Capture and Processing Laptop Upgrade

[SnakeyJ]

Last year I was given an old but serviceable HP625 laptop, which I pressed in to service as my capture, EQMod laptop and processing laptop.   Not bad for a freebie and has done quite well, with a hybrid hard drive and memory upgrade, other than three minor niggles:

- 100Mbs network means transfering 80+GB of capture takes an age.

- Terrible display, with very limited viewing angle and poor colour.

- Ageing Athlon II P340 Processor - runs apps ok, but dies on stacking and heavy processing.

So I was very pleased to save my new laptop from being sent to landfill, an HP Probook 4530s with i3 2310, gigabit network, USB3 and USB2, 500GB 7200 hard disk - and it's gracis, what's not too like?     Just one minor snag:

No problem I thought a replacement screen can be had for £40ish - however 5 minutes research revealed that the standard 1366x768 screen can be replaced by a full 1920 x 1080 HD screen (with a suitable HD cable) - All in with delivery this came to £68 with a premium panel and genuine HP cable.

Screen removal took about 10 minutes flat, here's the defunct panel:

How hard can the cable be.....   To be honest this took about 90 minutes, but was quite fiddly and stressful as it meant disassembling most of the laptop for access, though this was eased by an excellent HP repair and service guide (what a great company!).

Laptop now reassembled with no screws/parts left over - hey that's my lunch! You can't leave anything unattended in this house

Proof of the pudding - to great relief it all works as well!

Not only that, but this screen is gorgeous - bright, clear, noticeably more desktop area (a trade for smaller icons and writing) and a massive viewing angle - a great help while manually focusing my scope whilst trying to peer at the laptop screen.   Suddenly all is clear, my processing is not quite as good as I thought/hoped, but at least I can now see where it was going wrong

Best of all it screeches through stacking and processing  - almost no lag whilst adjusting wavelets in R6!  85GB of Jupiter capture reduced to the best 25GB in PIPP and then stacked in AS!2 in 45 minutes.    And now I can archive it all off to my desktop at 100MB/s, rather than the paltry 11MB/s offered by my old laptop.

This is simply the best upgrade ever

If you are struggling with a grotty old display on an otherwise perfectly good 3-4 year old laptop, this is definitely worth doing!

[Steve 1962]

Great job Jake - recycling at its best!

[SnakeyJ]

Great job Jake - recycling at its best!

Thanks Steve - i forgot to mention anything about the pain of re-installing Windows and all my astro apps - which I reckon added another 8 hours of pain (largely conducted at work, when I should of been doing more productive stuff).   Hoping this upgrade will give me a couple of years.