This was an odd pickup where the machine had a cracked screen AND a dead SSD, so the only way to replace the SSD was to also replace the screen. Which I found out was not a very fun job.

Ordering the screen

I scored a new to me screen on Trademe for $10 and when it arrived it was apparent that the touch screen ribbon cable had been severed during the removal process by the previous owner. So I ended up removing the touch screen module and just turning this Surface Pro 3 into a regular tablet.

The Guts

The Surface Pro 3 uses an annoying mSATA m.2 drive which are far less common in 2021 So I had to troll trademe and marketplace to find something. I scored a $25 64gb drive that was smaller than the stock one but would at least get this machine back into a working state.

Installing the OS

For whatever reason, Windows 10 was just extremely slow on this machine. I’m not sure if its an issue with the new SSD or what but it was fine with Linux so I just stuck with that. Linux Mint was, as usual the OS of choice.