Cool Story Bro: The Frankenstein X555 project.

I just gave this computer to my former employer when I left, because it had tons of custom software set up on it and I wanted it to live a happy life doing what I built it for. This is the tale of how I created the monster I have just set free into the world.

It all started when I was first hired at that company and was issued an HP 360 11" thing that was basically a jumped up netbook. They had clearly just bought the cheapest thing that was available at Costco and ran Windows. It wasn't long before I discovered that several of the programs I needed for work would not run because of the small screen size. Every trick I tried like changing the scale within Windows or even artificially faking higher resolutions and downsampling were ineffective, because the programs just went off the reported DPI of the monitor. Long story short, this computer was useless.

So I whined and complained to my boss and the best I could get was to figure it out myself. So I somehow sold that crappy HP for $350 and went to work. I basically ended up acquiring 3 laptops and combing them into one pretty excellent one. The systems and how I got them are as follows:

Asus X555 custom order with bad board, eBay $85. This one is pretty straightforward. Bought as-is, hoped to get as much as possible out of it. It had an i5 5040u and gt 920m, but the board was bad. Fortunately the 8GB ram, 480GB ssd and 1080p screen were fine. Case was in mediocre shape and touchpad were worn.

Asus X555LA, Best Buy $250. Bought on black friday last year. Got this with the sole intention of using the shell and replacing internals as I knew a wide range of mid-grade Asus laptops shared the same build. This was the cheapest model ever sold with this shell. Originally had i3 5020u, 4GB ram and crappy platter drive.

Asus X555LAB, Walmart FREE. I'm actually a little ashamed of this, but I didn't really do an evil thing. I realized I would not get the guts of a higher end machine out of the above system, so I hunted for another system with compatible parts. I found one in the least likely of places: the very back of Walmart's computer storage cabinet. I can only guess at the tale that led to this being sold in a corporate store, but there was a very beat up, open-box laptop hiding behind all the other boxes. Walmart doesn't usually sell open boxes in stores, so it was odd. This thing was totally messed up with damage to the keys and the hinge. The hard drive also sounded like it had received some damage in whatever mishap had befallen the system. I took it home, put in the entire guts from the middle system, as well as the keyboard from the top one in and returned it the next day. Got my money back, kept the board with i7 5500u and threw the hard drive away. They even got a computer that worked out of it, although it wasn't exactly the same one.

So in the end, I had the old 56-57-58' Chevy. It had a ULV i7, unfortunately no dedicated GPU, 8GB ram, 480GB ssd and 1080p screen for $350 with taxes. The thing booted in a few seconds and ran all day on a single battery. The low-voltage i7 was also pretty solid for work and even handled a few games. I'm a little sad to see it go, but it would have just been a web browser in my house where all PCs (and even Macs) must game or be unused.