What To Do with a Dead or Broken Laptop

What Can I Do with a Dead or Broken Laptop?

Dear Lifehacker,
My laptop—my enduring partner and long-lived friend—has finally succumbed to the ephemeral nature of its existence. I've spent a few days crying tears of love and loss, finally reaching the conclusion that the most logical course of action is to resurrect the poor, fallen computer I cannot live without. But what are my options? What can I do with a laptop whose lifeline has run short?
Sincerely,
Lonely Without Laptop
Remixed title image from Collin Anderson.
Dear LWL,
I'm sorry to hear about your laptop. Clearly you both were, uhm, close. Although this is an emotional time and it may be hard to hear, few options involve restoring your laptop to its former glory. Sometimes you just have to move on. But that doesn't mean your laptop can't find new life in other ways. Here are the many options available to you.

Try to Fix Your Laptop

Unless your laptop's motherboard has died or you've rendered your display useless, fixing your "dead" laptop isn't out of the question. In fact, it's probably realistic. You could pay for a professional repair service to handle the problem for you, but often times the cost will be higher than the actual value of your machine. If you can't afford a new one, or simply don't want to spend money unnecessarily, you can often fix the problem yourself. Assuming you know what's actually broken and needs replacing, just follow these steps:

1. Order a replacement part. You may need to call the manufacturer and provide your model number to figure out the specifications for the part you need to order. While you can often order that part directly, you'll probably find something cheaper on Newegg, Amazon (consider the used and refurbished gear in some cases if it saves a lot of money), Craigslist or eBay. Alternatively, if you've got a Mac you can turn to the iFixIt parts store.
2. Figure out how to replace the part. If you're just replacing a hard drive or a stick of RAM, chances are the instructions are in the manual that came with your machine. This is because RAM and hard drives tend to be user-replaceable parts. This is not always the case, but you'll generally find that to be a problem more often with Apple laptops than any other brand. Either way, you'll find many repair guides for Apple and standard PC laptop hardware at iFixIt. If not, do a web search for "repair guide" and the name of your model. There's always a chance one of your fellow internet citizens has posted some form of assistance.
3. Order the part you need and follow the guide to replace it. (This much is probably pretty obvious.) Be sure to keep track of all the screws you remove. I find it helps to separate them into an array of small bowls so you can easily locate the different types and don't risk accidentally brushing them off your worktable.

Hopefully once you're finished you'll have a working laptop again. It won't last forever, but it'll keep your computing companion alive a little bit longer.
Photo by S. Baker.

Strip Your Laptop for Parts

If your laptop can be an organ donor—which is to say, you've decided to open it up and remove the still-functioning hardware inside of its casing—there's a lot you can do. You can sell the parts individually on the black market Craigslist, or just put the entire computer up for sale at a reduced price (usually around half of its going rate as a used product) while noting that it isn't fully functional.
You can also keep many of the parts you dissect for other uses. If they still work, the hard drive, optical drive, RAM, and display can have their uses down the line. In most cases, the hard drive and optical drive can be placed in their own external enclosures to be used as individual devices on another machine. Losing a laptop sucks, but gaining a couple of handy peripherals is a better outcome than nothing. RAM is always handy to keep around in case you can use it in another machine. That machine may not be your new computer, but it makes a nice gift to a friend who could use the extra boost. Finally, the display can be turned into a standalone monitor. Additionally, it's one of the more expensive components so you may want to sell it locally on Craigslist or remotely on eBay (and sometimes even Amazon).
Photo by Tim Sheerman-Chase.

Transform Your Laptop into Something New

If you can't fix your laptop and don't want to strip it for parts, there are several DIY projects that can help you make better use of the hardware that's still functional. What you can and cannot do will, of course, depend on what your laptop can still do. If its motherboard is dead, nothing will be an option. Virtually anything else, however, can still keep it functioning on some level.
If you've lost the trackpad, keyboard, and/or display, you have a lot of options. For starters, these handicapped machines make great network-attached storage devices for downloading and serving files on your network. If the display still works but you've only lost the trackpad and keyboard, your laptop is in perfect condition to be turned into a touchscreen tablet. When a broken case is the issue, your laptop might just make a better desktop. You could even mount it on the wall or under a cabinet.

Hopefully these ideas have helped you find a way to keep your favorite laptop alive in some way. May it be with you forever, whether externally on your desk or internally in your heart.source lifehacker

Top Ten Antivirus 2012

Top Ten Antivirus 2012

Here is the list of the best antivirus and security software of all times. Among the top are BitDefender, Vipre, Norton, ESET, F-Secure, Kaspersky, TrendMicro, AVG, Avira, Zonealarm, Panda security and more. We will be running comparisons between different versions of the same security software, for eg., 2011 version vs 2012 version. We will be also comparing between the capabilities of different security software, for eg., BitDefender vs Norton. Based on the performance of various different antivirus security software, we will give them scoring. The factors on which we will score antivirus software: Speed, stealth, detection, link scanning, removing virus, updates, blocking bad websites, blocking phishing attempts, technical support and lots more factors. These are the antivirus programs we will be testing to come up with our

SSD'S SHORT FUTURE?

Computerworld - SAN JOSE -- As the circuitry of NAND flash-based, solid-state drives shrinks, performance drops precipitously -- meaning the technology could be doomed, according to new research.

Speaking to about 500 attendees at the 10th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies here this week, Laura Grupp, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, said that as NAND flash densities increase, so do issues such as read and write latency and data errors.

While the density of SSDs grows and the cost per gigabyte shrinks, "everything else about them is poised to get worse," Grupp said.

"This makes the future of SSDs cloudy: While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them attractive for many applications, the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it difficult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications," Grupp, lead author of the study, wrote in a research paper.

Grupp, along with Steven Swanson, director of UCSD's Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and John Davis of Microsoft Research, tested 45 different NAND flash chips that ranged in size from 72 nanometer (nm) circuitry to today's 25nm technology. The chips came from six vendors.

The tests revealed that the program speed (write speed) for pages in a flash block suffered dramatic and predictable variations in latency. And, as the NAND flash wore out, error rates also varied widely between devices. Single-level cell (SLC) NAND held up the best in the tests, while multi-level cell (MLC), and in particular, triple-level cell (TLC) NAND, produced the worst results.

The researchers took their empirical results and extrapolated them to the year 2024, when NAND flash development road maps show flash circuitry is expected to be only 6.5nm in size. At that time, read/write latency is expected to double in MLC flash and increase more than 2.5 times for TLC flash.

In addition, bit error rates increased by a factor of more than three, according to the researchers. "We can either have capacity or performance," Grupp said.

The researchers used PCIe-based flash cards with a channel speed of 400MBps based on the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) specification and a standard 96 NAND flash dies, which is typical of SSDs.

The researchers did not use specialized NAND flash controllers as are used by SSD vendors such as Intel, OCZ or Fusion-io. Instead their results were baseline and considered "optimistic" because they didn't include latency added through error correction or garbage collection algorithms.

Because SSDs have no moving parts, the time needed to write and read data is more than 100 times faster than that of hard disk drives that use read-write heads on actuator arms to find data on a spinning platter. But as NAND flash circuitry continues to shrink in size, the performance gap with hard disk drives will become more narrow,

By the time NAND flash shrinks from 25nm today to 6.5nm in 2024, SSDs based on TLC flash will sport as much as 16TB of capacity and MLC flash SSDs will have 4TB, Grupp said.

Considering the diminishing returns on performance versus capacity, Grupp said, "it's not going to be viable to go past 6.5nm ... 2024 is the end."

Read and write latencies related to SSD density and type. (Source: UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering) by lucas mearian