mateiang169 - Stardance

Ship Pending review

@mateiang169 on Making my old 2015 laptop not suck (it has windows 8...) · 24 days ago

I revived my old 2015 laptop that was stuck on Windows 8 and super slow! I fully disassembled and cleaned the hardware, replaced the dry thermal paste, wiped the drive, and installed a fresh copy of Windows 11 with all the necessary drivers and software.

The most challenging part was dealing with repeated Rufus crashes while creating the bootable USB drive, as well as carefully taking apart the laptop without damaging any internal components.

I’m really proud of taking a completely unusable machine and optimizing it into a fast, functional laptop that can now handle tasks and apps that were impossible on old Windows 8.

What you should know if you want to try this project:
Anyone can do this, and I highly recommend it! Unless your PC is way too ancient, this is a fantastic beginner-friendly project. It teaches you so much about electronics, hardware maintenance, operating systems, and software setup. It’s super fun and satisfying to take an old, sluggish laptop and transform it into a clean, fast machine!

2 devlogs
8h build

Video of Project → See source code →

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@mateiang169 on My awesome macropad! · 24 days ago

49m 34s logged

I finished everything files in order, repository on github and a README. So now i will submit!!!!

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@mateiang169 on My awesome macropad! · about 1 month ago

9h 31m 53s logged

So today i just finished the hackpad’s case. FINALLY!!!!! It took me a lot of time… (and btw for those who say i can’t use acrilic or pollycarbonate for the transparent part, i used a transparent type of 3D print plastic PETG and PLA).

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@mateiang169 on Making my old 2015 laptop not suck (it has windows 8...) · about 1 month ago

5h 52m 54s logged

So today i installed the necessary like drivers, gpu drivers and steam. And i will keep making my laptop better by optimising it as much as possible.

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@mateiang169 on Making my old 2015 laptop not suck (it has windows 8...) · about 1 month ago

1h 38m 35s logged

So today i just started a new project in which i am trying to make my old laptop not suck by putting windows 11 on it (it had windows 8 on it…), optimizing it and trying after to game on it. Btw it has an intel core i5 4000U, a GTX 820M 1gb vram and 8 gigs of ddr3.

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@mateiang169 on My awesome macropad! · about 2 months ago

1h 41m logged

So today i decided to remove the LEDs and fix all my 160 mistakes.

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@mateiang169 on My awesome macropad! · 2 months ago

18m logged

I am still working on my 160 errors. https://lapse.hackclub.com/timelapse/GXkx79bEw9xm

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@mateiang169 on My awesome macropad! · 2 months ago

9h 5m 23s logged

So i just started my hackpad. But i am a noob so i try my best. So i Started designing my macropad PCB in KiCad. After placing components and routing traces, I ran a DRC check and found over 160 errors. Instead of starting completely over, I’ll be fixing these mistakes step-by-step in the upcoming videos—properly spacing components and re-routing clean traces.