$350 sounds excessive for just replacing a hard drive. They are probably getting the drive for $70-$80 (that's for a 500GB 5400RPM drive, add $10-$20 for a 7200 RPM drive). Opening up a laptop and swapping out the hard drive should take an experienced person about 15 minutes. Are they going to reinstall all of your software? That's really the only reason I can think of for the cost unless they're replacing more than the hard drive, and even that seems high. I would think $250 at most for it all. For $350, they should be throwing in a copy of Windows 7 along with everything else. Of course, the hard drive controller could be failing as well which means a full motherboard replacement in which case the $350 is cheap.
That all said, it really does sound like it is time for a new computer if you can afford it. Depending upon the price you are looking at, get as much RAM as you can and get the fastest hard drive you can, solid state if you can afford it. If you're getting more than 4GB of memory, make sure you're getting a 64-bit version of Windows 7 (32-bit Windows can't use more than about 3.5GB of memory). Any modern piece of software will work with 64-bit Windows. I can't emphasize enough that the speed of the hard drive and the memory size is more important for day-to-day performance than slightly better processors. -- David Risner Software Engineer MERLOT, California State University On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Jon Delfin <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Melissa PollaK > <[email protected]> wrote: > [snip] >> Actually, I had been expecting to replace it next year when it would be 5 >> years old. If I do have it repaired, then I will need to keep it another >> 2-3 years. > > 2-3 more years of Vista? That would be another factor for me. > > jd, about to replace a 5+-year-old CPU > > -- > TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "TV or Not TV" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
