My laptop is an old used Samsung R439 that I bought for around Rs 12000/-(USD 185) from a local store when I was in second year in my college. It have a 14” screen, 2GB of RAM, a Pentium p1600 processor, and a 320GB HDD.

Recently it started showing performance issues like loading applications take a while and firefox freezes. I quite fond of this laptop and have some emotional attachment for it. I was reluctant to buy a new one but the same time I need the VT-x (virtualization) feature that my pentium p1600 lacks. So I chose to upgrade it from the ground. The hard part of upgrading is to find a compatible processor for the board. My friend Akhil Varkey whom I met during a Debian packaging session helped me to find a processor that suits my board. I bought the suggested one from Aliexpress, cause I found it cheaply available. I disassembled and installed new processor myself. During disassembling I totally destroyed two screws(stripped) including the holes :(. Now I need to be more careful when carrying laptop around. I already have changed my laptop battery and keyboard couple of months after I bought it. I will be upgrading RAM and hard disk soon.