Diagnosis

[Adrian]

Greetings all, I have the opportunity to pick up a dead laptop for free.
The owner suspects that she was infected by a virus as she spewed out infected emails to her entire saved address list. She then said that she suffered catastrophic hard drive failure. So she is giving it to me.
I can easily replace the hard drive and install a Windows OS. Is there anything else I need to look at?

 

[Qdos]

I wouldn't necessarily take her word for the HDD being dead, just set the BIOS up to boot from a CD and run the usual utilities on the machine (BART PE disk, etc, if you have such tools to hand...)

 

[thefabe]

Other wise replacing the hard drive in a laptop is fairly easy. Usually remove 1 screw to release the hard drive cage. Then 4 screws to remove the drive from the cage and insert the new drive. It's a good idea to have the correct size of screw driver but that's about all their is to it. Reinstall in opposite, your in business. Oh and most come with a 5400 rpm drive I would look for a 7200 rpm drive for replacement.

 

[sclausnitzer]

Depending on the model and the age of the laptop, you can look at investing in other upgrades as well.

Memory is pretty cheap these days, and most laptops can be upgraded to 2GB, or more.

eBay is a good place to find other components, like DVD R/W drives. Most CD/DVD drives are held in by a single screw, and can be easily replaced. If you are not up for serious customization, only look for drives for that model of laptop.

WiFi upgrades are available too, as most laptops use a mini-PCI card. So if the unit is 802.11b only, you can upgrade it to b/g without much effort. Some laptops like many Dell units also have easily installed Bluetooth adapters.

Also look at the condition of the keyboard. if any keys are broken, KB replacements can be found through many surplus resellers.