Yep. Just look up the specs on the manufacturer's website to find out what kind of connector(s) you have (most are typical IDE or SATA laptop connectors, some are different) and buy the appropriate drive. You will, of course, have to re-install Windows so make sure you have driver disks or a recovery CD handy.
Um, I am in the same profession as villagebycicle. Haven't been slinging shit as long as him, but I've got a good head on my shoulders. Any questions you have, I am more than willing to give an answer to. Be it computers, home theater, appliances, cameras, mp3's. Whatever, let me know if you are looking for really anything electronics related. I'll give my opinion, but that is all I have.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to find a laptop under $500 that is reliable? I have a poorer cousin that is headed off to college next fall and needs one to do basic schoolwork, facebook, etc. She and her family are not too good with technology and don't know where to start.
Basic schoolwork, facebook, email and web browsing would be handled just fine by a netbook. Consider something like one of the HP Mini netbooks.
My storage controller just informed me that one of the drives in my Raid 0 array is in the process of failing. Any idea of how long I've got? I haven't noticed any difference in performance yet, and wouldn't guess that it was happening besides the recurring pop-up on my toolbar.
Absolutely impossible to tell. Could be months, could be in three hours. Replace it immediately. For RAID0, you should be shopping by the time you've finished reading this. I don't like RAID0 for just this reason. It works okay for an operating system drive but doubling your chances of destroying all of your data is a pretty risky proposition.
I'm in with Virty and villagebycicle but in the wholesale/distribution end of things, I deal with component-level items. The Sony Store sends their customers to us for parts and accessories. We supply BestBuy/Futureshop/The Source with their parts and any repair places that do retail service. If you need parts for Sony, Samsung, RCA, Panasonic, JVC, Hitachi, Phillips, LG, Canon or Toshiba let me know - I'll get you a good deal. If I can't find it, I'll tell you who can. As a guy that also deals with these manufacturers on a regular basis - stay the fuck away from Sony in general. Their stuff is reliable but customer service and replacement parts are fucked compared to the others. The Sony Store hands out our business cards.
Two Questions: My laptop is about 4 years old and the battery life is only about an hour when I unplug it. My friend said that it's because I've always had the computer plugged in while the battery has been in my laptop so the battery is pretty much dead after a couple years. Is there anything to do to get my battery life back up? Next one: when I stream videos on websites (Hulu, ESPN, etc) it's pretty choppy and I think I may need more ram. Any suggestions on what to get? I have Dell with Intel Centrino processor, 500mb ram.
I know less-than-SFA about laptops, but am thinking of splurging on one for the bf's birthday. He's got his eye on the HP G61-448CA, mostly because of the harddrive space, the processor (AMD Athlon II) and the graphics chip (ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200). I know my experience with HP desktops has been fairly favourable, but what about their laptops? I've found a few "don't ever buy an HP" reviews, and a few "I can't live without this machine" reviews... so I'll throw it out here for the sharks. I also see the Asus brand being pimped out here a bit - do they have anything that's comparable to the HP mentioned above? I just don't have enough expertise in this area to know what's good and what's shit. Thanks!
I've been shopping for a school netbook/ultraportable and complement to my 5 year old desktop for a while now. I'm not asking for much performance as I'm more or less done with gaming. ASUS has a couple of really cool 12 inch netbooks which seem like a perfect fit (I feel like I'd go nuts with frequent use on a 10 inch), but I'm not sure about the OS. WIN7 Starter is shit, and WIN7 Pro is worth almost half the damn computer, so I'd like to know how much trouble it would be to slap Ubuntu on there? Both in terms of installation and hardware
I'll be buying a labtop right quick, but know shit about the brands and such. What I need it for is digital recording, like with Adobe Audition. I also need it to have a "audio in" port of some sort for recording audio into it. Either something with a 3 pin mic input(if that exists) or at work we use and adapter from the mic into what looks like a 9 pin input. So one with the most options there will help. What will run fast, loading mp3's to edit, start up for under $500? The Wife will also use it for internet surfing, if she can pry it from my hands. Thanks
Asus actually used to offer versions of their Eee netbook with a proprietary Linux OS that was actually pretty easy to use. I got my parents one a year or so ago, maybe longer. Installing the full version of Ubuntu might be a little much, there are actually a lot of custom Linux versions out there designed specifically for the Eee line, one of them is here: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.geteasypeasy.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.geteasypeasy.com/</a> If you just google "eee linux download" you'll find quite a few others. My wife has an Eee with WinXP, and my parents version running linux seems to run faster and better.
Not sure if this the right thread, but it's the closest I could find. I'll post this in the Permanent Threads help thread as well for redundancy. I deal with a lot of documents at work, predominantly pdfs. I have to cart them around between office, home and meetings depending on which given one I'm working on. I also have to edit, highlight and notate them; which I prefer to do by hand for sake of ease. To date I've been printing hard copies; which I hate doing for weight, bulk and wastage. I've been doing some research into e-book readers/tablets but I'm pretty lost. Ideally what I'm after fits the following: - Will display various common file types, with pdf a must; - The documents can be notated on screen in handwriting (to allow comments, arrows, strikethroughs, highlighting and so on), preferably by stylus; - Ability to have a blank screen to take notes on; - A decent size if possible, ideally similar to an A4 page; - Ability to save the document as amended; and - USB connectivity would be good, but not necessary. Just as long as uploading and downloading documents is functional. Anything more than this, really, is not needed and I don't really want to pay for something I won't use. If there's no other option, I will. Can anyone give me a recommendation or point me in the right direction?
Full disclosure: I work for Apple. The iPad is going to do everything you need except for the USB connectivity. -iAnnotate for .pdf (demo: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3g_wYr-vDI" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3g_wYr-vDI</a> ), Pages for .doc, and so on. -I would recommend a service like MobileMe to overcome the usb connectivity shortcoming. MobileMe, among other things, gives you an "iDisk" which is basically just 20GBs of online storage accessible from your iPad. Transfer files to your iDisk from any computer connected to the internet, and then pull them onto your iPad using the iDisk app when you need them. -There are apps that give your iPad a driver for some network printers. You'd have to verify that the printers you use in office are available for the iPad. -If you ever want to be able to do more with it, it has a ton of functionality because of the enormous market of apps.
My laptop recently got stolen and the insurance company gave me a thousand bucks. I know a want a 15inch, but after that my requirements go something along the lines of (in order of importance). 1.Build Quality- I take it to class everyday on my streetbike and it'll probably get slammed around. 2. Storage- I need 750gb-1tb but have no problem putting in a new hard drive myself. 3.HDMI Out 4. A good enough graphics card to play SC2 and Mass Effect 3 Any recommendations?
Last week I bought a Compaq Presario CQ62 from Office Max (not my first choice to shop for electronics, but I had a coupon). 3 gigs of RAM, athlon 2.1gHz dual core CPU, windows 7, and a nice big 250gb hard drive. It did/does exactly what I wanted - I turned it on, it started and 5 minutes later I was on the internet and re-downloading the programs I use day to day (which isn't much). Aside from the crap software that HP had pre-loaded on the computer (which I removed - HP assistant sucked and did nothing), its a great laptop for the $400 I spent. Office Max actually has a nice insurance policy you can purchase for computers you buy from them - $100 dollars extra gets you two years of protection from every kind of damage - even accidental. The only thing it doesn't cover is theft, but that's reasonable. However, I didn't buy their plan because I am pretty short on money. So hopefully it doesn't die on me in the next year or two.
I am 100% mac based and have been for about 10 years now. I've had a pc desktop that I built which is now just a home server. I am very much in the dark about current pc laptops. I am looking to buy one for my mom so she can video chat with me and my wife and child since we live so far away. The budget is around $350-$450 for the computer. There are a lot out there in that range, but I don't know what brands to trust these days, pc wise. I'm going to wipe it clean of all unnecessary crap and just have the basics on there for her. She only knows right now how to push a button to turn it on. That's it. This machine doesn't need to be hard core at all. Any specs will do for her, really. I'm thinking at least 2-3GB of RAM, 300+GB Hard drive, I don't know the current processors, 15" screen would be perfectly fine. The only truly necessary item is a built in camera. I don't want her to have to deal with plugging it in and all that. Any suggestions on trusted brands. I had a Compaq laptop a long time ago and it was so hard to get rid of their crap that it just soured me. But, I'm willing to check out any brands. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Is there anything comparable to the Sony Vaio Z? I configured one at 2350$ CDN with the following specs * Intel® Core™ i7-640M processor (2.80GHz) with Turbo Boost up to 3.47GHz * Microsoft Windows® 7 Home Premium * Black * 8GB (4GBx2) DDR3-SDRAM-1066 * 256GB (128GBx2) Solid State Drive with RAID 0 Technology * CD/DVD Player/Burner * NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 330M GPU with Intel® HD Graphics (1GB of dedicated video RAM) * 13.1" VAIO Full HD Premium Display (1920x1080) * Large Capacity Battery Bolded stars are the ones I upgraded Portability and performance are a must for me, so I scratched out the super sexy Macbook Air because of the underpowered processor and ram. It's for my professional work so my bosses are paying for a part of it. I told them I have to edit video (play starcraft). Any suggestions or should I go ahead and get this one?
Ah shit! I have a dead pixel line on my screen! It's bright green and I don't think I can ignore it, what should I do?
Just ordered my new laptop. Altogether cost me just under $1400 (without tax). I think it worked out well enough. My roommate has an XPS that's over three years old and seems to run Starcraft II and WoW just fine, so the one I picked out should last a decent while. At least it should. I kept this crappy HP Pavillion for nearly a year and hated it pretty much the entire time. I really wish I had taken proper time to research before I bought the HP I have now. I would have saved several hundred dollars, at least. Oh well, it made me a slightly wiser shopper, hopefully.