Since I have been working in laptop repairs for 15 years now, my first jobin fact}. Here is something I can write about with some certainty. I think you’ll find my viewpoint in fixing computer systems and notebooks in particular a littlepeculiar – considering it’s what I do for a living. You see, to be frank, the bulk of the time I advise throwing the thing away and getting a new one. Really, it is just the best thing to do much of the time. You see, laptops, more than vehicles, are made with a built inexpiry date. Except you have your device designed to run some fixedsoftware – like large companies do – or you are still using the original Word and and old Epson Dot Matrix printer, the chances are that the Internet & hand-helds and all that have made upgrading even more crucial.
The other aspect is – do they make your graphics card or processor anymore?
The other point is – is it a “sealed unit” where no one can open it and have a examination.
So straight away we are into a number of barriers – which is why 80% of notebooks in active use are under three years old.
So – what do I do? Largely, I’m fixing laptops less than three years old is what I’m doing. It isn’t so much they are badly made – there are many accidents they can have – being dropped, water damage,virus attack and obviously – owner attack too.
The most common is the hard drive. Yes they are robust and taking into consideration what they do I would say they are amazingly dependable. But when those heads are skimminga fraction of an inch above the disc – it is a bad time to have thump or bump on thedevice. Too many of these and you get a hard drive failure. Even now there are still many people who don’t do good back ups or do them often enough. This is easily the mostcommon repair.
What we do is take the hard drive out and employing a hardware/software device (you canget them too of course) is copy off all the information on the drive. Even after break down 99% of it is still there – even 99.9% The problem is when the 0.1% is slap bang in the middle of the boot up sequence or othercrucial windows files.
When we go truly online – and this is occurring – that will be the end of a major source of problem – bigbusinesses & Google do of course have thorough back up procedures in place – when a hard drive goes they just throw it away and put in a replacement one (hot swop) without missing a beat or breaking a sweat.
Till then – honestly – best guidance is back up and buy a new one – new drive or new PC. An old PC just can’t keep up – even if it were in excellent working order, it was never designed to cope with the demands put upon it today. So why try.
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