on it, which is expensive.

I decided to go ahead and buy the keyboard replacement. A frame replacement with the keyboard would have cost more then 1/4 the value of the laptop. Which is ridiculous, I would rather just put that money in to buying a new computer rather then spending that much on one part.

So begin by removing the top part of the frame of the computer that had the keyboard, then I remove the metal back plate for holding the keyboard. After that I remove the plastic rivets holding the keyboard to the frame with a Stanley knife. Once I got a good amount of them off, I just and went and ahead pull the keyboard the rest of the way off. This cause some damage to the frame, but isn’t bad enough to bothers me. There was one issue with my repair, the keyboard was no longer riveted onto the frame; which causes the keyboard to sink into the computer. While this is annoying, it was still quite functional and not a hindrance in using it.

After I replace the keyboard, I made some upgrades. I installed a SSD to speed things up, and putting in another 8GBs of ram, double it to 16 gigabytes. once i was done with that I put it all back together and booted up the laptop. The new keyboard works fine and the SSD is recognized and the new ram was worked good. Installation of the operating system went smoothly with no issues, and booted quite fast.

Since the original owner of the laptop wanted to make sure the data was secured. I went and wipe the old drive with the shred command in Ubuntu to insure the data was securely delete.

After all said and done, this computer quite fast and snappy. I’ll be using this laptop as a spare in case my primary computer ever goes down; it also act’s as my windows machine in case I need one.

colby

Computer guru with years working with technology. I find it fun to tinker with computer new and old, and make them do my work for me.

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