2TB or 4TB drive upgrade?

[LoyceV]

fries the 8GB of maxed out ram on this laptop.

You can still run it: the IBD will take a while, but after it's done, 8 GB RAM and SSD is more than enough to process 6 new blocks per hour.

[nc50lc]

As far as pruning, I wouldn't trust any node that does not include the full blockchain. Having a backup saves a lot of time.

FYI, full nodes with pruned blockchain don't just download a specific number of latest blocks by trusting their peers.
It downloads and verifies all the blocks from genesis as it creates its databases.
The difference is only the pruning part after it's done with the old blocks.
So you don't have to trust it since it verifies everything like a full node with non-pruned blockchain.

Here's a reference: /index.php?topic=5229380.msg53938029#msg53938029

Maybe there's another compelling reason why you don't prefer it?

[ABCbits]

There are more expensive laptops with open source BIOS but these older machines are well known in it's operation and the foundation base for Libreboot/Coreboot and at some point they will become unusable.

Have you ever research or consider device that use RISC-V chip/processor? Some of them likely to have more open firmware/BIOS than modern x86/arm CPU. Bitcoin Core these days also support RISC-V.

BIP110 was right in it's idea but the fork is just dumb so it is what it is.

It's more dumb than you may expect considering are efficient ways to add arbitrary data without violate BIP 110.

https://mempool.kilombino.com/tx/9c34287f805e622b86ac140ef10475750214cf60c3310441b9b9ea9f429bb1bc?showFlow=false&showDetails=true still benefit from witness discount and ignore BIP 110 by creating lots of OP_PUSHDATA1 [<256 bytes arbitary data]. Note this website automatically flag if the TX violate BIP 110, for example https://mempool.kilombino.com/tx/090cd53a6e0304d95a3f3483f8d1994c07c54cbb6e559f22c7c716cb048ee822.