Hi Wingy. Sorry this is two weeks late. Life intervened. I swapped mine and my daughter’s SSD’s and it’s definitely the drive and not the logic board in my case. That’s no guarantee for your friend but you never know your luck.

I was kind of hoping it would be the logic board to self-justify a new laptop. Now I’m thinking I’ll get the cheapest 256 I can get and nurse the laptop along for as long as I can.

But I’m committed to switching to Linux. Still exploring distros.