When your oldest son hands you a tub full of laptops and netbooks and says, “Do you want these?”, you say yes. Every single time. Even when he says, “Okay, but could you fix the purple one, so I can use it?” Especially when he says that.

My laptop, seen here on the left of the table, has the tear-down for this particular model (a Dell Inspiron 15R N5110), and MOST of the rest of the parts are the purple laptop. I took it completely apart, replaced the thermal paste, discovered a broken hinge (it mostly works now), upgraded the hard drive (goodbye spinning drive, hello SSD!), and added more RAM. I didn’t have enough on hand to max it out, but I more than doubled what was there. Oh, and I replaced the battery and ordered a new charging cable.

Once it was reassembled, I tested the RAM and made sure the hard drive was responding as expected. I put a lightweight version of Linux onto it (Linux Mint XFCE, if I’m not mistaken) and I tuned it as well as I could. I added a fairly large full-size SD card into the slot for some extra storage for music, videos, and documents, and then came the final step.

My oldest is a huge Marvel fan, so I named the laptop after a less well-known mutant by the name of Forge. And because I am a professional, I added a Forge wallpaper. As far as I understand, he’s using the laptop daily, and it’s still chugging along! Success!