How did we get here?
That part is actually easy enough. My friend Tom has a Lenovo PC he ‘inherited’ from work and it needed some attention. It came complete with an intel i5 6500 four core beast of a processor, 8GB or memory, a 640GB Western Digital Blue spinning hard drive and a fair amount of dust. The dust wasn’t the problem. Okay, it was a problem, but a very small one.
The big problem was the hard drive. I’ve been working with computers a long time and never seen a 640GB drive in the wild. To top it off, the drive had a lot of data, so a 500GB was out of the question. To anyone that hasn’t been SSD shopping lately, prices have fallen, drastically, so now may be a good time. I found a 1TB TeamGroup drive for around 50 bucks. Then, it was time to clone. We’ll get back to that in a minute.
Dusting didn’t take long. I got out the electric duster and blew out the big stuff, then turned my attention to the fans, and repasted the CPU cooler. It didn’t have heat problems, but I erred on the side of caution. A microfiber cloth and some alcohol wipes, and it was cleaned up and ready for the next steps. I needed a video card, and to replace the antenna on the wifi card. Taking care of the drives would be easy, and it would be ready to give back. I was wrong. Very, very wrong. The drives were not easy, but we’ll get back to that.
Starting off with the easy steps
The final step mechanically was to add in a graphics card. Nothing fancy, Tom said he just needed an HDMI port, and NVidia’s GT1030 has that. To any that may be reading this, and not familiar, the GT1030 was the low end of the 10 series cards from NVidia. After its release with 2GB of DDR5 memory, NVidia cut corners on future models by using DDR4 instead. There is a very real difference between DDR4 and 5. DDR5 is twice as fast, for one. Still, this fit the need. This isn’t a gaming PC, it just needed a tune up and an HDMI port, which the 1030 definitely has.
With the CPU in good shape and the graphics card installed, it was time to tackle the hard drive issue. Total time for this thing to boot up was about three minutes. It should have taken less, but the BIOS was set up to boot with a network connection. The problem? It wasn’t on a network to boot from. The HDD did have an operating system, though.
Every boot first went through the network process, then checked the HDD, which sounded bad. It almost sounded like scraping on something. I’m sure most of you have heard the sound of a drive clicking as it searches. This one sounded tired. It was time for the new SSD. Luckily, I now had one. I just had to clone the old one.
The cloning process
Did you know there is no company that offers a true open source cloning program? They all either make you pay up front, sign up for an elaborate scheme to get your data, offer only a small trial period, or a very limited set of utilities until you subscribe to a monthly program. Hmmm, Yeah, that’s the reason I don’t use Adobe products, either. Then, I remembered the only thing good about that 640GB drive. It was a WD. That means it has a version of Acronis specifically for Western Digital drives. Nice. I downloaded the software and I was in business. I chose what type of cloning and was ready to start.
Then came the real problem. The drive sounded like it was on it’s last leg, and I wasn’t 100% sure it would even survive the cloning process. That wasn’t the only issue, though. It was going to take five hours to clone. Five. There was no way this was going to survive five hours of activity. I started the process and left it over night expecting an error message when I woke up. Instead, I was greeted with success. Nice! I unplugged the HDD and tried it. After the network attempt, it booted into the SSD. We were doing well, so far.
The next step was to get into the BIOS and redirect the boot order to the SSD. I plugged the HDD back in and it promptly failed. It booted first to the network, then from the HDD. What? Seriously? But I already changed the boot order! The flipping thing had four different boot up scenarios in the BIOS. Completely ridiculous. This was definitely a former office PC.
The finished Lenovo
I set all of the boot orders the same. Check for a USB device first, then move to the SSD, then to the HDD. I saved, exited, and waited for it to punk me again. It booted straight from the SSD in about twenty seconds. Finally, we were in good shape. There were some final touches cleaning, a new antenna for the network card, and we were truly in business. This thing had new life.
Then curiosity took over. I chose to test Shadow of the Tomb Raider and CyberPunk, and wasn’t surprised by it’s lack of achieving even twenty frames per second, but that was never the goal of this computer. It will be primarily used as a creative tool, and not need to be the end all/ be all PC. There’s no need to equal to a two thousand dollar custom PC, or even a budget gaming PC. It just has to be solid, start quickly, and output using HDMI.
After running it through a few tests and making sure the graphics driver was good, I gave it my blessing. With any luck, this PC will last several more years. Or, at least long enough for Tom to get all of the use he needs from it. Now, it’s on to the next project.
The video can be found Here.
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