Still, wasn't a complete waste. I plugged in my old laptop with a charger that I found that fit. It may or may not do anything, but it gives me at least a chance of booting it up and potentially transferring things on it onto my newer laptop.
When it came to tft yesterday, I maintain that Hellnomicon is busted. However, climbing is two steps forward, 1.8 steps back, because while the Hellnomicon combo is incredibly easy to force and incredibly easy to place high on, I can't force it literally every game (if I don't have a shadow rod/belt by 2-2 and/or I don't have the Hellion units by ~3-1, then I can't get it), the build can fail if it is contested (I've been eliminated in like 2-3 games from being unable to get a two-star Kennen in spite of hard-rerolling), and it can take too long to get online with bad rng and bad matches (facing an undefeated player when low on health) can screw you over.
So while it's easy to spam and easy to get right, it's not invincible. I still think it's the most busted combo and one easy to pull off for climbing, it's just that while it is very strong, too strong imo (I literally won like 5 games in a row using the combo, top-4 finishes with at least one top-1), it's not completely infallible and climbing is thus slow especially since I've got like a 20-33% winrate when not using the combo. (Granted, I use the combo in like 75% of my games, butstill.)
Overall, I've probably lost my chance of being the first to get to a higher rank. I peaked at being a top-20 in gold with nobody above me, but too much time has passed and I've been too slow. But I'll continue to play tft ranked and continue to climb and hopefully for the first time ever get out of gold and go higher. I previously had never gone above gold because I climbed in tft to gold in the first week of ranked then got bored with ranked and stuck to normals for the rest of the set.
But this set is so fun and so interesting that I genuinely think that I want to keep going.
I am firmly of the belief that I can get much higher than gold. Probably not challenger, maybe not master, but I think that diamond is actually doable for me. I just need to put the grind in for it.