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computer help
I have a dell inspirion laptop that had the hard drive fail. I have a toshiba satellite laptop that is bad but has a good hard drive. Can I just swap the two? Is it plug and play if I can? I know nothing of this sort of thing. Thanks
Farts are funny
You can't simply swap the drives between the laptops without a significant amount of rework needed. The Hard Drives are probably the same physical size and would physically "Connect" in either laptop fine. But each hard drive is software built upon the hardware it was initially configured in. You would have to reformat the Toshiba hard drive then rebuild it by loading the OS, drivers, and everything else on it.
If you are thinking about doing a Hard Drive swap, just get a new hard drive since you will have to do all of the software rebuilding stuff on it anyway. This all assumes that you still have the OS and driver software for your Dell laptop. You can download most of the specific laptop drivers off of the Dell website, but you need to produce the Windows OS CD/DVD and license keys to load the OS on the new hard drive. If you are not up for that, then you can have a computer store do it for you but by the time you purchase a new hard drive and pay someone the labor and software to make the new hard drive work, you could have simply bought a whole new laptop for less money.
Unfortunately, laptops these days are pretty much disposable items given how cheap they are. You might be better off spending $250 - $300 on a new laptop.
What Cha-lee said
Last edited by davsel; 03-04-2015 at 15:06.
Depending on the OS, I probably have install discs, if you have the original CoA sticker on your laptop. It can be done, and it's not really a huge rocket-surgeon kind of deal. Depending on how old it is, an upgrade may be in order anyway. I've done a lot of hard drive to SSD upgrades in the past several weeks, so I'm familiar with laptop guts. PM me if you're interested.
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Replacement Laptop hard drives usually cost between $50 - $150 depending on the speed and performance of the drive. If you have to purchase a new version of Windows 8 OS goes for about $80 - $100. Then you have several hours of "Rebuild" work to install the OS and Drivers. Even if your time is "Free" and you know how to do it, you are spending almost as much as simply buying a new one.
Let me put it this way. I have done hard drive swaps several times in various PC's and Laptops. Every single time it involved a crap ton of time to get it all done and by the end I wish that I just shit canned the old computer and replaced it with a new one because the few dollars I saved by rebuilding it were completely wasted in the time it took to get it done. If PC's and Laptops were still $1000 - $1500 then its worth the pain in the ass to rebuild them. But now you can get them all over the place for $250 - $500 so its not worth the effort to try and "Fix" them. Buy a new one and take the old one to the range and shoot it up for some entertainment.
Do you need to have M$ Windows? If the answer is "No" you can PM me. I can help.
Almost any application you use on your Windows computer has a direct replacement in Linux. Other than the cost of the hard drive, I prefer to spend as little as possible on computer stuff.
Yup. WindowsOriginally Posted by cstone
Farts are funny
One day, you will drop your addiction to M$ Windows. The sooner, the better.
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