My laptop died on me.

[Killer Bees]

My laptop died on me this weekend. It looks like it is getting power (based on the leds), but nothing else is running (monitor is off, no fan running, can't open the cd-rom drive, etc). My warranty has expired. I did research on local pc repair shops, but I am not too impressed. One shop told me that it would be $200 just to look inside of the laptop. If I ship it to Toshiba, they charge a $309 upfront fee before they even know what it is. If I decided not to go with them, they will take $150 non-refundable fee regardless. If it were a desktop, I would try to play with it myself though I am more of a software person rather than a hardware person.

Does anyone know of an easy way if I decided to purchase another laptop, would I be able to extract the data on the laptop's harddrive to the new laptop? I have a web application I been working on for months that needs to be preserved.

 

[Bartram]

My laptop died on me this weekend. It looks like it is getting power (based on the leds), but nothing else is running (monitor is off, no fan running, can't open the cd-rom drive, etc). My warranty has expired. I did research on local pc repair shops, but I am not too impressed. One shop told me that it would be $200 just to look inside of the laptop. If I ship it to Toshiba, they charge a $309 upfront fee before they even know what it is. If I decided not to go with them, they will take $150 non-refundable fee regardless. If it were a desktop, I would try to play with it myself though I am more of a software person rather than a hardware person.

Does anyone know of an easy way if I decided to purchase another laptop, would I be able to extract the data on the laptop's harddrive to the new laptop? I have a web application I been working on for months that needs to be preserved.

Unlikely, but maybe your transformer on your power cord has gone bad. other than that, sounds like something in the power circuitry is blown. As far as the hard drive, if you can't plug the hard drive directly into an extra slot (if any) in your new laptop, you may be able to buy some type of adapter cable (something from the form factor of the old hard drive to USB or PC Card perhaps). Beyond that I'm puzzled on solving this one. If it was a desk top it would be no problem, but I'm not sure what the backplane of a laptop HD looks like and how interchangable they are across different brands of laptops.

 

[Killer Bees]

I thought about the power cord. But when I got home yesterday, I noticed the fan was running. I am still not able to open the cd-rom drive and nothing is showing up on the screen. I am going to take it to an authorized Toshiba dealer in Atlanta and go from there.

 

[Bartram]

I thought about the power cord. But when I got home yesterday, I noticed the fan was running. I am still not able to open the cd-rom drive and nothing is showing up on the screen. I am going to take it to an authorized Toshiba dealer in Atlanta and go from there.

Something else you could try. I had a problem where my screen on my laptop would go blank seemingly for no reason. I could never quite isolate what it was. Sometimes when I would move the monitor like I was closing the laptop, my screen would go blank. other times I'd be typing and it would blank in and out and then go blank. The only way I could get the screen back was to shut down the laptop, unplug it AND take the battery out momentarily. That would usually correct the problem for a few days but it would come back. So try that. Then one day it stopped. Makes me think it was a bug of some kind.

Also If you have access to a monitor for a desk top PC, plug it into your laptop and see if there is a response when you restart the laptop. I've never seen it, but maybe your screen has gone bad or you got a marginal connection between it and your video card.