Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Replace harddrive or buy new MB?

S

spellflower

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 7, 2005
236
16
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

This evening my MacBook started makng some weird clicking sounds and then froze up. I tried to restart it but all I got was a light blue screen with a folder and a blinking question mark.

I'm afraid the hard drive may be toast, and I'm going to the genius bar tomorrow to find out.

This machine is just a month shy of its third birthday. Stupidly, I did not get around to buying apple care before it's first birthday, so if I do replace the HD it will be on my own dime.

I'm wondering if it's worth replacing the HD on a 3 year old machine, or if I'm better off getting by on my iPhone until the new MacBooks come out.

What would you do?
 
Basically what it comes down to is..

Spend <$100 to buy a new HDD for a 3 year old machine and spend the time to install and transfer data.
Spend <$1000 on a shiny new MBP.

Because you didn't buy Apple Care and it's a 3 year old machine, I would just buy a new one. If the video card or logic board go next it makes no sense to repair those and you will end up buying a new mac anyway.
 
I would buy a new HDD and then sell your MB. Then use the money toward buying a new one.
 
Replace the hard drive and get snow leopard if you havn't already. 3 years is young for a laptop.

Did you backup data?
 
spellflower said:
...Stupidly, I did not get around to buying apple care before it's first birthday, so if I do replace the HD it will be on my own dime.t but all I got was a light blue screen with a folder and a blinking question ..
Click to expand...


A new hard drive is a lot cheaper than Apple Care. I'd say you lucked out.

A new drive you buy today for $100 will be larger and maybe faster then the old on. Maybe even spend some real $$$ and go with a solid state drive and make the old MB much faster
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Yeah, I did a time machine backup two weeks ago.

My MB never had any trouble, and Leopard was working fine for my needs.

I just don't want to throw good money after bad.
 
spellflower said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Yeah, I did a time machine backup two weeks ago.

My MB never had any trouble, and Leopard was working fine for my needs.

I just don't want to throw good money after bad.
Click to expand...


Replacing the HDD is probably the best way to go. If you know where to go, you can get one for less than $60
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

So if Apple wants to sell me a new drive and install it for me I should decline and seek one from a third party?

I don't have any experience with the insides of computers and I would prefer to have someone install the new drive who knows what they're doing, but I live in NYC so there are repair shops other than Apple available.

Of course, that all depends on if it is the HD. It could be something else for all I know, but I'll find our this afternoon.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Thanks for the video, molala. I think I can handle that. The genius bar said it was just the hard drive. They offered to put in a new drive for free labor since the top case was cracked and could be replaced for free at the same time, but they wanted $130 for a 160GB drive, so I decided to just have them fix the top case and order a bigger drive for less cash and put it in myself.

Can anyone recommend a drive?
 
Anything except Seagate at the moment. The toshiba's and hitachi's seem quieter than the western digitals. If you're lucky, you might find a Fujitsu, which are fast and quiet, but they stopped producing them a few years ago.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back