Laptop dilemma

[LVSaint]

My son's cheap lappy died the other day, only about a year old. It cost me $170 new. I won't find another similar one for anything near that price at the moment.

 

Indications are that the hard drive is about to give up. It's not making the dreaded clicking sound yet and sounds fine.

 

The OS will not load up. BIOS readouts say the HD is critical and it can not boot windows.

 

Silly me didn't burn recovery disks when it was working.

 

My question is, how likely is it that it's just the HD dying and not anything else like a motherboard? I want to do it on the cheap and dont mind forking out $40 for new drive and $35 to HP for a set of sodding windows recovery disks. But I'm not spending any money for some geek to look at it for $75 before anything has been done to it.

 

Shall I go ahead, buy the stuff and try the install? What would you do?

[hutch]

I wouldn't throw more money at trying to resurrect a £100 laptop.

[buctootim]

In the UK you can argue a laptop should last more than a year and HP should repair / replace it. Dont know about US but you can check its warranty status here.

http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/wc/public/home

[Whitey Grandad]

With the right equipment you can take the HD out and try it separately, if there's any irreplaceable data on there. You should be able to boot off a usb stick, or something, but as others have said, at that price it's probably not worth it.

 

All hard drives end in failure.

[LVSaint]

Thanks folks. I'm going to test the hard drive in another laptop and hopefully if it's compatible, should tell me if the drive is functioning.

 

I understand that with such a cheap laptop, cheapest components are often used and it'll develop another fault sooner or later if I get it fixed.

 

It's still mightily tempting to try to get it running again for $75 - it'd cost me three or four times that to replace the whole thing.

[Whitey Grandad]

Thanks folks. I'm going to test the hard drive in another laptop and hopefully if it's compatible, should tell me if the drive is functioning.

 

I understand that with such a cheap laptop, cheapest components are often used and it'll develop another fault sooner or later if I get it fixed.

 

It's still mightily tempting to try to get it running again for $75 - it'd cost me three or four times that to replace the whole thing.

 

Good luck! Remember to get all your data files off as soon as possible if you do manage to get the HD running.

[BlakeySFC]

If it's the HDD that's the problem it should be easy enough opening it up and replacing it, Laptop HDD's aren't very expensive.

 

PC Part Picker

Edited 22 January, 2015 by BlakeySFC

[LVSaint]

I know they're cheap but I am not 100% yet that it is the HDD, I'll check it later on another machine. thanks

[PaulSaint]

Lenovo sell some incredibly cheap laptops over here with cashback on top (see one here), are they available over there too?

[LVSaint]

I've seen cheap Refurb lenovos here. Am about to get myself a refurb dell Latitude.

 

Managed to get my son's laptop running. It was the hd. Minecraft is alive and kicking.