The HP ProBook 4540s is A Breeze to Maintain!

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

Intro

A little over a year ago, I rescued four computers from being recycled, one of which is now my mini-server at home. I found new homes for two of them, leaving only this HP ProBook that I thought was dead beyond repair. Then, one day, when it finally started after a year of holding on to it, I also decided to restore it.

Why this HP ProBook?

This machine wasn’t my choice. I’m not even a fan of HP computers. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. The battery was long dead, and as I had almost no experience with HP computers and the universal charger I had been trying could not start it up, I did not spend further time troubleshooting the internals. When I recently tried the correct one out of the three HP tips that came with this universal laptop charger and it booted into Windows, I decided to play around with this machine.

Early Impressions and Initial State

This notebook has a 15.6” HD screen, and this unit was equipped with 4GB of RAM and a 320GB mechanical hard drive. It runs on a second-generation Intel Core i3 processor. It has all the standard ports at least for its time, a DVD drive, and these two extra buttons above the keyboard, that also act as status indicators for the two respective network functions.

The machine was in the same state as a regular decommissioned office computer, with minor scratches and paint wear-offs all over the body. However, everything that I tried, including all the keys on the keyboard, the ports, and the disc drive, worked perfectly fine. I’m glad I could stop that woman from throwing this one out!

This machine is big, probably just like the other 15” notebooks, has a Numpad with all that space on the palmrest, and comes with several unique elements that I did not see in a notebook before.

Restoration

I learned that the internals could be accessed just the way you change this battery, with no screws to undo at all, and this blew my mind. I would even go on to say that it’s less effortful than any ThinkPad I’ve tried. I still can’t believe it: no screws!

The internal layout felt unfamiliar, but the components were easy to locate. Four screws to replace the storage device, two to remove the keyboard, and just one to remove the optical drive. The two network cards sit right there, leaving the RAM modules, CPU, and the heatsink assembly behind some protection that looks like a cage. Oh, did I just spot a replaceable CPU? This is another notebook that I’ve found the easiest to perform a CPU thermal repaste on, so that went pretty smoothly without touching anything else around the heatsink assembly.

I replaced the mechanical hard drive with a 256GB SSD and added 2GB RAM to make it 6GBs in total. As the internal module was Hynix, and the only Hynix SODIMM I had lying around was a 2GB module, I used that instead of doubling the RAM with the help of another 4GB module that I would have had to buy. Besides, such an old machine with a Core-i3 processor won’t go that far either, so I thought 6GBs of RAM would be more than enough to go with the rest of the dated and relatively weaker internals. I left the remaining elements like the wireless module as they were.

I ordered a charger, and after days of waiting for it to arrive, I received the wrong one. This is one of the things I’ve never come to understand about HP notebooks. Not only are their model numbers cryptic and too long, but they also have several similar-looking charging pins that I’m sure cause a lot of confusion with even HP owners. Even on this universal charger, the fact that there are three variants of HP charging pins proves how confusing it can be to get a charger for an HP notebook. For the ThinkPads though, I’ve only come across four, one of which is USB-C, one is the flat pin design, and the two barrel connectors, which have been the longest-running design before the other two, and are pretty replaceable at least across most machines.

I found license keys for both Windows and Office behind the service panel, so I restored it with a fresh install of Windows 10, and I won’t have to force the next owner to use Linux.

Conclusion

So apparently, ThinkPads aren’t the most maintainable computers, at least were not so during the last decades. But what we’ve seen across manufacturers is that these things are getting closer and closer to your standard smartphone, which has been intentionally designed to be obsolete and replaced as soon as the newer ones are out.

Outro

That's all I have for this video, and thanks for watching it to the end. May the maker watch over you. See you in the next video! And yes, "Free Palestine!".