He ran his hands along the case, opened the screen, and was greeted by the chime of a system that remembered being important once. The storage was an inexpensive SATA SSD shoved into a budget chassis—a sensible choice from the factory—but Windows balked at performance; disk activity stuttered, and the Task Manager painted a picture of a component fighting for recognition. Ethan suspected the IRST driver: Intel Rapid Storage Technology, the quiet mediator between drive and system that, when absent or outdated, turned quick hardware into a hesitant machine.