Two days after the result…
The chaos began to settle.
Family celebrations, phone calls from relatives he hadn't heard from in years, and polite media knock-knocks had all dulled into background noise. Rajat's room was once again quiet. As he sat on his bed, scribbling out ideas for stealth neural network deployments, his mom poked her head in.
> "Beta, Didi's old laptop is in the cupboard. She said you can use it now, since she's not coming back till December."
Rajat blinked.
He hadn't expected that.
---
The MSI GF63 Thin.
i7, 9th Gen. Lightly battered. Heat issues. Battery barely holding up.
He dusted it off, plugged it in, and booted it up.
> "Windows 10. Half-bloated. No structure. No soul."
He smirked.
Time to change that.
---
Step 1: Wipe the Slate
He backed up whatever sentimental files his sister left behind, then clean-installed Arch Linux, custom-kernel optimized for low latency and fan control.
The cooling? He cracked open the chassis, reapplied thermal paste with near-surgical precision, upgraded the fans using a pair of salvaged brushless motors from an old RC drone, and added thermal pads in just the right spots to push airflow dynamics in his favor.
Result?
The old MSI ran smoother than new.
---
Step 2: Modular Dev Setup
He built containers for:
AI/ML toolkits (TensorFlow, PyTorch)
Android Dev tools (AOSP fork for his phone)
Blockchain utilities (Bitcoin core, Lightning Node mock setup)
Full local server stack for API prototyping
He even wrote a script to sync his phone OS with his laptop via encrypted USB tether, enabling live-debug on both ends.
---
Step 3: Hidden Workspace
A separate partition, encrypted and masked, held all his "beyond-normal" projects: quantum-inspired algorithms, early-stage surgical AI logic, and a virtual AI assistant he named Praja, built with a stripped-down LLM and his own emotional dampening logic tree.
---
That Night
As the screen glowed in the dark, Rajat leaned back and whispered to himself,
> "Everyone thinks I'm prepping for hostel life… and I am.
But not just for that."
He looked over at his phone, now humming quietly with repurposed copper coils acting as a makeshift cooling dock.
> "This is my lab. My temple. My edge."