klevin99

Be aware that when you send a computer in for repairs, things go wrong. A few years ago, we had a problem with my daughter's Dell computer that on-site repair could not fix. They sent us a box for Dell depot repair with an estimate of 10 days. Daughter was in Grad school in UK on a home visit, heading back in two weeks - tight but doable. Two weeks later, no computer. Many calls over the next two weeks and they finally shipped the computer back. I sent it directly to daughter in UK without opening the box. Big mistake. She got a computer chassis minus battery and minus HDD - so it had never been fixed.

Contacted Dell only to be accused of having stolen the parts and trying to cheat them! and this was by a supervisor. After a BBB complaint (totally worthless) I contacted a NYT columnist, who got things moving. It still took two more months to get a replacement, with orders made and cancelled and so forth. Finally, they managed to ship a computer, but only to me. Had to pay to fedex it to UK (about $100).

Fortunately, daughter had backed up her computer to a cloud backup service, and bought a cheap netbook that served well enough until it was stolen just before her new machine arrived. backups again saved the day.

Needless to say we're no longer a Dell family, although her replacement machine came with 3 year on site service, which she got great use out of. It's global.

Moral: Backup, Backup.
2nd moral: test your backups before sending the machine out. Backups fail.

nkedel

When dealing with Dell warranty support mail-in service, I used to just take the hard drive out and only send the rest of the machine back.

My more recent systems have had on-site service, and I've been pulling the hard drive that comes with them as soon as they arrive to replace it with an SSD. As an added bonus, when their scripts in tech support tell me to reinstall, I can tell them I've tried it with a clean Dell-provided image off the original disk.

javabytes

Two physical drives makes for a far bigger laptop than I want to haul around.

Also, to OP, if I was looking at out-of-warranty repair costs for a DVD drive and what is in all likelihood going to end up being a new LCD assembly, that's starting to sound more and more like "new computer" time to me.

nkedel

Small mSATA card for the boot drive + a regular 2.5" hard drive or SSD can make for a very small machine, and if you don't need the optical drive, pretty much any optical drive-equipped machine can have the drive swapped for a second HDD or SSD.

...although both replacement parts are likely to be relatively cheap on the aftermarket, assuming the laptop is new enough to be compatible with new replacement screens (typically around $70; a new SATA DVD mechanism around $30-50.)

javabytes

True, mSATA is making this more feasible than in the past. Optical drive still = more laptop than I really want to be carrying around.

I was thinking more around $90-100 for a new screen... and that's assuming you're actually able to narrow it to the LCD, as it could be something else like the inverter. Under warranty, I've seen plenty of computers with backlight issues just get the whole assembly replaced because it's not worth the time to try and figure out exactly which one is responsible. And all these parts prices are assuming the manufacturer-authorized repair center doesn't use marked up OEM parts.

So it's safely $100-150 for the parts alone, potentially more, and any repair shop that wants to stay in business is going to have to charge you something for the labor that still puts it well into the "do I really want to pay this to fix a 4 year old laptop vs. put the couple hundred $ towards a new laptop".

nkedel

More than fair. Of course, mSATA also lets you go even smaller, with no bay for a 2.5" drive. I haven't seen a machine with 2 mSATA (or better yet, 2 M.2) slots, but there may be one out there and it would certainly make sense.

Some of the newer ones with LED backlighting don't use a separate inverter board, and I've seen the full electronics on sale for $70-$100 (older CCFL ones being pricier.)

Yeah, the assumption I'm making is DIY, from the cheapest new sources on the net.

Getting a machine with a bad motherboard for parts, , or a separate screen assembly, via ebay or similar, probably is no cheaper although it is often easier.

Paying labor once out of warranty is a losing game for all but the priciest and most esoteric models, and perhaps some Macintoshes just given their ridiculous resale value, or perhaps things with very short warranties (although that's mainly a sign buying with a short warranty is itself a bad idea.)

The parts are, as you note, probably a lot pricer with service-center markups.

OTOH, learning to DIY is not really that hard; we're talking parts swaps, not re-soldering things on the motherboard. Depending on the model, the parts may be cheap (or may not.)

--

Having taken a closer read over the OP's symptoms, the fact that a power cycle brings the screen back and that it works fine until going out suddenly worries me that it's something more complicated than just the screen. If it's old enough to have a CCFL backlight and inverter board, that's a good candidate; I don't know if LED driver boards (where they're separate) can fail in the same way because the voltages are lower and generally they're less demanding parts (and often no longer separated AFAICT) ... if not, the motherboard might be the problem.

Paint Horse

If there is no room for two physical drives, then use a flat USB drive for the data. Leave it plugged in to one of the USB ports.

nkedel

That's works only if your volume of data is tiny -- that will both fit and be fast enough on a flush mount MicroSD reader -- 64gb max, and I wouldn't trust the quality of MicroSD with that much data.

Otherwise, a reasonably large drive will require a cable and risk loss, damage, and the size will get in the way even if the weight is trivial.

Paint Horse

64 GB is tiny? How much stuff do you carry around with you?

I just looked at my drive with tons of lecture and lab notes full of photographs. I have 88 GB of data. I could trim that way down if I needed to.

Thus the reason to maintain multiple backups. I backup locally to a fireproof, waterproof USB drive, nearby to a bank safe deposit box using a portable USB drive, and remotely using an online service.

nkedel

My laptop is my main machine; I've got 144gb of photos, 128gb or ebooks, and somewhere well in the 10s of GB of source code in various repository formats(which keep history; the actual amount of live code is smaller.)

The working copy of the source code is on the C: SSD, which is faster.

I could trim down the 700GB on my laptop (plus about another 200gb of videos to be watched) if I needed to, but the incremental cost of upgrading my SSDs is significantly less than the value of my time to have to manage what's on the machine vs. just having everything on it.

In a year or two if the 960gb gets inconveniently small, I'll upgrade it to a 1.6TB or whatever's out at about $500 then. The rate of new data creation is rather bursty, although I'm taking a lot more photos since my daughter was born.

(I've got a 256gb mSATA card and a 960gb data SSD. My prior machine actually had more space, with a 480gb main SSD and the same 960GB SSD in the optical bay.)

I backup to a RAIDed server at home, the work stuff to various servers at work as well, the most important other stuff to both a private and public cloud services, and the photos get copied to a USB drive that lives at my inlaws every couple of months.

DenverBrian

This. Some of the earliest documents I ever produced on Word date from 1993. I have them among the 120 GB or so of data on my data partition. All backed up, of course, but if you have the space, why not simply carry your entire digital life with you at all times? @:-)

Paint Horse

Because its expensive and problematic as this thread shows. Just keep the stuff you really use on the D drive or whatever you use. Leave all the old stuff on the local fireproof, waterproof USB drive as well as on the online backup. If you need one of those ancient files, download it.

nkedel

Indeed.

Of course, all the Wordperfect and Word documents I've got from the late 1980s through the late 1990s when I started taking digital photos are small enough to fit on a single CD-R with plentiful room to spare, and have been living on my laptops that entire time as hard drives went from 20Mb in 1990 to 1.3GB in 1998 to 60GB in 2006 which was the last time I had bought a system I actually used which had a spinning disk.

nkedel

It's neither expensive nor problematic if you don't buy the laptop equivalent of skinny jeans and you're not on a college student's budget.

javabytes

My main computer has 12TB of hard drive space, a little more than half of it used. Far more than I want or need to carry around with me on a laptop. My laptop has a 128GB SSD, and it too is about half full. I carry what I need with me, and anything I don't stays at home. Same way my 16GB iPhone carries more than enough music for me... I don't need an iPod Classic so I can carry 50,000 songs with me on the off chance I want to listen to some random song. Between VPN and RDP, and a Subsonic streaming media server, I can easily retrieve anything I need, whether it's documents, software, pictures, or music.