Story

it all started when my older brother left out his Dell Inspiron 5558 because it was so slow. even after getting an SSD, debloating Windows 10 and trying my best, it still didn't run well. until he eventually gave up on it because of other issues too, like the black hole:

the black hole

a few months later, at 4 AM, i found it in the closet. i plugged it in and it was SO SLOW EVEN ON THE BIOS MENU! i booted my arch usb and after 5 whole minutes it finally booted. after installing btop i found out that the CPU was capped to 500MHz this entire time!! i couldn't figure out why at first, but some research revealed the culprit: between the unofficial charger and the 3rd party battery, the motherboard decided to throttle the CPU to keep the internals safe.

after more research i found the fix! using the msr tool with wrmsr -a 0x1FC 262238 i can Clear the "Bi-Directional Processor Hot" signal that was causing the throttle, and it worked! now i had a perfectly capable 2.7GHz laptop from 2015, and that's when i got the idea of building the home server.

so i installed Alpine, applied the fix as a system service on boot, and that's it.