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

[little_frank]

Cheapest option I found when looking around for a new computer was to use my existing monitor with a 'net-top' - similar spec to a netbook, but you're not paying for a screen so it's half the price.

But, if you decide on a laptop, it should have USB sockets, and depending on the type of hard drive you can either borrow a widget I have that plugs IDE into USB and powers old hard drive from plug socket, or buy something similar for £10-20 or so to get data off old hard drive and onto laptop (or even use old hard drive as an external backup drive, like I do - when I remember).