Here’s what I’m doing with my bricked HP laptop
Written August 3rd, 2008 by Paul in Gadgets
Christmas 2006 I bought myself a new HP laptop. A year and a half later it started giving me problems. The first sign of something going wrong was when the monitor just went snowy and I had to force it to turn off by holding the power button down for about 5 seconds.
After that, when I tried to restart it, it took about 3 tries before it finally booted up. Over the following week or so, the problem became more frequent and frustrating and finally it wouldn’t boot at all. Push the power button and the lights came on, the HD light flickered and DVD drive cycled, then nothing else would happen. The End.
I tried reseating the RAM, different RAM modules, unplugging the motherboard battery to try and force the BIOS to reset, I even went and bought a new hard drive but it made no difference.
So after much cussing and returning the $140 harddrive to the store, I called HP support and we ran through all the diagnostic drills over the phone, to no avail. The tech person said it was more than likely a fried motherboard, which is somewhere around $350 for this model. Heck, I can buy a low end laptop at BestBuy for that price.
So here’s what I’m going to do with the bricked HP.
1. I’ll buy a 2.5″ external hard drive enclosure for about $20, mount the drive in it and pull all my data off the drive via a USB cable attached to my old desktop.
2. Reformat the drive and use it as portable storage. I don’t know why more people don’t do this. Heck, if you have a bricked laptop or desktop and the hard drives are still good, use them with external enclosures rather than going out and buying retail external drives. The enclosures are as little as $13 over at TigerDirect.
3. The RAM, 2 12 cell extended life batteries, power cords and AC adapter and what’s left of the carcass (monitor, ports, card reader, dvd drive, internal charger, etc.) will be sold on Ebay or Craigslist, which should generate somewhere around $250-$350 in total.
4. Use that money along with some savings and buy a Mac Mini or MacBook… because after 10+ years of hearing those Windows chimes it’s high time I joined the cool kids.
