Laptop is in the shop. Need Advice ASAP !!!

[zanemay]

I have taken my IBM laptop to the seemingly reliable computer store across from Foodland in Pattaya - Wattana Computer. It has a wild mouse and some bad sectors on the hard drive. They say they need to change the hard drive - 20gb for 6,800 baht.

 

 

 

I suppose this is a good price. But on the other hand I doubt they can transfer my data, most of which is backed up. Perhaps all of it. They might not be able to preserve my main programs which are Lotus applications. However, I could get along with Wordpad until I got back to the US next month.

 

 

 

Would you have your system worked on here???

 

 

 

Thanks,

 

Zane

[adikgede]

If your laptop has a PS2 port on the back plug a mouse into it and see if that works better. If you still have a problem its probably software and not hardware.

 

 

 

Running a surface scan with scandisk should take care of the disk for the time being, you can run a surface scan again in a days time to see if there are more bad blocks than yesterday. That should let you judge the severity of the problem.

 

 

 

I know a laptop harddrive is pretty idiot proof but they may not have experience opening up the Thinkpad case without breaking something.

 

 

 

Try a mouse at the shop and if that works buy the mouse and pass on the additional service until you know for certain that your are facing imminent hardware failure and they aren't going to break some little plastic tab somewhere that is going to cost as much as a harddrive to replace.

[zanemay]

The mouse goes crazy when I boot. If I have left the computer off for a day or so I can work for about 10 minutes before it freaks - jumps all over the place and gives mouse button down commands.

 

 

 

I suspect the shop tried to boot the machine and got the bad sectors indication. Only one sector shows as bad in routine analysis and I have worked around this for many months. I have rattled the mouse stick and done everything I could to work on a physical problem. It doesn't seem physical as it follows the same pattern. I also get an IBM error message with a number sometimes when I boot.

 

 

 

I am not sure if they are making any association between the mouse problem and the hard drive having a bad sector. Yes, I would be worried about them taking it apart and breaking something. I do need a new/bigger hard drive and I can get one installed in the US, but for how much?

 

 

 

Oh well, any more thoughts?

 

 

 

Thanks for the help,

 

Zane

[Guest]

that price (6800) for a 20 Gig HDD sounds pretty good, make sure its not a second hand or reconditioned one. a friend of mine got quoted 11,000 for a disk replacement for his thinkpad in panthip. the cases are a bit trickier than toshibas and the like to get into, maybe the techies in the shop havent done one yet.

 

 

 

as for backing up you should be able to plug this disk (providing you can get it out!) into a normal desktop, all you need is an IDE adaptor cable with both size plugs on it , about 100 baht or so in panthip.