If you would like to watch the video version of this, it’s over here. If you’d like to skip the torture just continue reading I wouldn’t blame you. Also it’s 4 am, I wrote this whole blog post just about as poorly as someone asking for help on yahoo answers.
It was about 4 years ago, I was 16 and my brother was about 20. He was in the market for a new laptop, so I’m doing my googling trying to find something that best suits his needs for the budget of $300. Finally after a bit of searching I come across an ad for a computer called the Lenovo U400 on craigslist. I say meh, it’s got a nice CPU and solid state drive. “pick that one up mark”, later in the day he comes through the door with this thing and the first impressions were great honestly. It had some nice styling, It was a type of aluminum and almost resembled a Mac in a way. Only downsides in the beginning was the viewing angles in the display, they were garbage. But I wasn’t expecting an amazing display for that price.
(here’s a picture of the laptop off of google)
So after a little while things started to get weird, the display hinge ended up getting super loose and you would have to giggle it if the screen started freaking out, the bottom of the laptop case started to get misaligned as well. It was starting to turn into a complete shit box.
I’m gonna go off on a small rant here for a second, but has anyone just had laptops that fall apart? just built so terribly that they can’t withstand typical day to day use? Or laptops where there’s been problems with them out of the box, but the issues were so obvious you just think to yourself, were they in that much of a hurry?
This was definitely one of those laptops, after its short life of a few months this thing ends up in my closet for who knows how long. One day I’m just hanging out thinking to myself in my computer chair staring at the wall, “aren’t all in one computers just super poopy laptop motherboards glued behind a screen?” then it clicked, not only do I have an extra monitor I’m not using, I’ve got a super poopy computer in my closet that would make for a perfect all in one computer. So I rip the thing out of my closet, make a disaster in my room and I end up ripping everything I can out of this poor wannabe macbook. Battery, dvd drive, screen, anything that’s not completely necessary to lose some of the weight off of this thing.
I grab the good old duck tape and I load the sides up and I get it nice and secure on the back of this LG monitor.
I ended up reinstalling windows on it and basically using it as a super cool screen saver machine, just one of those computers you set up in your room that you never use, just to show people how cool you are haha.
But then it clicked, I wanted hackintosh. I just have to do hackintosh for this thing. So there I am spending 3 days trying all sorts of boot commands and other things just trying to get it into setup and the home screen. Anyone who’s dealt with hackintosh and aren’t super familiar with it, know that it can be either the easiest thing you’ve done in your life or the most obnoxious thing. Constantly googling of kernal panic errors and kext issues, it just wasn’t working in my favor. So I installed mountain lion on it because I just couldn’t get any new Mac OS’s to run and even ML ran like garbage.
I just couldn’t get anything right, so I just shoved my hackintosh SSD from my main machine and bam, it worked great. So I ended up just cloning the drive using some software I found and now we’re up and running smoothly running a newer version of Mac OS.
After a while, who knows how long. I ended up getting tired of this thing and my buddy from school calls me needing a new computer. I told him 70 bucks, I rip it off of the back of the monitor, drive it over to his house and set it up. He’s been using it as his main computer for 2 or 3 years. This half of a laptop sits on his desk, he makes music on it, studies with it, you name it. It’s just hilarious though because it just goes to show you that hardware isn’t everything, all of us with our 1500 dollar computers and ultrawide monitors could probably get by on much less, would I want to? probably not.
(picture at my buddies desk and me with his computer)
That’s where all of my fun was when I was younger, I was plagued with shitty computers and I made them do what I wanted them to do, sure it was a struggle the whole way through but I had a blast and it made every upgrade even more fun. My first computer that I owned myself was a super old xeon machine, with 2 cpus, and 2 cores each with about 4gb of DDR memory and a 32mb Radeon 7500. I spent so much time just trying to get half life 2 to run and especially garrys mod, I finally got it running and everytime I would blow up a barrel or do anything that card couldn’t handle, the game would crash. but just the ability to run that game made it so freaking cool, it’s those obstacles that really make stuff fun haha. I remember the first time I replaced the graphics card in the machine, I was so freaked out that I was going to get static into the computer, it looked like I was doing open heart surgery haha.
Now it’s like I don’t even get a kick out of crazy hardware that much, I’ve already had everything. I wish I could go back to the morning of christmas where I got my first new cpu and motherboard haha.
