One of the things that I look for in my own personal laptop is the ease of upgrading the components... the RAM and the SSD slots are the critical parts... most of the rest isn't really going to be that easy to upgrade anyway due to the specific physical shapes of the various bits and pieces in a tight-ish case. Of course, when I'm shopping for my kids or my wife, it isn't such a big concert... they prefer other things in their electronic equipment anyway.

So, ease of user upgradability... right after battery size and performance/price ratio.

The Gigabyte Aorus 15 fit the bill for me after a beloved laptop died earlier in the year. It has user replaceable RAM sticks, and two M2 SSD slots... of which, only one was populated by a 1TB stick on purchase. Salvaging my old dead laptop gave me three M2 SSD sticks to use... of which, there were two 1 TB versions, and one corrupted 2TB boot drive.

I was hoping that I could install and format the 2 TB drive as an additional storage drive... using an USB enclosure, I was hoping to have it already formatted... but it was running into problems. Sigh... I guess I could try to install it into the SSD slot and see if it would be possible to do from inside the machine.

First things first... screws out... the machine is secured by 12 Torx screws... not a problem for my iFixit toolkit! I love that kit!

A little thing to note, one side (the front) was secured by 4 shorter screws... so, always a good idea to keep the screws matched to where you took them out!

A couple of screws in the middle proved difficult to get out even with the magnetic tip of the iFixit kit. I'm guessing that after most of the screws are out, that there is a bit more pressure from the case lid on these remaining screws which makes it more difficult to remove them.

Sticking the screwdriver tip on a line of strong magnets fixed that problem easily!

Finding that thin line at the front of the laptop (where the short screws were...) and cracking open the retaining clips is always a tricky process if you don't have a thin wedge tool (also in the toolkit!)... a credit card used to be my old go to tool, but even those are a little bit thicker than the tapered tips of this tool, so using this tapered wedge made things SOOOOOO much easier!

... and there it is. The first time that I have cracked open this particular laptop. At some point, I should do a repaste of the CPU and GPU heat sinks, but not today. I have an hour before I need to go to support some students at their concert!

... and here is the unpopulated SSD drive. FFS, would it have killed them to just include the bloody retaining screw? Yet another thing to salvage from the dead laptop. Of course, I had already closed that up...

5 months of operation and there is already a thin dusting of dust (haha...). A quick blow of compressed air and that was done. Making sure to hold the fan to stop it spinning!

I joked to my wife that though this was a pretty routine and low difficulty job, that there might be a chance that I would have borked the laptop. She said that if it was, then we aren't getting a new one... we have car expenses to deal with first.

... and it didn't boot. Heart drop... However, a quick trouble shoot (removing the corrupt 2TB boot drive...) showed that the problem was the corrupt boot drive. Sigh, that meant that I would have to just settle for a 1TB version instead. Poop...

So, this is the problem SSD... at some point, I will have to see if I can get it recognised and then format it, then I'll have a nice large capacity SSD ready for use. It is worth doing, these things are expensive...

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