HP G61 Restoration

Another project that I had the pleasure of working on was a restoration of a hand-me down HP G61 Laptop that originally shipped with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit. This laptop had an AMD Semptron M120 Single-Core Processor clocked at 2.1 GHz, 3GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 320 GB 7,200 RPM SATA Hard Drive. When this computer first came out, it was a decent machine and could handle most modern games at the time. This laptop was capable of running Deus Ex Human Revolution at medium settings with a decent framerate (consistently between 30 and 60 fps), not bad for a mid-range laptop from 2009. Unfortunately, with the release of Windows 10, updating this laptop absolutely destroyed the performance and, similar to my netbook, even performing the simplest tasks were a challenge. To add insult to injury, the screen developed dead zones as the laptop aged, turning what was once a really nice modern mid-range machine into a paperweight.

So, naturally, when my mom was finished with this laptop (she only wants to run Windows, so Linux wasn't an option either), I was ecstatic to finally be able to restore it and add it to my list of project computers! The first thing I decided to do with this laptop was to restore an older version of Windows, so I could reinstall some of my favourite games and applications from that era and refresh this laptop back to the way it felt when it was brand new (with the exception of the screen). Since I already had several monitors and a proper desk setup, I decided to wire this laptop into my existing desktop structure as a secondary "permanent" addition to my setup. I decided to reload this laptop with Windows Vista Ultimate X64 and restore all of my old games and user documents from when I had previously shared this computer with my mother (back before I had enough cash to start buying my own gaming computers).

After reinstalling Vista, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the performance of this machine was better than brand new and that it even supported game discs that I had from when I was a kid (games that were meant to be played on Windows 95, 98, and ME), which is just something that I can't do with modern versions of Windows. Also, similar to my article about restoring my netbook, Vista has a certain modern feeling that still feels relevant today, with translucent glass-styled windows, a jet-black taskbar, 3D Aero Flip (a feature discontinued with the launch of Windows 8), and several applications that were later removed in newer versions of the Windows Operating System. I still use this machine as a legacy machine to run older applications, and at the moment, this laptop is the oldest machine that I currently use that is natively compatible with all of my favourite games and applications from the 1990s well into the 2010s. This laptop with Windows Vista Ultimate would have been my dream computer when I was a kid back in 2006-2007 when Vista first came out and I was blown away by how modern and high-end this operating system felt. I also really loved the glossy aesthetic of that era and I personally feel that some of the most attractive computers were made around that time.