Gonna Attempt to Laptop Fix Myself
First I'm going to say I really like the tech guy at staples. The one I got today is the same one I've had the last few times I've gone to Staple for computer stuff. What I like is that he gave it to me straight and gave me a few options on what I could do. (I now feel empowered to embark on this computer repair attempt)
First off he told me straight out it would not be worth it to have them do a data recovery and repair as having them restore my data and fix the machine would run me between $400-500 and even then that would not guarantee how long the computer will last.
Thus the second option for around that price or a little more I can get a new laptop and have them set it up for me (cost about $100 for them to set it up) which would include transferring my data from the old machine to the new one and installing programs.
The third option, which is the one I'm going to try, was to buy a dock (cost $45) that would turn my laptops hard drive into and external hard drive and use another computer to transfer the data to a different external hard drive. After the data is transfered then I put the hard drive back in the laptop and contact HP for the disks to reinstall windows on my laptop (which he told me may cost me $20-30) then once I receive the disks I reinstall the OS and it should work again assuming that there is no hardware damage, which there should not be any.
I think I should be able to manage that all on my own especially because he took the hard drive out right there (so I saw how easy it was to do) and quickly checked on one of their computers to see that my data was on the drive and looked ok.
First off he told me straight out it would not be worth it to have them do a data recovery and repair as having them restore my data and fix the machine would run me between $400-500 and even then that would not guarantee how long the computer will last.
Thus the second option for around that price or a little more I can get a new laptop and have them set it up for me (cost about $100 for them to set it up) which would include transferring my data from the old machine to the new one and installing programs.
The third option, which is the one I'm going to try, was to buy a dock (cost $45) that would turn my laptops hard drive into and external hard drive and use another computer to transfer the data to a different external hard drive. After the data is transfered then I put the hard drive back in the laptop and contact HP for the disks to reinstall windows on my laptop (which he told me may cost me $20-30) then once I receive the disks I reinstall the OS and it should work again assuming that there is no hardware damage, which there should not be any.
I think I should be able to manage that all on my own especially because he took the hard drive out right there (so I saw how easy it was to do) and quickly checked on one of their computers to see that my data was on the drive and looked ok.