It is time to give up completely on the XMG laptop... sadly, it didn't quite last as long as I would have hoped... just under 4 years. And apart from the occasional janky last year where the boot SSD would not be detected, it was a great machine and I loved it! A gaming laptop with a decently large battery, and a mechanical keyboard... powerful GPU and CPU combo... it was a dream machine. It did tend to run hot, even when it wasn't working hard... and I am starting to suspect that this constant hot running was what eventually caused the problems that made it die. On its final working day... it was actually running super-hot.

Probably something that I should have rectified sooner... but I just never found time for a repaste of the CPU/GPU and cleaning of the fan system. The eventual fault was likely to be in the motherboard, but the heat was not being shunted out efficiently enough. Even a recovery boot disk wasn't being detected either... so, I was completely out of options, only the BIOS was loading.

There was several hardware options that I could have tried, but none of them were particularly simple on a laptop... and I needed to get back on my administrative feet before everything got out of hand when the year started properly. I might just keep the corpse of the machine around to try when I have time.... but seeing as I have a little pile of machines lying in the office, I'm not exactly sure when that will be...

So, it was time to perform the last rites on the machine. Removing the two SSDs to see if I could recover any information from them and to use them in other machines. I'm hoping that the SSDs weren't the problem... I don't think so, as I had tried all the combinations of the SSDs being the boot drive, and all of them failed on the XMG but would work in other machines.

Plus... these are decent SSDs as well! Both NVMe M2 SSDs, with one 1TB and another 2TB... solid storage and decent Samsung ones as well. The new Aorus will take another SSD in addition to the 1TB that is already in there... so, I'll pop the 2TB in there so that there is no danger of running out of space anytime soon, and the 1TB will go into an external enclosure for backup duties. Although, I have seen people use an external enclosure for Steam games!

Now, the only question is whether or not the Aorus has a retaining screw already in the laptop... I hope so, otherwise I will have to open up the XMG AGAIN And I have done that a few too many times in the recent past for it to be anything more than a tedious annoyance...

I can also be found cross-posting at:
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Handy Crypto Tools

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ByBit: Leverage and spot trading, next Binance?
OkX: Again, another Binance contender?