Top 9 Most Reliable Laptop Brands And Failure Rate Comparison

I bought a working hard drive that matched exactly his old one(which took some doing to find), and carefully replaced the circuit board. When I re-inserted it in the computer it booted perfectly.

Unfortunately these days you usually have to do an extra step... First you have to find a matching board, then you have to find the eprom on the boards and use a heat gun to pull them off and do a swap. Most boards are programmed not to work if the info on the eprom does not match the info on the hard drive. You can sometimes do this with a cheapo heat gun and covering the rest of the components on the board with aluminum foil, but heat guns made for this purpose can be found for less than a hundred dollars.

I just had this type of failure on a hybrid hard drive. This was out of my league. Most of my data was backed up but I still lost quite a bit of 3-D modeling that I had done designing stuff for me 3-D printer. It is more of a hobby, so I wouldn't say it was truly valuable but there were many hours of work into it. I had been saving my work in a directory picked by the software that I use and didn't think about it not being backed up, until it was gone. Fortunately, I just found a place that will evaluate the board and charges just $60 + $15 for shipping if all your PCB board needs is a diode swap, a reset, or some other simple repair that doesn't need a clean room but is a little beyond the capabilities of most of us. That is a fraction of what normal data recovery costs... so we will see how that goes.

Your trick of dropping the old desktop computers a few inches to reseat the socketed chips reminds me of the laptop motherboard repair that I used to do to a lot of friends computers when they went on the fritz. I would take the heat sinks off the gpu and cpu and cover the rest of the motherboard with aluminum foil and have someone hold the laser pointer from an infrared thermometer on the surface mounted chip that I was heating up with the heat gun. This usually brought these laptops back to life for a while longer, but sometimes it would kill the thing off completely, especially if some little resistors came loose or the chip was what was actually starting to fail. They mount surface mounted components under extremely precise conditions and typically with some type of robot.

Unfortunately these days you usually have to do an extra step... First you have to find a matching board, then you have to find the eprom on the boards and use a heat gun to pull them off and do a swap. Most boards are programmed not to work if the info on the eprom does not match the info on the hard drive. You can sometimes do this with a cheapo heat gun and covering the rest of the components on the board with aluminum foil, but heat guns made for this purpose can be found for less than a hundred dollars.

This one worked fine with just swapping the circuit board. The potential for a mismatching EPROM was why I didn’t trust it for writing data. Reading data was fine. This was back in the early days of HDs. . . Before they started getting too sophisticated.

I had clients who were backing up to streaming tape drives thinking they were fine. They had lots of tape cartridges of historic data backups. THEN, drum roll, the tape transport died. Just try and find a four year old, obsolete tape transport to match the tape cartridges you have. Lots of luck. The manufacturer has a FEW new ones in stock at EXTREMELY high prices for just this eventuality. I had one client where this happened. The original tape transport had been $250. The replacement to access his data from the original maker was over $3000! They said “Take it or leave it. We only have a few left.” Used ones were really problematic as they were old and likely to be on the used market due to being iffy already. He took it, copied a few critical tapes, finding many of his tapes were stretched and unusable, unreadable anyway, and went to another back-up system. I don’t think the tape drive company is still around, but I won’t name it.

Yeah, the high-heat gun approach could be a help or a disaster approach. I’ve seen some heat gun applied actually lift the traces off the circuit boards by a bit of technician over-enthusiastic use of one.

They had lots of tape cartridges of historic data backups. THEN, drum roll, the tape transport died.

We used tape backup for the fire department's computer system which was located at the communications center where I was assigned for a couple of years. The machines were old and the tape cartridges were huge. We rotated them, so that they were reused, I believe about every 6 months. They backed up not just the network, but also the 911 calls and radio communications. They were replaced about 20 years ago with newer technology because they eventually became a maintenance nightmare. We had a system, but actually making the backups was a fairly time consuming operation.

Every time I have to replace components or re-solder something I swear I am going to buy a cheap work station to help do better work.

Around $75 on Amazon or Ebay.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00Y09MJ7Y/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=AG4SP3NVGD1DE&psc=1

Just for the record... I was having difficulty installing an additional hard drive in my new HP 2 in 1 laptop. I was starting to wonder if HP had started “white listing” hardware that could be installed in their laptops. But I ordered a new ribbon cable from Amazon to replace the one that I purchased on eBay. I didn’t believe that this was the problem and ordered a similar Lenovo laptop which had reviewers which talked about their success adding larger drives. But when I installed the new cable the hard drive was recognized immediately.

Now I have to decide which laptop to keep. They both came from Costco. The Lenovo was actually a slightly better deal, but I have already purchased over $80 in upgrades for the HP, not all of which can be returned.

Just for the record... I was having difficulty installing an additional hard drive in my new HP 2 in 1 laptop. I was starting to wonder if HP had started “white listing” hardware that could be installed in their laptops. But I ordered a new ribbon cable from Amazon to replace the one that I purchased on eBay. I didn’t believe that this was the problem and ordered a similar Lenovo laptop which had reviewers which talked about their success adding larger drives. But when I installed the new cable the hard drive was recognized immediately.

Sounds as if there is a data line on that ribbon cable that has a break in it somewhere. Likely a bad connection between the connector and the cable. Happens.

As to which to keep, seems as if you fixed the HP problem and have $80 of upgrades. Return the Lenovo and keep the HP for what it will do for its lifespan.

As to which to keep, seems as if you fixed the HP problem and have $80 of upgrades.

Thank you for your input. That was my first thought as well. But it is still a little bit of a dilemma for me. They are both 2018 models that are being closed out. I definitely would have purchased the Lenovo if it had been on sale when I picked up the HP. The Lenovo has an Intel processor along with a discrete video processor. The screen has better reviews for brightness and color accuracy. I have had better luck with Lenovo laptops holding up in the past.

The HP has an AMD processor that was designed to match the version of Intel processor that the HP has. And it does in most benchmarks, but in real life use most users report having better performance with the Intel processor even without the discrete video processor. The HP also has a slightly newer generation USB C port 3.1 vs 3.0. The 3.1 port actually has some substantive improvements.

I was planning on dropping off the unopened box with the Lenovo at my local Costco. I would lose the $15 I spent on shipping. But I have decided to do a side by side comparison. I would feel more guilty about it, but Costco insisted on giving me my money back instead of repairing or replacing the laptop that I had which was still under warranty. It is a model that they still carry. It is not currently on sale so I would have had to spend an additional $100 to get back the same model laptop that I just returned.