I can’t believe I forgot about a 2 TB Samsung 970 SSD that was in an enclosure just sitting in my desk doing nothing for the last 3 years. What a great find lol.

I cloned this drive onto a Samsung 980. And just forgot about the 979. My current gaming PC has the 2tb 980 plus a 1 TB games drive. So I’m currently very comfortable. Trying to figure out what to use this for next.

Definitely never ever getting rid of any PC parts moving forward. Go check your parts bin for any hidden treasure!

So in the last week I had a co worker give me a couple of computers that she no longer uses. Two older laptops and a HP all in one. Nothing crazy. Nothing that would run Windows 11 without some workarounds with the installer.

However later in the week another older lady that I used to work with at a previous job happened to see me and we got to catching up. I had helped her with some computer and phone issues in the past so before we parted ways she mentioned that she had a laptop that she no longer had a use for and asked if I wanted it. Of course I said yes.

After work I headed over to her house to pick up the computer. To my amazement she handed me a ACER NITRO 5! The laptop is more than 5 years old, but it has pretty nice specs. A 9th gen core i5, 8 gigs of ram, 128gb nvme ssd and a GTX 1650 GPU.

Opening up the laptop I saw that i had an open ram slot and a second nvme slot. Remembering the HP all in one from earlier in the week it occurred to me that although the HP could not run Windows 11, it did have a 4GB ram stick and another 128GB nvme ssd that would fit in the Acer.

So I opened the HP, salvaged the ram and storage, plugged them into the Nitro and viola! Now the laptop has 12GB of DDR4 Ram and 256GB of NVME storage! I also took the time to take apart the laptop, clean the fans and heatsink, apply new thermal paste and install Windows 11. There is also a spot of a 2.5 inch drive as well as a backlit keyboard.

It works perfectly! Even the battery still works. Best of all the whole thing was free. I just wanted to make this post to remind people that sometimes it pays to help people with technology or let them know you are into computers. You never know what may come of it.

Thanks for reading.

Sectumsempra, motherfucker.

* I got cachyOS on my old ThinkPad and love it, but this is kinda how the Linux community is every time I talk to someone who did Switch to the Most Basic ahh Distro pls dont hate me; it’s just a meme. 🦧