Broken Laptop

[blank]

I have an old Dell Inspiron 8600 with a few problems.

Graphics card is broken - display has lots of glitches.

Hard drive is broken - takes about 15mins to boot and you can hear the disk struggling - had lots of bad sectors when it first went wrong and I ran chkdsk etc.

Bottom case is cracked in lots of places.



Any suggestions what to do with it?

Put it on eBay as spares or repair with no reserve?
Try and get some of the parts I need cheaply and re-build it?

[DennisCooper]

Hi blank,

Both suggestions are what you'll probably end up taking one up on. Only you can decide!

Spares/repair quick way to get shot of it

Recondition it with a higher capacity hard drive, find a working graphics card and any other little bits, and if you get the bits cheaply enough from ebay, you'd have a perfectly useable 2nd laptop.

I had the Dell 8500 which I really liked, i specced it up with the 1920x1200 screen when they first came out and it was a wonder to use and see the display and people used to gawp at it and ask me why it was so clear and pin sharp!

Cheers, Dennis! West London & Slough UK!

[blank]

Think I'm gonna have a go at salvaging it then put something like Ubuntu on it and use it for general net browsing etc.

That way I can hopefully keep my nice new laptop from going the same way!

[sunbeam_alpine]

Do you have any doors that need holding open?

[Deva Link]

Take it to the tip.

[TheEnd]

ebay, with broken laptop, "boots up but slow, and the screen is funny, spares or repairs?" and let someone buy it thinking they'll make an easy buck

[Clivey]

Firstly, are you absolutely sure it's a problem with the graphics card? Some screen faults can produce some very weird effects - the best way to check would be to plug it in to an external monitor / TV and see if the display's still the same.

If it is indeed the board, and the laptop uses onboard graphics, you'd probably be looking at fitting a new logic board to sort the issue out...and this will cost you multiples of what the laptop's worth. If you can put up with it however, just fit another HDD.

[blank]

Pretty sure it's the graphics card itself - tried the external monitor trick. It's a separate card so I'm gonna have a tinker if I can get some spares cheap enough.