Would you just buy a new laptop???

population

Hey all

I have a Toshiba Satellite A210-11P and it is a little over 3 years old. It never gave me any trouble at all before and I expect wear and tear over time but the following has happened within weeks of each other and I am wondering would it be wise to outlay on repairing it, or look at a new laptop.

Basically the webcam is not functioning. The DVD player is broken and the battery has just given up the ghost. So in terms of repairing all this stuff, is it wiser just to sell it as is and look at a new one, or go ahead on the repairs???

Zapho

Well I would always go down the repair road. If you're lucky, these problems are software based rather than hardware based and a simple driver install or a re-install of windows (which you could do yourself easy enough) could probably solve it.

If your problems are actually hardware based, then I myself charge a minimum of €30 for a hardware repair job like fixing a webcam (usually a quick enough fault) so its probably cheaper to just buy a new external webcam. A replacement DVD-rom drive would cost between €20 and €50. So in total thats not too bad either.

So, in my opinion, it should be easy and cheap enough to fix the laptop. If its not giving you too much trouble apart from that, I wouldn't go wasting money on a brand new one.

As for the battery - well its 3 years old, you would expect that to happen at this stage. A new battery is the most expensive thing here. But again, look on ebay. You might find a bargain.

population

Cheers Zapho

Do you actually do said repairs yourself?

Alanstrainor

The battery is most likely not a software issue. Batteries will degrade over time, and 3 years is pretty good going tbh. As for the dvd drive and webcam, these could very well be software issues.

population

The DVD player just seems to be freezing all the time. And it has gotten very noisy lately.

Zapho

population wrote: »

Cheers Zapho

Do you actually do said repairs yourself?

I do indeed. I have a small business doing this kind of stuff in Galway.

If you look at the toshiba website you should be able to find a webcam driver for your laptop model. Download and install that and see if that fixes one problem.

About the DVD player - do you mean that DVD video playback is freezing? What about audio CDs? Do normal data cds/DVDs work?

population

Zapho wrote: »

I do indeed. I have a small business doing this kind of stuff in Galway.

If you look at the toshiba website you should be able to find a webcam driver for your laptop model. Download and install that and see if that fixes one problem.

About the DVD player - do you mean that DVD video playback is freezing? What about audio CDs? Do normal data cds/DVDs work?

Yeah DVD playback is freezing. CDs seem to work fine though

Spudzzmurphy

population wrote: »

Yeah DVD playback is freezing. CDs seem to work fine though

Had this problem a few weeks go with my DVD drive,and Dell replaced it under warranty,after all else failed.

Zapho

population wrote: »

Yeah DVD playback is freezing. CDs seem to work fine though

What program are you using to play them? Try reinstalling that program.

population

It just plays on windows media player. I am running Vista as the operating system

Smokin_Aces

I have a toshiba laptop until I walked on it by accident. The screen is screwed. Anyways I've some important things on it, I was wondering if I would be able to connect it to a monitor of some sort to view my laptop instead of the busted screen or i'm out of luck? Thanks

ED E

Smokin_Aces wrote: »

I have a toshiba laptop until I walked on it by accident. The screen is screwed. Anyways I've some important things on it, I was wondering if I would be able to connect it to a monitor of some sort to view my laptop instead of the busted screen or i'm out of luck? Thanks

If its physical damage to the panel itself, yes. If its falled and the GPU was damaged(causing a blank screen) no.

Its likely the former, hook up a VGA and use the hotkeys to turn on the external display.