My computer died...

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Yes it is dead....It was running horribly so I decided to do a system restore to factory settings. So I went and got a USB drive to put a few mp3 albums, some pictures and season 5 of game of thrones I have mp3 files for onto....which is good because it would seem I put those on the USB drive just in time. Anyways it wouldn't complete system restore just wiped all my files and the operating system out. So I found a new one I am going to get at best buy but had to get their credit card to finance it for 12 months since 479 dollars is a lot to pay at once....which should be sent to me in a week than I can go get the laptop. Its an HP with all the normal features, windows 10 and has touch screen capabilities and should run league of legends better than my sony viao was.


As for this broken computer I thought of selling it for parts or something but maybe I will keep it and use it as tool to learn how the internal functions of computers work....perhaps build my own laptop with the dead sony Viao as the basic frame more or less. I know nothing about building computers but it could be interesting to learn but of course in the mean time I want a good up and running laptop.

If you're lucky all that'll need replacing in the old laptop is the hard drive, which you can probably get for a few dollars on ebay, once you work out what kind you need. Other than the disk drives / battery / screen though, there isn't a lot that you can replace, as almost everything is soldered onto one big circuit board. There are only a few companies that make laptops that are fully modular so you can swap out the memory, CPU and graphics card, like Clevos.

I've fixed a few HP laptops for people, and they seem well made (mostly I was fixing things due to age, like dead batteries, or hard drives that had started to go). Sony computers I won't touch, since my first VAIO had so many problems, and support just kept telling me to reinstall from the Windows CD (when the CD drive was the problem, and couldn't even read the disk). Same goes for Apple. 'Thin', 'quiet' and 'powerful' may look great in the adverts, but they also mean your laptop will overheat so much that it ends up desoldering its own chips. I've owned about a half dozen different Apple computers, and they all had cooling problems (and I've seen articles recently saying some of the new iPads have cooling problems too).

Learning how to fix computers is well worth doing, as you can end up saving yourself a lot of money in future. After my last Apple laptop desoldered its own graphics chip, I got a few more months out of it by taking the circuit board out, and baking it in my oven to reflow the solder. Of course a few months later it just ended up desoldering it again, but it kept me going until I could afford a replacement.

If you do learn though, watch out for everyone you know wanting help with their computers

^ True story, a new hard drive is just around 50-100 bucks and very easy to install.

Also I hope you won't be careless and get zapped if you try to open your laptop, Sweetleaf.

Yay! Finally somebody gets curious about embedded tech on their own steam! I think VAIO is about as good as educational hardware gets - they're STRANGE, plus parts are usually pretty cheap on eBay, I consider rebuilding one of Sony's ultraportables for work every time I come accross one. Either you'll want a 2nd PC for your TV, a laptop to try Linux on or more...

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

I have a half-dead i5 Dell XPS I should try your battery trick with. I just pulled my CMOS battery & briefly disconnected the main Li-Ion. I've been considering buying a donor machine with a broken screen (due to the charger/usb/audio breakout board) AND an i7 motherboard.

As a small-time developer I always want to see more people taking these fixes into their own hands. Worst case scenario, you fry things and need to recycle the machine, but that still means you invested in learning something.

I typed this on a ~1000 dollar Samsung but my main computer when I'm not doing Windows things or gaming is a Toshiba dual-core Atom netbook I've spent maybe 15 bucks on, including 2 chargers. Apart from a fast wifi pci-e chip all my speed tweaks on there are Linux mods. It's comparable to using a much bigger Intel hyper threading machine usually, and Fedora always feels a cut above Windows.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

I have to say that Viao didn't really live up to my expectations anyways....I for some reason had it in my head it would be a lot cooler than it ended up being. And it always seemed to have a few random little glitchy bugs/issues here and there.

You're not going to get electrocuted opening up a computer, be it laptop or desktop. Mains voltage ends at the power-brick/wall-wart for a laptop, and in a desktop the power supply, which is a separate metal box inside the PC's case that the power cord plugs directly into (if it was made of cardboard it would be about the right size and shape to fit 3 coffee mugs inside). From there on the highest voltage you'll see is 24V.

It's actually recommended to work on desktop PCs with them plugged into a wall outlet, but switched off at the wall, or on the back of the power supply (if it has a switch), so that the computer is disconnected from the live connection, but still grounded, and protected from any static electricity you might be carrying from synthetic clothing, or walking on carpets. Otherwise (and for laptops) you'd need an anti static wrist strap, to get rid of any static.