had my hdd failed? i think so

[alphason]

my acer laptop was left unattended and was just seeding torrents, when i returned to it it had crashed. restarted and get the following message " pxe-e61 media test failure,vcheck cable... operating system not found" so i removed the hdd and saw no obvious signs of damage cleaned the connector but made no difference. it a hitachi 2.5 inch 160gb about 6 years old runs 12 hours a day most days.

i guess the hdd has gone? so is worth while to replace hdd or whole laptop. assuming it is the hdd at fault?

considering the age of the laptop maybe as well to buy a new one better spec acer now only about 12.000 without os. when i bought this acer they put on a 'copy' of windows and some other stuff for 500b so i guess i could get the same done with win8 (?) for a similar price. looking on the 'net it seems a new hdd is around 2,000b plus i would again need the os on top.

thanks

Sent from my Gpad using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

[lopburi3]

If you were happy with computer before I would go for a new HDD and upgrade Ram to 4 if only 2 now. That should be a big improvement and may last many more years and likely not cost much. It could also fail; but so could a new computer.

[JakeBKK]

If you were happy with computer before I would go for a new HDD and upgrade Ram to 4 if only 2 now. That should be a big improvement and may last many more years and likely not cost much. It could also fail; but so could a new computer.

Good idea. 160 GB drives do de-facto not exist any more.Get yourself a 500 GB one ~ 1800 THB and a memory upgrade as lopburi3 suggested.

[alphason]

its only 1gb ram, the battery now only lasts under 30 minutes and is missing number 6 on the keyboard (our cat seems to have taken to the number 6 key). its a pentium 1.86ghz 1mb cache.

so i am edging towards a new one i think ... acer 4gb ram 500g hdd pentium b2020 2.4ghz 2mb cache 1gb video usb3 hdmi 12,900 + 600 for win 7 etc installed. ok price and available today with a step up from what we have now. maybe i will buy a cheap ebay hdd to fix the old one and sell it on cheap or keep for spare?

thanks for replies

Sent from my Gpad using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

[VBF]

its only 1gb ram, the battery now only lasts under 30 minutes and is missing number 6 on the keyboard (our cat seems to have taken to the number 6 key). its a pentium 1.86ghz 1mb cache.

so i am edging towards a new one i think ... acer 4gb ram 500g hdd pentium b2020 2.4ghz 2mb cache 1gb video usb3 hdmi 12,900 + 600 for win 7 etc installed. ok price and available today with a step up from what we have now. maybe i will buy a cheap ebay hdd to fix the old one and sell it on cheap or keep for spare?

thanks for replies

Sent from my Gpad using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

With respect, it sounds (ahem)well used, however I have had computers in worse states than that and carried on using them.

If you wish to splash the cash, a nice shiny new machine would be great, BUT......... if you decide to upgrade disks and/or memory, please check that the BIOS is compatible. On a machine of that age, that may be an issue.

I'm going to give an opinion now, so no flaming please.... "For a given amount of money, if you don't need the portability of a laptop, get a similar or better desktop."

Why? Simply because individual components may be upgraded more easily and without needing to go to the original manufacturer. I have 4 desktops (yes, I know I'm an anorak but I am an IT contractor!) ranging from 11 years to 3 weeks of age. All the old ones have been in pieces and upgraded, modified and/or fixed many times with parts from Amazon or wherever. My laptop were it to need attention, would require me to be very selective about parts, to say nothing of the difficulty accessing the internals.

Just my thinking!

[rakman]

Run the bios on the laptop and see if the drive is recognized by the laptop.

If nothing found, it's probably toast.

Also, listen to the drive as you power on the laptop. No spinning sound, it's dead. If you hear a clicking sound, it's dead.

Personally, with the price / performance levels of today's laptops, its hard to pass up on a new one.

[EveryDayTheSame]

Visit this site and download "spinright" after reading the explanation of exactly what it does.

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

[JamieP]

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?2655-PXE-E61-Media-Test-Failure-check-cable

[ravip]

its only 1gb ram, the battery now only lasts under 30 minutes and is missing number 6 on the keyboard (our cat seems to have taken to the number 6 key). its a pentium 1.86ghz 1mb cache.

so i am edging towards a new one i think ... acer 4gb ram 500g hdd pentium b2020 2.4ghz 2mb cache 1gb video usb3 hdmi 12,900 + 600 for win 7 etc installed. ok price and available today with a step up from what we have now. maybe i will buy a cheap ebay hdd to fix the old one and sell it on cheap or keep for spare?

thanks for replies

Sent from my Gpad using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

so i am edging towards a new one i think - Yes, go for the new.

[innerspace]

First try the hdd in a different machine.

If it works then maybe the motherboard has died...if so bin the laptop. But check cables and connectors first.

If the drive is dead consider a ssd....will give a good performance boost to an older laptop and now quite affordable.

Fixing it up may get you an extra year. New laptop will be great for a year and then ok for a few more. All depends if now is the time to upgrade or not

[sustento]

If the laptop is six years old it's likely to have an IDE drive/interface so even if you could get your hands on an IDE SSD it wouldn't make much difference to the performance which would be limited by the IDE interface. Time for a new laptop...

[guzzi850m2]

With respect, it sounds (ahem)well used, however I have had computers in worse states than that and carried on using them.

If you wish to splash the cash, a nice shiny new machine would be great, BUT......... if you decide to upgrade disks and/or memory, please check that the BIOS is compatible. On a machine of that age, that may be an issue.

I'm going to give an opinion now, so no flaming please.... "For a given amount of money, if you don't need the portability of a laptop, get a similar or better desktop."

Why? Simply because individual components may be upgraded more easily and without needing to go to the original manufacturer. I have 4 desktops (yes, I know I'm an anorak but I am an IT contractor!) ranging from 11 years to 3 weeks of age. All the old ones have been in pieces and upgraded, modified and/or fixed many times with parts from Amazon or wherever. My laptop were it to need attention, would require me to be very selective about parts, to say nothing of the difficulty accessing the internals.

Just my thinking!

+1

I also only use desk top at home and uses a ultra book and a net book for travel.

The graphic card failed on the desk top pc but was easily changed.

[topt]

so i am edging towards a new one i think ... acer 4gb ram 500g hdd pentium b2020 2.4ghz 2mb cache 1gb video usb3 hdmi 12,900 + 600 for win 7 etc installed. ok price and available today with a step up from what we have now. maybe i will buy a cheap ebay hdd to fix the old one and sell it on cheap or keep for spare?

Can I ask where you found such a good deal - seems cheap for those specs compared to when I was looking a while ago.

Also what screen size?

[alphason]

Thanks for all the replies.

Yes I cheked the BIOS and the IDE HDD is correct in the first position, but there is no entry in there so the HDD is not being recognised in BIOS.

[alphason]

With respect, it sounds (ahem)well used, however I have had computers in worse states than that and carried on using them.

If you wish to splash the cash, a nice shiny new machine would be great, BUT......... if you decide to upgrade disks and/or memory, please check that the BIOS is compatible. On a machine of that age, that may be an issue.

I'm going to give an opinion now, so no flaming please.... "For a given amount of money, if you don't need the portability of a laptop, get a similar or better desktop."

Why? Simply because individual components may be upgraded more easily and without needing to go to the original manufacturer. I have 4 desktops (yes, I know I'm an anorak but I am an IT contractor!) ranging from 11 years to 3 weeks of age. All the old ones have been in pieces and upgraded, modified and/or fixed many times with parts from Amazon or wherever. My laptop were it to need attention, would require me to be very selective about parts, to say nothing of the difficulty accessing the internals.

Just my thinking!

+1

I also only use desk top at home and uses a ultra book and a net book for travel.

The graphic card failed on the desk top pc but was easily changed.

Yes I agree with the logic of this, have owned desktops before.

But... I like the neatness of notebooks without all the extra cables and power plugs, and although it doesn't travel far it often moves around to different rooms in the house so convenient.

[alphason]

So yes I bought the new one in the end, and happy i did. Its noticably faster even just Internet browsing.

I had Win 7 and a bunch of other software put on, some I have since removed and added some other programs I regularily use. I had all my documents stored on Dropbox so it took a few hours to download all those. I also have a my book live NAS which is holds tv/movies/music so I had not really lost a lot from the old machine.

The biggest job was finding which of my downloaded torrents still had not reached the reseed limits, (i download them to the pc then move the video files to the NAS) so had to manually go through and reseed quite a few updating the download location for each.

I will still maybe try and get the old one working when I get around to it.

[alphason]

so i am edging towards a new one i think ... acer 4gb ram 500g hdd pentium b2020 2.4ghz 2mb cache 1gb video usb3 hdmi 12,900 + 600 for win 7 etc installed. ok price and available today with a step up from what we have now. maybe i will buy a cheap ebay hdd to fix the old one and sell it on cheap or keep for spare?

Can I ask where you found such a good deal - seems cheap for those specs compared to when I was looking a while ago.

Also what screen size?

I thought it was a good deal our last one I think was over 20,000 (??)

Did not really want to spend ages going around as i needed to get up and running again asap. So looked around on the Internetand seen this one in the Big C promotion brochure (you can donload the brouchure from their site) and Big C is easy for us.

Wife called them up Sunday to check and they said they said they would install all the software and have it ready to pick up by 7PM, went back after 7 and it was all finished. Paid 12,900 (+ 600 for the software direct to salesperson not big C).

Acer Aspire E1-431G

Intel Pentium 2020M 2.4Ghz, 2MB L3 Cache

Nvidia GeForce 710M 1GB dedicated VRAM

14.0" HD LED LCD

4 GB DDR3 Memory

500GB HDD

DVD Super Multi DL drive

Carry case

So far so good.