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I Have No Hinge and I Must Scream

Getting the thing

Freshmen groups will joke about how they need to ask their parents for the latest GeForce RTX AI PC for Intro to Programming. Ladies and gents, I present to you - my busted, dusted, second-hand laptop I’ve held onto since 2021.

This was early Covid and my family was dead serious I would somehow make it into NUS/NTU. I’ve had a small Lenovo laptop before that and we wanted to get a new one before doing the online rounds for NUS/NTU. We ended up with a second-hand Dell for 8M VND, came with a 128GB SSD and 8GB RAM. I was young and naive, so I didn’t see any issue with that yet. I was easily satisfied with having 8GB so I could play Minecraft in 30FPS (lmao).

Stickers (battle scars)

The sticker spam is obviously inspired by people in actual hackathons and tech venues, with dozens of event stickers. I love maximalism so much because there are so many stories to tell from visual detail, and I couldn’t care less about keeping the stickers clean and minnimal. These are my battle scars, and this bad boi is my sword and shield.

Some of my favorite stickers and stories:

• The PostgreSQL one was from answering in a CS2107 lecture in NUS.
• Thách Thức 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 stickers.
• MakerLab sticker from a visit.
• Tape "sticker” from a guy to keep the frame from falling off.
• Major League Hacking stickers from attending their hackathon in 2022.
• Sticker from Tiki Hacking Trail 2022.
• The 2 AWS stickers came from the AWS Build On VN 2021, maybe my first hackathon?
• Covered up VNOI Sticker was from ICPC HCMC 2022.
• Alot of Google event stickers (GDSC, GDG, Google I/O HCMC, WTM, etc.).
• A sticker from CinnamonAI during the internship.
• Heavily water-damaged but you can somewhat see the Toán Mô Hình Hà Nội sticker, as a thank you gift as part of Ban Nghiên Cứu.
• FIT@HCMUS, there used to be more of those.

Timeline Of Doom and Despair

During GameUIT Hackathon 2022, I uninstalled everything just so I could run Dart and an Android emulator. And again for CS426 - Mobile Development, Android Studio took up most of device resources, leading up to a battery box replacement later in 2023.

Charging cable didn’t work sometime during my NUS exchange, I had to borrow someone’s company laptop’s charger (fortunately was also a Dell) until the end of the semester.

Fast forward to 2024, I took CS427 - 3D Game Development with Unity. Worst decision ever. Day 2, the laptop dies on the spot after my 2nd bootup of Unity, I decided to just bail the class and head to the store, got told the motherboard is just dead. Another repair shop said it overheated and burnt itself, said I would have to get a new one anyways. Paid for the new motherboard and a storage upgrade (512GB, will regret that). Teammate also lent their 8GB RAM stick for the class, until I found a cheap resale. That’s how one class cost me 10M VND, both tuition fee and repair charges.

It turns out that the repair messed up the keyboard. The keys Q, X, T, Y, square brackets, backspace, arrows, etc. either work sometimes or just dead. I bought a small external keyboard from HyperWork to lay on top (pairs with the phone too via Bluetooth).

The wireless mouse is actually a free gift from placing in a hackathon in late 2024, so that was nice.

The hinges were bending and twisting against the metal covers some time during 2025. It went on until the front cover had to be taken off, and then the back cover fell off from the screw. Half of the right hinge was taken off because it was stuck. Now in 2026, the left metal cover might be broken, alongside the screen frame tearing by the hinge.

Unsure what happened to the webcam cover, didn’t notice how it disappeared until before an interview in mid 2025.

Outro

Survived 6 years with this beast. This proves you'll never need a fancy AI PC to turn a binary search tree. You can do just fine with any device. I'll hopefully get a new device soon. Maybe.