laptop upgrade
Lately I’ve been having trouble with my laptop’s hard drive — including the click-o-death once. Very scary. I got a new hard drive last week, and after some really frustrating problems with copying my existing hard drive onto the new one, I finally got it installed.
I’ve never taken my laptop apart. I’ve taken desktop’s apart since my friend Amit got a computer when we were in… oh, I think 10th grade or so. Other than my laptop, I’ve only owned one pre-assembled computer in my entire life — and that one didn’t last too long before I started adding new parts to it. But a laptop, well that’s a different animal.
It would seem, especially my laptop, which required six stages of disassembly to actually get to the hard drive:
- remove main structural screws from back, and external hinge screws from behind screen
- remove upper panel (above keyboard, where power button and status lights live), remove internal hinge screws and unplug monitor cable
- remove monitor, unscrew keyboard restraints
- remove keyboard, unplug keyboard, unplug mouse/sound/etc. of upper panel
- remove upper panel of laptop base, unscrew hard drive cage restraints
- extract hard drive cage, unscrew hard drive
- remove hard drive. rejoice.
Fortunately, I was able to keep everything straight, and didn’t lose a single screw, even though they were all tiny enough that, save for two screws, I needed my miniature screwdriver set (like screwdrivers for eyeglass repair).
After all that, the hardest part was still copying the drive. I finally figured it out, though, and my laptop is now up and running! It’s a little faster, even, since the new hard is 4x the size of the old one (which means less defragmentation of files), spins faster, and has more cache. Altogether a nice upgrade.