Roughly what's the max I should spend on repairing a 5 year old PC?
May 13, 2020 1:12 PM Subscribe
My 4 - 5 year old PC died this morning and is currently in the hands of a techie friend. He suspects it may be the hard drive and beyond his capabilities. If I have to take it to a shop and if it can be repaired, given that it's that old and I could presumably get another one for $800 - $1000, what should be my cutoff for repairs?
It's an Asus I got online; it is not wonderful but neither is it terrible. I use it for Lightroom and Photoshop and Minecraft, mostly, along with email and listening to music OH GOD I FORGOT ABOUT MY MUSIC and, for the last two months, I've been working at home with it. That means working remotely via Splashtop. I will be heartbroken to lose my pictures many of which I suspect are not backed up (I cannot right now bear to look into the cloud and see) and my music which is not backed up at all I don't think. I am in the process of getting laid off right now so working remotely is not a concern at the moment but money sure as hell is. However, I do not want to sink too much into it if it's not worth it. What's the most you would pay to repair a desktop that old before you threw in the towel and bought a new one?
It's an Asus I got online; it is not wonderful but neither is it terrible. I use it for Lightroom and Photoshop and Minecraft, mostly, along with email and listening to music OH GOD I FORGOT ABOUT MY MUSIC and, for the last two months, I've been working at home with it. That means working remotely via Splashtop. I will be heartbroken to lose my pictures many of which I suspect are not backed up (I cannot right now bear to look into the cloud and see) and my music which is not backed up at all I don't think. I am in the process of getting laid off right now so working remotely is not a concern at the moment but money sure as hell is. However, I do not want to sink too much into it if it's not worth it. What's the most you would pay to repair a desktop that old before you threw in the towel and bought a new one?
Best answer: You can get an SSD for $50-100 that will probably be immensely faster than what you have with about the same space. Unless this is an all in one design, swapping it in is 5 minutes of work you can do yourself.
If you do need lots of space, a large hard drive can also be had for $100 new.
posted by Candleman at 1:26 PM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
If you do need lots of space, a large hard drive can also be had for $100 new.
posted by Candleman at 1:26 PM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
If your files are important to you, stop using that drive at all, immediately. There's a chance that they can be salvaged but additional use now reduces the chances of being able to do so. If you search Ask for disk recovery, you'll find a bunch of information on how to do so. If the instructions don't start with some variation of "create an image of the drive" they are probably incorrect. The steps that need to be taken are within what a reasonably good computer person can do using online guides. I would not trust Best Buy or a random computer store to do it properly.
posted by Candleman at 1:30 PM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Candleman at 1:30 PM on May 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
Best answer: "I am in the process of getting laid off right now "
one more reason to just by a new hard drive. If you want to rescue data cheaply from the old one, have an IT savvy friend have a look on it. For mechanical failures, putting it in the freezer in a bag and restart it to rescue data can do wonders.
posted by yoyo_nyc at 1:59 PM on May 13, 2020 [2 favorites]
one more reason to just by a new hard drive. If you want to rescue data cheaply from the old one, have an IT savvy friend have a look on it. For mechanical failures, putting it in the freezer in a bag and restart it to rescue data can do wonders.
posted by yoyo_nyc at 1:59 PM on May 13, 2020 [2 favorites]
If the issue is the hard drive, what you're (potentially) looking at paying for is data recovery rather than computer repair--it's fairly easy and cheap to replace a hard drive (you can buy an internal hard drive for under $50) and if your friend is a techie he should be able to do that. That will let you keep using your computer but not get you your files, obviously. Data recovery seems to be its own (often expensive) world but you can punt on that and on deciding how much you're willing to spend to recover data/how willing you are to DIY it with the possibility of making it worse or impossible to recover.
When stuff is fucked up on my computer, my first strategy is often to try to run linux (Ubuntu) live from a USB stick. (That bypasses the hard drive - you can run Ubuntu live from a USB stick even if the hard drive has been removed.) If that works, it tells me that it's something about my OS or my hard drive. If the issue is something in the realm of a virus or an OS issue rather than physical issues with the disk, you can also potentially use this to recover data from the disk, but if there's probably something physically wrong with the hard drive itself, yeah don't do try that, like Candleman says.
posted by needs more cowbell at 2:02 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
When stuff is fucked up on my computer, my first strategy is often to try to run linux (Ubuntu) live from a USB stick. (That bypasses the hard drive - you can run Ubuntu live from a USB stick even if the hard drive has been removed.) If that works, it tells me that it's something about my OS or my hard drive. If the issue is something in the realm of a virus or an OS issue rather than physical issues with the disk, you can also potentially use this to recover data from the disk, but if there's probably something physically wrong with the hard drive itself, yeah don't do try that, like Candleman says.
posted by needs more cowbell at 2:02 PM on May 13, 2020 [5 favorites]
Best answer: I probably wouldn't pay much at all to repair the hardware. Do a search on ebay for your computer make and model and you'll get an idea for how much they're worth these days. I wouldn't spend more than whatever prices you found on a repair if you can just outright buy a straight replacement for that much.
That said, the data on the drive may be worth a lot more to you than just the cost of repairs. If there's data that you feel is worth saving, and it turns out that it's the drive that's broken and you can't access the files with a SATA to USB adapter, I'd recommend getting a data recovery service to look at it. While there are some things a technical person might be able to do to rescue data off the drive, a lot of the same things can also have the potential to destroy data on the drive instead, depending on what exactly failed.
(This is also advice that's likely too late in coming, but keep physically separate backups of any data you don't want to lose. All hardware will die eventually, and if your data is only in one place, a failure can take your data with it.)
posted by Aleyn at 7:38 PM on May 13, 2020
That said, the data on the drive may be worth a lot more to you than just the cost of repairs. If there's data that you feel is worth saving, and it turns out that it's the drive that's broken and you can't access the files with a SATA to USB adapter, I'd recommend getting a data recovery service to look at it. While there are some things a technical person might be able to do to rescue data off the drive, a lot of the same things can also have the potential to destroy data on the drive instead, depending on what exactly failed.
(This is also advice that's likely too late in coming, but keep physically separate backups of any data you don't want to lose. All hardware will die eventually, and if your data is only in one place, a failure can take your data with it.)
posted by Aleyn at 7:38 PM on May 13, 2020
Hard drive replacement is literally the simplest repair on most modern desktops - two cables and a couple screws. But yeah, I'd get a USB key, put bootable linux on it as needs more cowbell suggests above, and see if it boots. If it does, your problem probably is the hard drive, which is a cheap fix.
If it doesn't, now you know, and based on what you've described it's probably worth either buying a new computer or taking this opportunity to learn about computer repair.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:27 AM on May 15, 2020
If it doesn't, now you know, and based on what you've described it's probably worth either buying a new computer or taking this opportunity to learn about computer repair.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:27 AM on May 15, 2020
Response by poster: Thanks, everyone! Turns out the real problem was the fan but a new hard drive is also in the works.
posted by mygothlaundry at 9:31 AM on May 15, 2020
posted by mygothlaundry at 9:31 AM on May 15, 2020
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If it doesn't work, and that's the main problem, you could get the computer running again by buying a replacement drive. Solid-state drives are nice and make an old computer feel much faster. You'll need to reinstall windows-- if you don't have installation media it can be downloaded from Microsoft.
posted by alexei at 1:25 PM on May 13, 2020 [6 favorites]