***disclaimer***: The events depicted in this post happened over a month ago so some of the details may not be exactly as I remember them.
I woke up the next morning dreading the horrible mistake I had made the night before. Bitter taste in my mouth, memory foggy, heart heavy. Laptop dead. There was nothing I could do except mourn my loss and try and move on.
So, move on I did but it would not be easy nor cheap. Besides having an Asus laptop, I also had a MacBook I used for other projects that required MacOS. Unfortunately, this was an M1 chip, and these processors for all their glory and innovation had one problem I could not swallow. You could only plug in one external monitor to the damn thing. Unacceptable.
I was spoiled and had become accustomed to the finer things in life like using two 27’’ monitors. But maybe I could do with one of the monitors and get accustomed to the 13’’ of the MacBook with time. I would never know because a more serious problem was present with the M1 chip. I would not be able to easily run Virtual Machines which I needed for cyber security class. My options were either paying for Parallels or using UTM which was not ideal to say the least since I had to run multiple VM’s from Web Servers to firewalls and target computers as well as Kali to exploit them. So, this in conjunction with only being able to use one monitor was too much for me to accept and knew I just had to bite the bullet and get a new PC for my own sanity.
Off to my favorite place and in the world I went. Micro Center!!! I did not want to spend too much money at the time so went with the bundle AMD 7 7700X with 32GB of DDR5, and 4070 GPU to run all the VM’s I needed to my hearts content. Modular PSU, BeQuiet Fan and Lian Li case. The Storage I had and hopefully a Windows 11 license I cloned from my laptop before I committed Involuntary Tech Slaughter. Question now was how badly would it freak out going from an Intel Laptop to an AMD Desktop.
I always enjoyed building PC’s, and this was not exception, I had not worked with BeQuiet fans before, so it took some time to know exactly how to set up properly. But now came the moment of truth. Would the PC boot into windows using the cloned SSD of my Asus laptop. After a couple of minutes and a couple of restarts I did in fact boot into windows. It was my old laptop now in a desktop. I felt I had saved the soul of an old friend, though a defective one that needed some patching.
My suspicions where right and the drivers were not working in the AMD environment. I had no Bluetooth, WiFi, sound in general. The solution was simple though, I connected Ethernet to the Desktop and downloaded the Windows recovery file that performed an in-place upgrade. This solved all the issues I mentioned and have not had any issues since.
This was a long arduous experience that taught me the value of patience and going through the proper steps when performing any maintenance on my machine and one I will not soon forget. Silver lining is that it made me pull the trigger on getting a desktop and well, guess I can find new uses for my old laptop. Maybe even repurposing the 144hz screen.
