Found a free laptop in the recycle bin

[PandaBear]

Wasteful kids these days, there're non-internet connected children in Africa!!!!

Anyways, it was a Samsung QX410 with i5 450m, 4GB of DDR3, GeForce 300m or some mobile GPU like that, 1366x768 screen, and some sort of 2.5" Samsung HDD. It shipped with Windows 7 but the license key was worn away. No power supply, battery drained.

Took a chance and bought a $10 power supply off ebay, swap in an old 120GB SSD, and.....

IT WORKS.

Install Windows 10 from USB and it boot, it runs fine, not slow either. The touch pad driver from Windows were junk and would stuck to the right side, but google said there's a driver that works, but you have to download it from.... HP (it is a Samsung laptop) and manually roll back from Device Manager. Or you can just use a USB mouse.

Overall it feels ok build quality wise, it is not as good as Dell Precision but it is on par with a Lenovo Ideapad or a HP my wife's work place gave out. The CPU from that generation runs HOT. It idles at 55-65C and when running it can reach 80C. I saw that this gen of i5 can go up to 90C peak temperature.

Youtube plays fine with about 20-40% CPU utilization, 5GHz wifi seems to work well too. It would be useful for zoom, youtube, web browsing, etc.

 

[daves87rs]

Nice! Free is good. Get the feeling my son would have tried the same, as he is in computers.

He had fun with my old Sony Viao.....

 

[Lubener]

Talk about being at the right place at the right time. I got a feeling it was pitched by an angry spouse trying to lessen someone's time on the internet. Had a similiar situation many years ago finding an expensive guitar at the rubbish chute at an apartment I onced lived at.

 

[ka9mnx]

Great find!!! Sounds like a good candidate for Linux...

 

[LazyDog]

Wasteful kids these days, there're non-internet connected children in Africa!!!!

Anyways, it was a Samsung QX410 with i5 450m, 4GB of DDR3, GeForce 300m or some mobile GPU like that, 1366x768 screen, and some sort of 2.5" Samsung HDD. It shipped with Windows 7 but the license key was worn away. No power supply, battery drained.

Took a chance and bought a $10 power supply off ebay, swap in an old 120GB SSD, and.....

IT WORKS.

Install Windows 10 from USB and it boot, it runs fine, not slow either. The touch pad driver from Windows were junk and would stuck to the right side, but google said there's a driver that works, but you have to download it from.... HP (it is a Samsung laptop) and manually roll back from Device Manager. Or you can just use a USB mouse.

Overall it feels ok build quality wise, it is not as good as Dell Precision but it is on par with a Lenovo Ideapad or a HP my wife's work place gave out. The CPU from that generation runs HOT. It idles at 55-65C and when running it can reach 80C. I saw that this gen of i5 can go up to 90C peak temperature.

Youtube plays fine with about 20-40% CPU utilization, 5GHz wifi seems to work well too. It would be useful for zoom, youtube, web browsing, etc.

I am looking at adding an SSD drive to a laptop never done one before. What is the easiest process for doing this based on my lack of knowledge??

 

[Leo99]

Take that old hard drive and destroy it. Who knows what's on it.

Always fun (for me anyway) to troubleshoot computer things and get them working again.

 

[demarpaint]

Great find!!! Sounds like a good candidate for Linux...

My thoughts exactly, you beat me to it.

 

[ka9mnx]

I am looking at adding an SSD drive to a laptop never done one before. What is the easiest process for doing this based on my lack of knowledge??

Google is you friend!

 

[Boomer]

Not to hijack your thread but I just had to comment on the wastefulness of students. We live near Penn State University and the stuff kids leave behind when they vacate the dorms each year is unbelievable! Large screen TV sets, DVD players, printers, etc. All are in working order. Just get mom and dad to buy you a new one in the fall. The University typically has a sale each year open to the public to sell all this stuff.

So I am not surprised you found this in a recycle bin.

 

[supton]

I am looking at adding an SSD drive to a laptop never done one before. What is the easiest process for doing this based on my lack of knowledge??

I wound up doing a fresh install on my SSD. I tried cloning but IIRC it failed. Was easier to just put the old drive into a case and plug in, copy over files instead, treating the old drive as an external drive.

Plus a fresh install of Win10. Runs good now.

 

[mrsilv04]

I just hope it wasn't stolen...

 

[javacontour]

I am looking at adding an SSD drive to a laptop never done one before. What is the easiest process for doing this based on my lack of knowledge??

As others have noted, Google is your friend and it's a good opportunity to do a full re-install.

I'd opt for the fresh install route as no matter how you approach it, you have to have a means to connect your old drive to either copy it to the SSD or copy the files.

 

[javacontour]

Wasteful kids these days, there're non-internet connected children in Africa!!!!

Anyways, it was a Samsung QX410 with i5 450m, 4GB of DDR3, GeForce 300m or some mobile GPU like that, 1366x768 screen, and some sort of 2.5" Samsung HDD. It shipped with Windows 7 but the license key was worn away. No power supply, battery drained.

Took a chance and bought a $10 power supply off ebay, swap in an old 120GB SSD, and.....

IT WORKS.

Install Windows 10 from USB and it boot, it runs fine, not slow either. The touch pad driver from Windows were junk and would stuck to the right side, but google said there's a driver that works, but you have to download it from.... HP (it is a Samsung laptop) and manually roll back from Device Manager. Or you can just use a USB mouse.

Overall it feels ok build quality wise, it is not as good as Dell Precision but it is on par with a Lenovo Ideapad or a HP my wife's work place gave out. The CPU from that generation runs HOT. It idles at 55-65C and when running it can reach 80C. I saw that this gen of i5 can go up to 90C peak temperature.

Youtube plays fine with about 20-40% CPU utilization, 5GHz wifi seems to work well too. It would be useful for zoom, youtube, web browsing, etc.

Sounds nicer than oilBabe's old laptop I'm using. It's an ASUS S500C Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3317U CPU @ 1.70GHz

I did upgrade the RAM to 8GB and swapped the 500gb HDD with a 512gb SSD. I also swapped out the 802.11g with an 802.11ac WiFi PCI card.

That's pepped it up a bit.

Going to put it to work in my "pain cave" driving the TV for Zwifting sessions.

It will replace an even slower laptop that's doing the job right now.

 

[BISCUT]

Wasteful kids these days, there're non-internet connected children in Africa!!!!

Anyways, it was a Samsung QX410 with i5 450m, 4GB of DDR3, GeForce 300m or some mobile GPU like that, 1366x768 screen, and some sort of 2.5" Samsung HDD. It shipped with Windows 7 but the license key was worn away. No power supply, battery drained.

Took a chance and bought a $10 power supply off ebay, swap in an old 120GB SSD, and.....

IT WORKS.

Install Windows 10 from USB and it boot, it runs fine, not slow either. The touch pad driver from Windows were junk and would stuck to the right side, but google said there's a driver that works, but you have to download it from.... HP (it is a Samsung laptop) and manually roll back from Device Manager. Or you can just use a USB mouse.

Overall it feels ok build quality wise, it is not as good as Dell Precision but it is on par with a Lenovo Ideapad or a HP my wife's work place gave out. The CPU from that generation runs HOT. It idles at 55-65C and when running it can reach 80C. I saw that this gen of i5 can go up to 90C peak temperature.

Youtube plays fine with about 20-40% CPU utilization, 5GHz wifi seems to work well too. It would be useful for zoom, youtube, web browsing, etc.

Very wasteful. Good find. Will you be sending it abroad as a donation?

 

[LDM]

Its amazing what people will just throw out. I still use a really old Dell laptop running WIN XP to do my old OBD1 tuning because it has a RS-232 serial and parallel port that I need for certain things. USB emulation just doesn't cut it on some of the old cars. It even has an IDE SSD installed so I don't have to worry about hard drive failures anymore. Even made it run better too.

 

[PandaBear]

I just hope it wasn't stolen...

It would be worth only about $100 if you are lucky, It was found at an office e-waste bin. So I doubt it is really a stolen laptop.

The HDD it came with has a reputation of going bad after warranty expires (Samsung drives won't last 8 years), and the touchpad does not have Windows 10 support unless you go out of your way to download it from HP. My bet is someone just got tired of tinkering with it and just upgrade to something new, and it is someone with a job and no time to ebay it out.

 

[PandaBear]

Its amazing what people will just throw out. I still use a really old Dell laptop running WIN XP to do my old OBD1 tuning because it has a RS-232 serial and parallel port that I need for certain things. USB emulation just doesn't cut it on some of the old cars. It even has an IDE SSD installed so I don't have to worry about hard drive failures anymore. Even made it run better too.

IDE SSD also fails but I think you know what you are doing. Are you sure USB to UART doesn't cut it? We are running it fine for something in the 115200 bps range at work and even then it is still good. We chuck all of our old machine and went USB to UART all the way.

 

[LDM]

IDE SSD also fails but I think you know what you are doing. Are you sure USB to UART doesn't cut it? We are running it fine for something in the 115200 bps range at work and even then it is still good. We chuck all of our old machine and went USB to UART all the way.

Trust me, I've tried. Especially for the parallel port. The old GM OBD1 ECMs use some weird communication rates and the transfer from the ECM to the serial doesn't play nice when you add USB emulation to the mix. There is also the issue of making some of the stuff work with newer OS like WIN10, which is another reason I keep that laptop XP.

For my OBD2 stuff I have a much nicer and newer laptop since everything there is USB anyway.

 

[PandaBear]

I am looking at adding an SSD drive to a laptop never done one before. What is the easiest process for doing this based on my lack of knowledge??

You can try by buying a USB to SATA adapter off ebay or amazon, then use the hard drive companies' tool to clone your HDD to your SSD.

Personally I found clean install better and I just install the SSD then use a USB with Windows image (microsoft has a tool to create a windows installation media) to do clean install, then I copy over the files from the old HDD to the new SSD. Still, it is a good idea to buy a USB to SATA adapter off ebay.

 

[nthach]

That’s not a bad find at all - it’s more of a ChromeOS(CloudReady) or Linux candidate for me.
At work, we recycle a ton of computers but my favorite save is a Lenovo ThinkPad P40 Yoga. It doesn’t support USB-C or NVMe SSDs but we were about to junk what was a $1400 machine in its day.