I don’t think I’d try to carry my 55" OLED by myself. I recall it being particularly unwieldy when we were installing it.

Thanks for your insight, fartsparkles.

Though I do believe the idea is to NOT get punched when You’re a boxer.

It was a 5lb block of cheddar from UW Provisions, in Madison Wisconsin. Which, in their defense, is a very large block of cheese.

I had a block of cheese one time, they went crazy about it. X-rayed it a bunch. They really didn’t like that cheese.

Bluetooth is fine, haven’t experienced any lag like the other guy said. But remember standard Bluetooth is only two channel, so don’t try to use the microphone on the headphones or your audio will not be stereo.

You can use the headphones for sound then I’m pretty sure there’s a built-in microphone on the deck. For multiplayer game chat.

The name mastodon literally means “breast tooth,” referring to the the “nipple”-shaped bumps along the top edges of these animals’ teeth.

I purchased the drive, flashed steam OS to it, put it in the deck and turned it on. Really really simple. Didn’t encounter a single hiccup.

I just bought a USB m.2 adapter and flashed steam OS to the drive before I ever even put it in the deck. First boot was just like booting the original drive.

It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

You’re fine, just follow the iFixit guide. It’s super easy. After removing the screws I pulled it apart with my fingernails, no problem. Remove screw, replace drive, put screw back in. This is like, day one stuff at a computer repair job. Again you’re fine. If you can do a Lego set, you can replace the m.2 on a steam deck. Don’t psych yourself out, my mother could do it.

I’ve never heard of such a thing, on any computer. Though HP would be that shitty. Sounds like something fishy with your UEFI, you ever update your bios?

I used to do this like 30 times a day sometimes (HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus), never had an issue with boot menus. The ONLY problem I’ve ever encountered was an external boot triggering bit locker, and locking me out.

What you’ve described is a hell I’ve never experienced, but def does not sound like standard operating procedure.

Sorry I was so late to the game. I used to work computer repair, always had a Linux stick to boot into, and changed it up every couple of weeks.

Always something fresh, it was fun seeing all the different distros. You can also make a Linux USB stick with persistent storage and install apps and save settings. In my experience those tend to shit the bed after a few weeks.

Another option that’s one step above a USB stick, is an m.2 enclosure. I had those with dual boot, windows and Ubuntu. I could plug that into anyone’s computer, boot the external drive and rule out hardware problems with ease.

The m.2 enclosures are almost indistinguishable from an internal drive, made it so I could boot into my own setup on any machine.

I would recommend reinstalling windows, because the activation key is still on the mobo, and you might as well use it. Then you can fuck around with dual boot, and try all sorts of Linux distros.

You can even put them on a USB stick and side load, without installing anything at all. This is great for testing, until you find one you like and pull the trigger on a dual boot setup.

Good call, have fun buddy.

What screen did you upgrade to?

I upgraded mine before I ever even turned it on. Now I just wish I’d gone with the 1tb instead of 512gb. I did get a hub, that allows me to connect external drive enclosures. A recent update just enabled auto-mounting external drives, which is nice.

I used to pull the product key stickers off parts we bought at my old job. Laptop bottom cover, with free windows 7 key. Every computer in my house is running Windows 11 pro, activated with a Windows 7 key, that was otherwise just going to get thrown away.

Some other quick picks from it:

-Improved sleep resume speed.

-Improved Bluetooth connection stability.

-The performance overlay can be customized via configuration files.

-An upgraded Arch Linux base for the operating system.

-An upgrade to the KDE Plasma desktop mode.

-Fixed an issue where certain workloads would exhibit severe CPU performance issues unless SMT was manually disabled.

-External storage devices are now auto-mounted when connected to Steam Deck.

That last one is pretty great, I can now much more easily connect my external m.2 enclosures for game storage.

We exclusively repaired for schools, kids puke for like… no reason.