1202 ALARM

I bought this Tecknet dual SATA external hard drive dock a few years ago and it's been very useful when I've been upcycling laptops, particularly for cloning one drive to another. The source drive goes in the A slot and the target drive in the B slot, press the clone button on the front and the unit does the rest.  The target drive must be blank and have the same or a larger capacity than the source drive. If the source is bootable then the target will be too. The only issue is that unless the drives are identical in size, the target will have a primary partition the same size as the source followed by unallocated space. This is easily fixed by using GParted to expand the primary partition to fill the whole drive. The unit has a USB 3.0 connection so also invaluable for backing-up prior to upgrading Linux Mint.

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. HP Pavilion G6 CPU Upgrade 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...