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Laptops can be sent back to the manufacturer if the purchaser finds the screen of the laptop scratched or with a minor blemish, or if it is an unwanted present to him or if the packaging of the laptop is dented etc. Such laptops are inspected, tested again for quality and repackaged by the manufacturer and sold for a very less price. Such laptops are called as refurbished laptops.

Factory refurbished laptops:

The laptops in the factory undergo rechecking for any manufacturing defect by passing through various stages of examination. Then, when no fault is found, the hard disk of the laptop is reformatted and again the operating system is loaded. It is again made to work for less than 4-5 hours time to check for any defect and the parts are replaced if they are found to be defective. The refurbished laptop is then updated with a new serial number to mark it as a factory refurbished laptop. Such factory refurbished laptops are of high quality available to the consumer at a lesser retail price. Such refurbished laptops can be got from almost all the renowned brands. However the process carried out for the restoration of laptops may differ from company to company. The main aim is to make the laptop run again efficiently as it used to be previously.

Custom refurbished laptops:

These are repaired laptops which are reassembled to match the customer’s preference. It gives an opportunity to get a complete laptop solution at a very affordable price to the customer. The utilities offered by the customer refurbished laptops are got at a cost of a used laptop. It also avoids the necessity to upgrade immediately, which is not the case with the standard laptop. It allows the customers to have preferences in terms of selecting the features like the screen size, processor speed requirements, multimedia, memory capacity, hard drive size, optical drive, graphics, accessories, Bluetooth etc.
When purchased in bulk, custom refurbished laptops are the best option as it combines both functionality and price advantage together. Additional benefits can be availed through promotional offers and discounts from the manufacturers.

Advantages of purchasing refurbished laptops:

The refurbished laptops are of high quality as they are checked for high standards of performance at each level of examination done. The consumer can get a branded, quality laptop of a latest model at a very less price compared to the retail price. More over discounts are offered to military personnel, senior citizens and students who can maximize their savings by purchasing a refurbished laptop. The refurbished laptops can be selected from renowned brands available in the market at a lesser cost. Such refurbished laptops are also got with 1 year warranty which can be extended up to 3 years. The warranty period supports replacement of parts and maintenance required by the laptop. Hence purchasing such laptops are very reliable. The refurbished model laptops enable the customers get more features at a lower cost. When the purchaser is bent on buying the latest, trendiest laptop, but cannot afford to buy a new one he can go for a refurbished laptop to get satisfied.

Since computer users are human, the user can be the primary cause of computer failure. And we operators of our computers are in most cases but that, we operate the computer but know very little concerning software and hardware components and peripherals.

Since this is the case, you should ASSUME NOTHING when diagnosing any computer problem. We diagnosed a new PC with a video display problem. After briefly looking at the video card it took a while to see that the video card was not pushed into the adapter slot completely.

Even though I looked at the card, I failed to check it thoroughly. This cause me to spend more time on troubleshooting that was not needed.The thought of a hard drive failure strikes terror in the heart of every computer user.

This is because a hard drive failure may lead to invaluable data loss. Here are the most common procedures you should perform when you experience hard drive failure.

General Hard Drive Troubleshooting

The hard drive can display problems such as “retry, abort, ignore” or “cannot read sectors” while operating. This is an indication that there may be bad or unreadable spots on the drive. Reformatting and reinstalling the operating system can normally correct this problem. This will cause you to loose all data on your drive so it is important to always have a good backup of yourfiles daily.

There are good good utilities you can purchase that can repair hard drive problems without destroying data. The utility Spinrite is a good utility and only cost $200.00 which is a good price if you want to avoid the hassle of reformatting the drive and restoring the operating system. Here are some general hard drive problems you should start from and we’ll be more specific later.

Use Operating System Utilities

First you may be able to correct those bad spots and errors from your hard drive by performing those PC maintenance in the operating system. Windows has Disk Defragment and you should run disk defragment after running Scandisk since scandisk will need to fix any problems it finds. After scanning the drive and defraging the files, run Disk Cleanup to ensure all junk files have been delete.

Check Drive cables and connections

If there is on indication that the drive is receiving power (you don’t hear that familiar clicking noise or the drive light is no working) check the 4 wire connector coming from the power supply.

If the connection is secure, you can remove the power supply connector and do two things. You can check to see if there is voltage with a multimeter. But its much faster to connect another 4 wire connector to the drive to see if the drive works. There are normally extra connectors from the power supply or you can use the connection to the cdrom drive to test for voltage from the power supply.

If the connection indicates no or very little voltage (4 volts or less) from the power supply, the power supply may be going bad. Now check and double check all connections, especially if you are someone else have recently worked inside the computer.

If the drive will not boot up…?

Boot the computer with your bootable DOS disk. If you don’t have one made, STOP and make one NOW by clicking on Start, Settings, Control Panel, Add and Remove Programs and Startup Disk.

Try to access drive C: by typing DIR C: and press Enter. If you see the directories on drive C: try to make the drive bootable by typing sys a: c: and press Enter. The system files should be restored and the drive may be restored to boot on its own.

If this fails, you may have to reformat and partition the drive with the setup utility that came with your drive or computer.

If the Drive boots but hangs up at boot…?

Turn the computer off, open the system unit and disconnect the ribbon cable at the motherboard end. Turn on the PC AND You will get an error message that the drive is bad and in most cases will go into your BIOS. Change the hard drive type to AUTO and shut off the computer.

Reconnect the ribbon cable and see if the hard works properly. The drive settings should be restored and should operate fine.

A hard drive that fails to boot up may also have a bad controller. If the controller is mounted on the hard drive, there is not much you can do except replace the drive.

About 14 years ago, 540 MB, yes, MB, hard drives were the most popular, and the possiblity to get a 640 MB hard drive was really fascinating. You could store data of about a hundred floppy drives into it, fill it with games, and c programs, and even run Windows 3.1 on it. What would world be like if there is a 740 mb drive then? Those were the thoughts when we were kids learning C programming at a local computer training centre.

A few months later, the 1 GB hard drive came out, and with new windows 3.1 applications too rolling out, the possiblities were endless. Then the 2 GB came out, then the 4.7 GB, then it was 10, then 20, 32, 40, 80, 120, 160, 250, 500, and now the most popular drive around is 1 TB. And I still cant get enough of storage, or dump my DVDs into my new 500 GB drive. i guess I will have to buy another one and RAID them together to get 1 TB, and when the price of the 1 TB drive comes down, get one of those as well and raid them all together.

My main drive that hosts the operating system is still a good old 40 gb drive, which is for the operating system alone, and absolutely no files are stored on it.

DVD drives are still slow. When hard disk to hard disk copy only takes very little time, as the data transfers in about 30 MB per second, the DVD drive with a lot of struggle supplies only 6 to 7 MB per second. Hope the blue ray thing that is coming up is faster than this.

Linux used to be for geeks. Not any more. With Fedora and Ubuntu on the first quadrant, Linux has become an operating system that is for everyone.

Why is Linux better than Windows?

In my blog I always praise Linux for several reasons. Let me list out a few points.

1. It is Open Source. You can customize it as you like.
2. It developed by a team of people just like you and me. You can give bug reports to the development which will certainly be reviewed, you can design graphics, and you can be an alter-ego to the OS, while with Windows, you cannot be anything more than a consumer.

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3. Windows is full of bugs, that can be fixed only by the developers. In linux, you are the developer. You can either fix it yourself and put up the fix for distribution, or wait for someone else to do it, as you will find people rushing up to get it done.
4. Linux has no intentionally placed bugs as in Windows.
5. Possiblity of virus infection of your computer is almost 0 when compared with that of Windows. No virus scanner is required, and that leaves your PC with a lot more resources.
6. Linux is a lot more Stable than Windows. Has got great security and is very strong, and no one can really hack into your PC.

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