An SSD replacement brought my HP Chromebook 14 back from the dead.

Just recently my first gen HP Chromebook 14 started crashing and rebooting randomly, and almost exactly 2 years after I received the device new, the 16GB SSD inside completely died. Unlike the new Macbook Pro, or quite a few Chromebooks, the SSD is actually replaceable. With a little Googling I found a useful blogpost on how to replace it. Instead of going the whole hog and plumping for a 128GB drive, I went for a 32GB SSD due to budget constraints and the worry that it might play up again.

Pulling the Chromebook apart was quite a delicate job, and I am not really keen on doing it on laptops, but it went OK. I even tried re-seating the display cable to fix the flickering I have been getting recently. I put it all back together but had take it apart again because the SD card reader's catch stopped working, the card would not stay in, so I had to put the springiness back into that. Also there's a screw left over...there's always one! Then it was a case of inserting the recovery SD card to restore ChromeOS. It is good to get it going again after having to use my old heavy Dell Latitude E6500 (with Kubuntu) instead for a week or so. I missed the near instant response a Chromebook has when you want to quickly jump on the net, and the hassle-free updates and ultra quick boot time. It's nice to have a little extra onboard storage space and I just hope this SSD lasts longer than 2 years as I really do not like opening this thing up! It's also good to know that the battery is also easily replaceable too.