Repair-It

HP TPN-W129 (circa 2017ish?) Case family laptop upgrade

Max was trying to 3D print something at Grandpa's and wound up needing a PC since the SD card slot in the printer controller has given up the ghost.

Zeb grabbed his now old and severly sticky (hopefully only coffee spills) laptop and it barely booted and seemed like it was wheezing heavily.

The hard drive was more-than-100% flat out for a probably a good hour before it woke up enough to try to access anything. Eventually we wound up giving up and driving to use a different computer.

Overall the HP seems decent - large-ish touch screen, numpad, etc. Apparently it has a wicked-slow 2TB conventional drive (of which 150GB is used).

There is an expansion M.2 SSD slot, and it has two 4GB DDR4? RAM slots, 2400T.

I'm thinking I should order an M.2 and RAM for it. The big value/cost question is should I order 16GB or 32 GB.

Newegg browsing got me to these as the likely candidates:
- SSD (for OS/maybe apps, keep 2TB drive for warehouse storage):
https://www.newegg.com/transcend-256gb- ... EyNjQzODA2

- RAM:
16GB (~$80):
https://www.newegg.com/crucial-16gb-ddr ... EyNjQzODA2

32GB ($120-$140):
https://www.newegg.com/timetec-32gb-ddr ... 56XA872105
or
https://www.newegg.com/crucial-32gb-ddr ... FYRKKZ5562

Or skip the RAM upgrade all together...

I did verify with a Windows CMD that it can handle 32GB.

Consider Linux Mint unless you are happy with the OS situation. Hopefully it's not still on 10. My Surface Laptop is on 10 but I pressed the button to extend support for a year. And it is one Intel generation too old to run 11 with no barriers. I will probably end up doing 11 the back door way though.

You can try the Mint live boot to get an idea if it will work. But you may have software requirements that need Windows.

Back to the hardware question. 16 or 32 is the right question to ask. 16 is really the bare minimum. 32 gives you pretty much unlimited headroom to do anything that laptop is capable of without being cramped. But if it is more of a single application at a time machine, 16 is probably just fine. For having 7+ apps open, 32.

M.2 is good. 256 a bit on the small side with 150 used. 256 is going to be 238GB formatted. I'd consider 512. You will have to shrink the partition (can do this within Windows but sometimes requires a third party utility) and I recommend Clonezilla or similar USB boot session to transfer the HDD data to the SSD and it should be fairly seamless after that. I've done this a number of times now.

The times I’ve done this I’ve done a clean windows install on the ssd and left the “ attic” disk loaded/available to find files. Saved me the time to transfer stuff over. I would think we could stay under 250Gb on the ssd, but maybe there’s actually very little stored.

Here's a 500 GB SSD M.2 for $59, I guess that's only $13 more.

https://www.newegg.com/western-digital- ... 6820250277