Donated HP Laptop Mild Upgrade

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I was given this really nice HP 350 G2 laptop by a very kind lady on Freegle. As is usually the case it was running slow under Windows. I offered to install Linux, but she had bought a new laptop and just wanted this one to be used.

This is the first 15w laptop I've worked on and it needs low power RAM (1.25v), which I didn't have in stock, so I purchased a 4Gb module on eBay for under £5 delivered. This took the total memory to a respectable 8Gb. A 512Gb SSD upgrade (under £20, AliExpress) and a clean install of Linux Mint and I have a decent laptop to do me for the next 3 years. Performance is fine for my needs (mostly web browsing, Zoom and some hobby coding).

The CPU is an i5-5200 which seems to be the fastest that the motherboard can handle so I won't be changing the CPU this time.



As I usually do, I'm going to cycle my i7-3632M HP Pavilion G6 (above) into the workshop, which will leave two older laptops to pass on via Freegle, a Dell and a Toshiba of a similar (2009) vintage.

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