Gadgetory

in between working on the last minute Christmas PC build I was able to get another gift into the production queue last minute and that was converting a laptop from an internal hard drive at 7200 rpm to a solid-state drive and this is because I hate to see computers that function perfectly fine kind of be thrown out or used less or whatever just because one component that's replaceable is failing so we're gonna talk about how that fix a lot of problems including noise in this video before getting to that this content is brought to you by AMD and the rx 480 and 470 GPUs which are on the table and you can find links to sales for those in the description below but if you're not using something like a DGP you to build an actual desktop computer you might be using a laptop and this is where we've done a few videos recently one of them was working on G ends Andrews laptop where it had some pretty severe dust problems if you recall we were able to improve the thermals by I don't even remember it was like almost 30 C in some cases but it was a big improvement and that improved our frequency and it removed some bottlenecks in the system that were caused by thermals overall fix a lot of problems like freezing as well so that's an instance where a laptop that works well the silicon was all fine is being killed by something that is resolved well through some effort in this case it was even easier because I didn't even have to pull the whole thing apart and clean it but I did a bit of cleaning cleaned out the fan and the reason I started there was because when you have a laptop that's making a lot of noise you generally think well it's probably the fan so we went through the process of pulling it apart looking at the fan what's going on and it looked clean so the next process is well maybe it needs to be real Oubre kated or needs something to freshen itself up replace the fan maybe it's just bad bearings none of those seem to be the problem and after some heuristic checking of putting my ear against the shell we were able to figure out that it was the hard drive the hard drive was spinning up to such a high rpm basically it smacked 7200 rpm at all times including from desktop that it was working unnecessarily hard it was producing a bit of extra which of course increases the fan speed a little bit too and just generally was obviously on the way out so this is not a drive that was long for this world it's been put away in permanent storage in a Faraday cage but other than that the obvious next step was replacing it so for a laptop it makes sense to do an SSD upgrade or side grade depending what you have in there now and that's because of a few reasons some that you don't think of on desktops normally of course everyone thinks of speed as the biggest improvement but not only that you get some power savings so an SSD some of them draw less than a watt of power depending on if you're using s 0 X or other advanced sleep and C States SSD power savings and Windows 10 for instance or even I think Windows 8.1 had it but if you're using stuff like that you get power savings and the drive is not a physical spinning component less risk of damage by just throwing the laptop around in bags and it's quieter and that noise in a laptop is a lot more noticeable than in a desktop with other fans and system components so that's what we were working on the first step was to clone the drive you can do that by using software like Clonezilla and you can also use a Cronus and you can which is paid software you can use Norton Ghost which is one of the solutions that I used to use and liked a lot over network he can do pixie boots to ghost and then just clone into everything from the network somewhere so that's really cool and there's a couple other free options to clone Zell is one of the better ones but it does have some issues so I know P you Xena Cronus went through it's a I think a $30 Buy these days went through an upgraded it did the clone no problems whatsoever Windows survived I left BIOS setup as legacy is trying to go to UEFI after you've already installed it is not ideal set up as H ahci so everything was good no real issues there there was one blue screen issue at the very beginning and that was resolved by going through and doing a check disk so sometimes well pretty much every time I've ever done a clone for a functional in use real system as opposed to a test bench you'll want to do a check disk just to make sure everything is where it should be so that fix that problem in terms of improvements for this I grabbed the UV for drive Kingston Drive it was on sale 240 gigabyte SSD to replace something like a 480 maybe gigabyte hard drive something like that and the drive was barely being used so that was a fine option and we did see gains in a few areas one of them was reducing the boot time so that went down from a little over a minute to about 27 seconds as a much quicker boot up of course and applications feel snap here in addition to that change but we can't really measure that easily and that's a clear benefit on the experiential and usability side of things where things just kind of open faster and it feels better but you can't necessarily measure or quantify the difference as for the rest the noise levels for the original system put us at about forty 9.1 DBA went under prolonged idle periods without any load whatsoever and that's almost entirely disk noise with some fan noise thrown in because things were heating up unnecessarily with the SSD we're down to thirty 4.3 DBA and that's idle with a 36.3 DBA average heavy loads that's when the systems really working about as hard as it'll ever work which is for things like Excel spreadsheets PC mark benchmarks things like that and then in a burst and worst case scenario that should really never occur we hit forty 3.4 DBA when the fans were really ramping up for short periods of time to deal with the heat and that is not something we'll really encounter but if we did it's still lower than the idle noise with the original hard drive and the louder fans pre-cleaning and things like that so that's really all there is to this video the whole point is that if you've got an old laptop because we just did another one of these with dust it's really worth pulling it apart and trying to fix things piece by piece if possible if there's not a silicon level failure with the CPU or the GPU then normally the fixes are trivial it's cleaning out dust I just say trivial with air quotes because it's trivial once you get to the part that's a problem it might be difficult to get there there are service manuals you can look up online for pretty much any laptop type in the name of the laptop and the word service manual and that'll tell you exactly how to disassemble it that's the hardest part once you're in there pull out all the dust maybe remove the bearings and the fans if it seems like it's necessary it's been spinning against dust for a while tends to get hot and then drives of course hard drives are pretty common failure points and laptops primarily because they move around a lot and that's not good for a spinning disk so you can get an SSD throw that in there of course that's not news to anyone but if the point of of prevention from doing something like that was that you didn't want to migrate your OS we didn't know how the answer is very easy you can install clones L to a USB key plug it into a functional system ideally not the unit you're working on there are some pretty severe issues with a Cronus and with Clonezilla when trying to work from the local machine so if you have an internal laptop drive and you have an external drive plugged in to a USB 3 donegal or even you move it internal and you try to boot to a USB key with Clonezilla or a Cronus I've very rarely had success with that it's just something with the way the laptops are set up it does not like but if you plug it into a functional desktop really no problems whatsoever you don't even have to leave the booted environment you'll have to go into a special USB key environment or save mode or anything like that it works perfectly fine from the desktop with the application installed so Cronus is an option if you want a paid solution it's a bit easier to walk through but Clonezilla is not hard it's just it looks more intimidating because it's got menus that are arrowed to access all Linux distro basically that's been stripped down and changed into just a very simple disk cloning and semi partition management software parted magic is also pretty good to look into so I think hopefully that gives everyone a basic idea of how you can make these changes if you wanted to pretty simple content overall but I was I was very interested to see a noise reduction from almost 50 DB to something like 43 that's pretty substantial and 36 when it's under a more a nominal load it's something like working with YouTube we're at 36 DBA so that's pretty damn good and it was exciting to work on and as part of why I like working on computers because you can measure the results and see them in real time what it does work you can watch our last minute Christmas build 1 & 2 if you want to see some of the process but doing that troubleshooting live and toys patreon commercial video helps out directly links description below for more information including the links to these cards thank you for watching I'll see you all next time