How Can I make this laptop work?

December 2, 2012 5:52 AM

What is the quickest and cheapest way to find out if a laptop works?

I was sat outside a cafe in town, it is opposite a cash converters (pawn shop/pay-day loan place). Two students went in to try and sell them the laptop but they didn't want it, so when the students came out they put it on a bench and walked off, so I went and picked it up (it annoys me to see that sort of thing). However, it has no hard drive (fair enough) and no power supply.

So do I just have to risk it and buy the bits, or pay someone?

The laptop is a Compaq Presario C300.

posted by marienbad to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Walk into a local repair shop (local independent. not a Geek Squad) and see if they'll temporarily fit a drive and battery in it just to see if it'll boot?
posted by Thorzdad at 6:09 AM on December 2, 2012

that thing is OLD, would not be worth doing anuthing to even if worked, IMHO.....
posted by raildr at 6:51 AM on December 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

You can get a universal laptop power supply, but between that and having to add a hard drive (and IDE drive most likely, on a system that old) the costs involved don't make sense, you don't know if there are other issues with it and even if everything else works perfectly a capacitor on the motherboard can go at any time on an older system, or the LCD backlight can go out...

It's probably not worth messing with when you consider that brand-new laptops are on sale for under $300. One of those cheapies will blow that old laptop away, even more so if you add a $90 SDD to it.
posted by NoAccount at 7:10 AM on December 2, 2012

To save on the hard drive, you could just download the Live CD for Ubuntu and then you can actually launch the laptop using just that.

That just leaves you with a power supply problem, which might be something you could walk into a big box store, and just find a similar compaq on display and plug your one in.
posted by Static Vagabond at 7:46 AM on December 2, 2012

You don't know the providence of the machine so if you intend to take it to a repair shop to ask to borrow a power-supply, make sure its one you know won't grass you up for (possibly) handling stolen goods.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 8:51 AM on December 2, 2012

Response by poster: RE: provenance of the laptop - they were clearly university students, they had the posh voices and walked like they owned the place, so definitely not junkies or thieves.

Thanks for the answers.
posted by marienbad at 11:40 AM on December 2, 2012

Best answer: Ebay has several chargers for that model around £5 (assuming Ebay UK from poster's location, prices are about the same for USD also). Don't worry about the hard drive until you are sure it boots using a Linux live cd and you check the screen looks good. You are going to want to make sure that you check to see if it is just the hard drive missing or also the hard drive caddy(£12). Cheap batteries for it are around £12 on Ebay. It looks like any 2.5in sata drive (ssd might be nice to give it a bit of a boost) is fine for that model. The laptop is fairly old and large though , unless you really like it for some reason, it is unlikely to be that useful in a cost effective way. With its age, I would say it is fairly safe to say someone left it because its old rather than because its provenance is questionable. Even if it was, unless you announce it to the repair shop owners or try to get service from HP, it is old enough that no repair shop is going to find it even a little suspicious that you want things to test it and are missing some things. Now if it was a new model or something shiny like a Macbook, a missing power supply might raise a few red flags, but on something of that age missing power supplies are common.
posted by cspurrier at 3:49 PM on December 2, 2012