Laptop that was going to die
HP Envy m6 was not a powerful laptop back in 2012. But in 2019 it started to work extremely bad: fan’s noise was as awful as traffic noise, hard drive usage was 100% most of the time and even Wi-Fi adapter stopped working after one of the Windows updates.
Specifications: Intel Core i3 3110M, 6GB RAM and HDD 750GB.
If the hard drive usage is mostly 100%, Windows is starting up more than 40 seconds and almost all applications load much longer than it used to. Then MS Windows requires re-installation and HDD has to be replaced with SSD. The first part was easy as far as HP laptops contain recovery partition. As for SSD, I chose SanDisk Plus 240 GB (35$). It worked well for my MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012). As expected SSD improved Windows startup time to 20 seconds.
So the next step was to decrease the level of noise. It was not so easy to do because disassembling is pretty difficult for this particular model. But the worst thing is the quality of the laptop’s plastic: almost all parts are fragile. It looked like the manufacturer didn’t want users to fix a laptop, only to buy a new one.
Disassembling took 15 minutes and 10 minutes to reassemble it again. And we can see a big difference in noise level under load.
But I knew that it will be hard to get to the fan, so I decided also to upgrade CPU. Intel Core i5 was chosen in replacement to i3.
Couple more minutes and we have a new CPU. It cost me 22$ and I managed to sell the old one for 14$, so the CPU upgrade cost me 8$.
Overall Cinebench R20 results and results’ differences were modest: 440 and 457. Fortunately, the main purpose of this laptop is not video rendering. Geekbench tests were much more inspiring.
As we can see i3 and i5 performance difference is around 20%, thanks to Hyper Boost feature. So the upgrade was not bad and it was not necessary to update to Intel Core i7.
The last fix but not least is a broken Wi-Fi adapter. It was the easiest and fastest replacement of all and cost around 8$.
Hardware upgrades cost me only 57$ but the laptop was fixed and ready to work even better than new and without any USB dongles.
