Sunday afternoon project

[almoststew1990]

Having built that desk the other day I had a hankering for a dumb project to do.

I found an old, cheap laptop on Facebook Marketplace - an Acer 5315 for £20, a pleasant 25 minute drive into the country.

This has a Celeron M (single core, 1.73GHz but at least I think it is not netburst era), 1GB of RAM, 5400RPM HDD and Intel X3100 / GMA965 integrated graphics. And running Vista!

It is in pretty nasty condition but we can all agree we've seen worse...

Start up took about 10 minutes to reach a functioning desktop along with muchbloatware. Some throwbacks including Youtube to MP3 converters, Quicktime player and Word 2000. I particularly enjoy the dog that barks when it detects a start up program - even AVG. Something called Spybot tried to prevent me disabling the sidebar from starting at start up. Windows explorer has an extra taskbar for encrypting and decrypting something. It is essentially unusuable. I ended up booting into safe mode and uninstalling most of the crap on it so I could run HWinfo and start downloading drivers.

Despite not being connected to my home network via ethernet or wifi it managed to connect to STRN_XXXXXX so no idea what that is about (VPN thing?)

So my plans:

Clean it to an inch of its life.

Upgrade the RAM to 2GB (unless it can take 4GB)

Throw in one of my spare 120GB SSDs

Socket M Core 2 Duo but I am mindful the current CPU is 25W and a C2D is 35W but the laptop is surprisingly quiet

Thermal paste etc.

Windows XP (or maybe a fresh Vista install!)

 

[almoststew1990]

I cleaned up the laptop, it only needed a bit of light scrubbing. I took the horrendous sticker off and removed the gunk that had accumulated around it in a line. It looks alright now!

Inside, it was not too bad - apart from the fan exhaust which was just a wall of dust between the fan and the shell. Clearing that out and adding fresh thermal paste (MX-6) has dropped temperatures to 20c to about 45c. I swapped out the 5400RPM HDD, which had 30GB of photos on it, for an SSD. The battery even lasts 45 minutes or so! Hooray for user servicable laptops:

Any ideas what the big hole on the right is for? A second HDD maybe? Looking at the manual it supports the Pentium Dual Core T2330 so I've picked that up for £5 on eBay. I think it is limited to 533MHz CPUs and RAM. My local CEX has 1GB sticks of DDR SODIMMs for 10p so I'll pick that up when I am next in the office.

I've also got Windows XP installed. The drivers were quite a faff but in the end I found an Acer recovery disk on Internet Archive and installed the drivers manually from that (the recovery disk was epecting Vista). The WiFi won't connect to any network, even unprotected ones, which makes me think I need a different driver.

I'm having fun with some late 90s games. It can just about run GTA 3 at 640*480*32 but it is happier with things like Age of Empires, Unreal Tournament, Half Life etc.

 

[Bubo]

Reminds me of me refurbing my beloved old Acer Aspire 5739G laptop that I had handed down to my young nephews, who being typical young oiks went on the abuse it and break it. Why is it kids just don't know the value of things? Years later when I found it abandoned in a back room at my dads house I just felt compelled to restore it to as new condition, despite knowing it would serve no useful purpose whatsoever. But it was my first proper laptop back in the day, and I was duty bound to nurse it back to health and just optimize it as much as possible.

 

[jcb33]

I still kick myself for giving away my Pentium 4 + Geforce 4 Go Toshiba. That thing was a beast at the time and it would have been the perfect retro games machine now.

That's a really nice find you have there and I appreciate you removing Vista from it xD I love the background, too. Normandy forever!