This morning, when I woke my laptop computer I got a message from the Windows 7 OS that the hard disk was about to fail. I ran my weekly incremental backup drive via robocopy to an external, and then followed the OS suggestion to make run the system backup. After the backup finished (apparently successfully), the computer shut down. I could restart it into the BIOS, but it wouldn’t start Windows.
The laptop is an Acer Aspire that I bought new in 2012, so it’s certainly had a good run. Most of the software I use is freeware: LibreOffice, Notepad++, Firefox, a text-file viewer, etc. I don’t play graphics-intensive games, don’t do heavy computing, don’t stream movies beyond the occasional YouTube video. I might have three or four separate programs open simultaneously, with perhaps six to ten open tabs in Firefox.
The question is whether I should take the computer to a repair shop or to Average Buy to have a new hard drive installed and the sytem restore done from the external drive, or whether I should buy a new computer and transfer my data and non-OS programs back from the external drive.
Today being Sunday, I was only to get an approximate repair quote from Average Buy by phone, of around $200 for a new ATA drive and installation and reinstall of system from the external drive. New laptops comparable to the one that just died that I see online from places like Newegg are in the $400 to $650 range, where “comparable” encompasses a wide range of meanings – like machines without mechanical HDDs, machines with small SSDs, machines with 6Gb of memory that are already at maximum capacity. Average Buy sells lots of HP computers, but I have seen too many problems with them
Which route would you take? Why?
I have considered buying a new laptop (space prohibits buying a desktop) and also replacing the hard drive in the old one and putting Linux on it. On the one hand, that’s a $200 cost to play with Linux, but given that my very senior brain is no longer to comprehend things like making a machine dual-bootable, and given a mild desire to play with Linux, that’s not a terrible expense.
Opinions on this?
Thanks.
The laptop is an Acer Aspire that I bought new in 2012, so it’s certainly had a good run. Most of the software I use is freeware: LibreOffice, Notepad++, Firefox, a text-file viewer, etc. I don’t play graphics-intensive games, don’t do heavy computing, don’t stream movies beyond the occasional YouTube video. I might have three or four separate programs open simultaneously, with perhaps six to ten open tabs in Firefox.
The question is whether I should take the computer to a repair shop or to Average Buy to have a new hard drive installed and the sytem restore done from the external drive, or whether I should buy a new computer and transfer my data and non-OS programs back from the external drive.
Today being Sunday, I was only to get an approximate repair quote from Average Buy by phone, of around $200 for a new ATA drive and installation and reinstall of system from the external drive. New laptops comparable to the one that just died that I see online from places like Newegg are in the $400 to $650 range, where “comparable” encompasses a wide range of meanings – like machines without mechanical HDDs, machines with small SSDs, machines with 6Gb of memory that are already at maximum capacity. Average Buy sells lots of HP computers, but I have seen too many problems with them
Which route would you take? Why?
I have considered buying a new laptop (space prohibits buying a desktop) and also replacing the hard drive in the old one and putting Linux on it. On the one hand, that’s a $200 cost to play with Linux, but given that my very senior brain is no longer to comprehend things like making a machine dual-bootable, and given a mild desire to play with Linux, that’s not a terrible expense.
Opinions on this?
Thanks.
via International Skeptics Forum http://bit.ly/2FcYW89
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