I see dead PC

[rich_jacko]

Gah! My computer appears to have suddenly died. (To be fair, it has served me pretty well for more than a decade and it was definitely getting slow in its old age.)

Can anyone recommend a decent, inexpensive laptop? I'm not fussed about playing games on it; I just want something that'll cope with the interwebs/Office/Photoshop/etc. With at least a 15" screen and a decent amount of disk space.

Also, I'm pretty sure (or hopeful, at least) that it's the motherboard that's gone rather than the hard drive. There's quite a bit of stuff on there I want to retrieve. What's the best way of doing so? Can you even connect desktop hard drives to a laptop?

Comments

[rich-jacko.livejournal.com]

The widget sounds really useful. Where did you get it from?

I'm after a "proper" PC rather than a netbook-type machine. I want to be able to run full programs, copy/paste and drag/drop stuff with ease, and all the other things where my tablet is a bit limited.

[little_frank]

Probably from Aladdin's Cave at Leppings Lane tram stop (who are generally awesome and helpful), possibly from an internet shop, can't remember for sure.

My net-top (Acer Aspire) runs Firefox, Open Office, GIMP (linux equivalent to Photoshop) etc no problem - I wouldn't expect it to do well at graphics-intensive games, but it's more powerful than my old desktop (that admittedly I built about 15 years ago), and I used to run Mathematica on that! It came installed with Windows 8 and all the usual MS stuff, but I stupidly deleted the backup disk partion, which meant the Windows wouldn't run (of course they don't give you recovery disks these days either, the bastards).