Optical Drive | Tech Now

Latest Blog Posts

What Can You Do With a Dead Laptop?

Posted by JD on November 14, 2009

NEW 2.5” Laptop Hard Drive USB External Enclosure/Case

$7.65

2.5 SATA Laptop Hard Disk Drive HDD Enclosure Case USB

$7.65

USB 2.0 2.5 IDE HARD DRIVE ENCLOSURE CASE FOR LAPTOP

$7.99

When a desktop computer starts to struggle, they’re usually a few options for upgrading the core components and give new life to its performance. Unfortunately, upgrading the laptop is impossible, or at best very, very difficult.

If your laptop is no longer working, or is much too old to keep pace with the demands of today’s software, the temptation is to throw the whole thing away. But don’t give up on your baby just yet. With a little transformation, your “laptop-formerly-known-as-useless” could turn out to be quite useful. Recently, TechRadar.com published an interesting piece about cool things to do with your laptop. Let’s take a look at some of their suggestions.

Believe it or not, you can salvage some of the components inside. This is an option you should reserve for laptops that are truly and finally dead. Start with the hard drive. Is it still working? Then you can have a “new” external hard drive (and also recover any files you may have lost in the death throes of your laptop). Purchase an external case for a 3.5 inch drive and your old laptop’s hard drive will plug right (usually). There may be a chance that it won’t fit-I’ve run into a few old IBM drives that are two thick for the enclosure. But guess what, it works without the enclosure too, although it does look a little Borg-ish. It’s a quick, easy and inexpensive route to an additional external drive.

Pull the memory cards out. They may be of no more use to you, but lots of people are always on the search for replacements for their broken laptops (broken less than yours, of course). Actually, there may be a few people farther behind the curve than your laptop and would love to upgrade their memory with your cards.

What about the optical drive? Do you fancy a new home theater computer? To fit with the living room décor, cases for media computers are usually thinner and require a slimline optical drive. Your salvaged laptop drive may be just the thing.

There you have it, at least three components that you can extract from your dead laptop and use to make something else, save some money, or even make money by selling them on eBay. Just don’t start throwing your laptop around to hasten its demise!