Chosen Solution
This has happened for the first time since installing Win10 on this laptop - it is a former 8.1 laptop. In this case, I only installed it to get out of having to put up with it’s owner for a few more years. NO, I did not pick this - he did without asking me. While I am willing to replace the drive with an SSD if need be (as a weekend project) — as long as he gives me one to install (or cash to buy one), I see this laptop as the red headed stepchild due to the procedure required for the hard drive, which I’m (hopefully understandably so) not keen on doing when it inevitably dies. This apprehension is pushed further into the red by a lack of TPM (even 1.2) and no official Win11 compatibility so it has a use by date of 10/14/2025 — with my targets I set for such retirements, it’s early to mid 2024 but I’ve told the owner end of life is 2025 for transparency. Yes, Win11 can be installed but it’s not supported and I don’t want to chance it for a issue HP/AMD/Microsoft will not support. This is in addition to the already abysmal performance of the A10-4655 APU (2014) due to the mandatory security features. The i5-8350U from 2017 (Kaby Lake R) fares better performance wise every time. All of that said, I think the day has come I may need to open this laptop and replace the HD for an SSD, if these issues persist and grow worse. I suspect it’s about time due to a Windows 10 disk error forcing a restart, combined with the previous SMART issues I’ve known about for years but have kind of stabilized with time. It’s one of those I’ve let the owner know about years ago and monitored it a little, and he’s opted to risk it for the last few years we’ve had it.
I didn’t see any issues with the SMART info, but if the hard drive is starting to cause reliability issues, I’d be replacing it (at least if it was my laptop). If the internal hard drive was also less than 1TB, I’d be replacing it - no point having a small hard drive when you can get a 250GB SSD for about £25 (or equivalent currency) online, or 500GB (SSD) for about £50. HP 15’s aren’t the easiest to do a hard drive replacement on, but once all of the screws have been removed (watch out for hidden screws behind the feet and rubbers, as well as hidden screws in the DVD drive area) and the two halves have been separated, it’s relatively easy for a hard drive swap. I bought a HP 15 P series laptop a while ago and in my opinion it’s time to get the 1.5TB HDD replaced with a 500GB SSD. Whilst I’m at it, I’ll replace my WLAN module (current one is 72Mbps max!) and bump up the RAM to 16GB (though apparently the motherboard needs to come out. Why make it so difficult to upgrade the RAM?!). Might as well also do the fan and thermal compound at the same time…
Even if the HDD works fine, you should still install the SSD, they’re faster, quieter, and may last you a lot longer than that spinning disk ever would.
