Searching for the Laptop
In late July my little sister requested my services of transferring the data from her old Asus laptop (which was not charging) to her new Asus laptop. The old laptop wasn't charging, and Best Buy techs confirmed this. I took it home, bought a replacement battery and charger and found the same thing (start with cheapest solution, work your way up to the more expensive solutions). I disassembled it and discovered the positive wire to the charging port had become frayed. While my soldering skills aren't the best I cleaned it up, soldered it back on, put a dab of hot glue to secure it and got it working again! I was able to make a tidy profit from it having sold it to a coworker too. Thus began my journey into fixing laptops...
So now I'm already looking on eBay for things to fix, knowing this could be another money pit. The next Asus I bought had unknown issues. When it arrived here I tested it and got no power. Simply disassembling it and reassembling it I was able to get power to it. That stroke of luck fueled my interest to the point of my visa seeing more action than it ever had. I had ongoing issues with an HP Probook 4440s, a Samsung NP-QX411L, two Asus Republic of Gamers laptops, and an HP Pavilion DV9500. On the positive side, the local thrift store was selling old laptops that they couldn't refurbish for only $10. one laptop was a Dell Latitude E5510 with an i7 processor and 4 GB of RAM. After only needing a new cover and a hard drive I was able to make a $75 profit. I also had better luck with a Samsung, but my best project was an HP EliteBook 8460p.
The earlier ProBook I purchased looked very slick, but the EliteBook was in a higher class and engineered logically. The reason I favor it is because I was able to get OS X on to it. This project required a little more research and I was able to find an entire thread on tonymacx86.com dedicated to getting OS X running on HP ProBook and EliteBook laptops. begrudgingly I was also forced to use Clover, which I had very little success with before on my main system but better luck with on my AMD motherboard. I just feel a great sense of accomplishment having invested around $125 and getting the equivalent of a MacBook Pro in my hands.
Now to get that credit card bill back down....
So now I'm already looking on eBay for things to fix, knowing this could be another money pit. The next Asus I bought had unknown issues. When it arrived here I tested it and got no power. Simply disassembling it and reassembling it I was able to get power to it. That stroke of luck fueled my interest to the point of my visa seeing more action than it ever had. I had ongoing issues with an HP Probook 4440s, a Samsung NP-QX411L, two Asus Republic of Gamers laptops, and an HP Pavilion DV9500. On the positive side, the local thrift store was selling old laptops that they couldn't refurbish for only $10. one laptop was a Dell Latitude E5510 with an i7 processor and 4 GB of RAM. After only needing a new cover and a hard drive I was able to make a $75 profit. I also had better luck with a Samsung, but my best project was an HP EliteBook 8460p.
The earlier ProBook I purchased looked very slick, but the EliteBook was in a higher class and engineered logically. The reason I favor it is because I was able to get OS X on to it. This project required a little more research and I was able to find an entire thread on tonymacx86.com dedicated to getting OS X running on HP ProBook and EliteBook laptops. begrudgingly I was also forced to use Clover, which I had very little success with before on my main system but better luck with on my AMD motherboard. I just feel a great sense of accomplishment having invested around $125 and getting the equivalent of a MacBook Pro in my hands.
Now to get that credit card bill back down....