It’s one year old, and 28 days past the expiration of its warranty. Toshiba Satellite something something model Cr@P-Y-didn-1-6ET-A-mac.
Belongs to the kid for whom it survived a year of college with me only needing to restore it to a restore point once over Christmas break. Otherwise, it functioned, except for when it didn’t. Dang thing got decent reviews on Amazon, but its problems—high-pitched squealing, not being restorable via carefully prepared restore disks, etc, seem rampant once one Googles.
I don’t have any clue how much it would cost to fix a trashed PC laptop, but I know that I myself and anyone with a genetically similar energy field are, apparently, poison to Windows machines, based on my Mac to PC trasholation ratio. (Since 1988, probably 10 mac machines have served 4-5 year successful terms each, whereas 4 PCs that we’ve dealt with have died young after headaches and hassles. One Toshiba mini is hanging in there. I think that’s because we rarely touch it. It probably takes a certain amount of powered-up exposure to our gene pool before it loses its mind.)
Ok, I know some people don’t understand Mac-preference and will defend PCs to the death, but they probably don’t exude Windows anti-matter through their exocrine glands.
It just costs so frackin’ much to replace it with even the most basic of macs, not that they make those. But I don’t want to spend more than $100 on fixing something which, statistically speaking, is more apt to crash and burn than not.
Those symptoms just sound like a bad HD, Emm, no? I wouldn’t think a new replacement drive would be all that expensive, even out of warranty, and you could probably just swap it in yourself, for significantly less cost than a whole new machine.
That happened on my Thinkpad, fortunately while still in warranty. They sent me a replacement drive which was twice the original size, and it took 5 minutes to do the swap.
I concur, probably the hard drive. If you don’t want to fix it, donate it to me - my nephew is in a work program learning computer repair. He’s already brighter than the original designers - he can put them back together with fewer screws. They could have saved some bucks.
I just wrangled an offer I can’t refuse. One of my old HS buddies works in the DC area. He is a NASA engineer and happens to have a supply of hard drives, one of which matches this computer. I think I’m going to buy him lunch next week. If this works the repair will cost one lunch.
A one year old laptop is worth repairing. If it is the HD, you can probably even do it yourself. On most laptops, the hard drive is one of parts you can access through one of the hatches on the back (RAM is another). You’ll need a tiny screwdriver, usually a phillips (+).
First, go online and google ‘hard drive’ with the make and model number of that computer. Find a site that’ll sell you one as a replacement part. Buy it.
Then turn the laptop over and unscrew one hatch. Works somewhere where any dropped screws will be easily caught and found; not pone where screws can roll themselves under the furniture. Once the cover’s off, look for a block about the size of a 1/4 inch thick credit card. If you don’t see it, put the cover and screws back and open the other hatch. When you find it, gently detach it from it’s ribbon/cable and swap it for the new one, then batten down the hatches again. You’re done. You will need to reload the O/S and your software, tho.
Just don’t throw away the little frame the hard drive is sitting in. Take the bad one out of that and put the new one in it, THEN put the new drive in the computer. Don’t do what I did the first time and put the drive in without that frame. I noticed it before closing things up though.
Good point. If the case is metal, it’s probably there to shield the drive from the rest of the guts. If it’s plastic it’s likely just an anchor. You can do without the latter but you need the former.
Thanks all. My friend did switch the hard drive today, and I think that functions in the sense that it is probably doing what it is supposed to be doing. My reinstall from the recovery disks seems to have failed, nonetheless. OTOH, at the moment the machine is doing something that looks like it has potential. I don’t know what. In any case, on Wednesday, Gabe will either take the one with the new hard drive, or a Toshiba mini which lives here largely unused. I think my friend will help me get the main Toshiba laptop working sooner or later.
My thinking about PCs is that they are preferred by people who like to be able to repair things on their own, replace components as needed, and exercise some independence regarding the structure of their computers. Those of us who neither have nor feel inclined to acquire fairly extensive and detailed knowledge of the ways of operating systems will often run into hassles, headaches and roadblocks in keeping our pcs functional.
So, I think that whichever you prefer it’s a matter of independence. PC users prefer the independence of being able to jigger with the thing’s workings, reconfigure it the way they want, and swap things out as desired.
Mac users prefer feeling independent of the need to have a REALLY GOOD friend who is always available to fix the pc when it, inevitably, goes amiss.
Often, what the recovery disk reinstalls from is files contained in a hidden partition on the hard drive itself. This won’t work if that drive is pooched.
Yeah, but it’s a new hard drive. Which I probably botched up all by myself. It (the replacement one) had Windows 7 Ultimate on it, but with no wireless driver in evidence. So I decided to use the recovery disks and reinstall the Windows 7 Home Premium he had originally. Which means of course that now I have nuthin’, except for a permanent “rating system something or other” endless loop. Well, the kid will have something to use, and I’ll have my friend diagnose the laptop later.
Can you get to system restore? Try rebooting while holding down F8 to get to the boot menu. You should be able to start system restore from a command line before it begins loading windows. That might let you reverse the latest change.
and weight!
