In the spirit of getting a few more years of life out of my laptop I have decided to repair the base and upgrade the hard drive. Before I did my fix in the previous post I had placed a bid I somewhat anticipated losing. I placed one bid at $29 and figured someone out there would out bid me since all the other laptop bottoms in new condition were over $40. I won the auction yesterday and it's like bleh my screen is holding suprisingly well. I thought that fix would only be a bandage like prevent it from shifting as much but still lift but right now my hinges feel as good as new.
Don't suggest just placing the part in storage, I ordered a new sound board for my last laptop for $15 years ago and got lazy about the install. I shoved a toothpick into the headphone jack and knocked everything back into place and had the part on hand just in case. The rest of the laptop died after my mom used it for a few years.
Anyways my laptop was built buy someone who thought they had the Apple spirit. Most laptops have 2 or 4 screws on the bottom and many just allow the drive to slide out when you unscrew them. Others have a little panel that you open and with a few more screws you can take out the drive. My Dell (inspirion which is home model not business ones) has the drive hidden under the keyboard, under the palm rest, and ultimately mounted on the bottom side of the motherboard. Anyone who has attempted to repair a laptop would be aware that would be a major pain in the ass. By the way, if you are confused about the subtle bash at Apple... good luck getting into any of their products to even replace a battery.
So I decided the only way to increase the value of completely disassembling my laptop beyond cleaning the fans would be to include an upgrade.
The most obvious upgrade to me would be to change out the hard drive. There are other minor things that people would suggest such as processor, wifi card, or ram but I belive my laptop is sufficient in those aspects. What I really want is a 500gb SSD unfortunately they average $370 for the drive. The second best is to buy a traditional spinning drive. To step it up just a little I ordered a 1tb hybrid drive with 8gb SSD and 1tb spinning drive. I am not a huge fan of the brand of Seagate, but I do know their drives are reliable. They take a lot of crap and are probably a bit overly cautious about the warnings. If Western Digital released their hybrid drives I would have bought from them. On the plus side this is Seagate's third generation of hybrid drives and I would trust that they have fixed all the bugs of gen 1 and 2.
The thought I wanted to get through was should I start my laptop with a fresh install of Windows 7 or just copy my entire drive over? At work I believe I am able to transfer everyone's "lives" from one drive to another so I should be able to do that for myself. Yet I hesitate.
