Post by frinspar on Nov 20, 2014 0:44:22 GMT -5
My newerish Toshiba laptop had a hard drive failure a while back. Managed to get it to work again, but couldn't trust it for anything beyond turning into a media serving device for the TV in the bedroom.
Well, it finally had its second failure tonight and it's for good.
So I've been looking at options, and I think I might get a new, small hard drive and install Windows back on there.
I've found a tutorial on how to get Windows and, using the product key on the bottom of the laptop, install and activate it on the new drive.
A 160GB drive is about $60. I'm going small, because if we still want to stream things to the TV back there, that laptop is the only way to do it. I can run some things through the Blu-ray player hooked to it, but that's only off either the desktop or my old, reliable Toshiba that I reverted back to using since the newer one crapped out. Can't browse at all, and we watch stuff that we'd need a browser to get. And this older laptop doesn't have HD capability, and isn't powerful enough to play on the TV. The other one is, and I can just run an HD cable from it.
Anyway, the only part anyone needs to read is this.
Is it really that simple to swap out a hard drive and reinstall? Anyone ever swapped out a hard drive?
I just put the new one in, install Windows, reactivate it using the original product key and then go from there?
The desktop has Windows 7, which the Toshiba had. Could we clone it somehow from the desktop, rather than downloading it? What are my options?
Any help or advice would be appreciated.
I would've gotten the same discounted Lenovo desktop unit we just got for Wifespar's mom whose old PC also finally gave up the ghost, but they stopped selling them right after I got hers.
Well, it finally had its second failure tonight and it's for good.
So I've been looking at options, and I think I might get a new, small hard drive and install Windows back on there.
I've found a tutorial on how to get Windows and, using the product key on the bottom of the laptop, install and activate it on the new drive.
A 160GB drive is about $60. I'm going small, because if we still want to stream things to the TV back there, that laptop is the only way to do it. I can run some things through the Blu-ray player hooked to it, but that's only off either the desktop or my old, reliable Toshiba that I reverted back to using since the newer one crapped out. Can't browse at all, and we watch stuff that we'd need a browser to get. And this older laptop doesn't have HD capability, and isn't powerful enough to play on the TV. The other one is, and I can just run an HD cable from it.
Anyway, the only part anyone needs to read is this.
Is it really that simple to swap out a hard drive and reinstall? Anyone ever swapped out a hard drive?
I just put the new one in, install Windows, reactivate it using the original product key and then go from there?
The desktop has Windows 7, which the Toshiba had. Could we clone it somehow from the desktop, rather than downloading it? What are my options?
Any help or advice would be appreciated.
I would've gotten the same discounted Lenovo desktop unit we just got for Wifespar's mom whose old PC also finally gave up the ghost, but they stopped selling them right after I got hers.