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What to Do With an Old Working Laptop PC

Posted On : Dec-18-2009 | seen (681) times | Article Word Count : 580 |

Two-year old laptops still in good working condition are a good candidate for disposal these days. You have increasingly powerful and cheaper laptops with widescreen displays, larger 1GB memory and more capacious hard disk drives that you begin to wonder why you still keep banging the keys on your poor old laptop or notebook PC.
Two-year old laptops still in good working condition are a good candidate for disposal these days. You have increasingly powerful and cheaper laptops with widescreen displays, larger 1GB memory and more capacious hard disk drives that you begin to wonder why you still keep banging the keys on your poor old laptop or notebook PC. Well, go ahead and invest on a new one. It’s certainly not advisable to upgrade a 2 year old laptop unless you have a good source for pre-owned or unsold inventories of PC and laptop parts that can be had for a bargain.

Memory modules and hard drives that are the most common upgradable parts of a laptop are quite expensive and sometimes difficult to come by depending on the brand or model of your laptop. Rather than spend on them, you can let it do any of the following.

An Internet Workstation

Or you could make it your internet station. Old laptops sporting even a Celeron processor with 256 MB ram and 80GB of hard disk capacity can work as an internet and emailing PC that can be just as capable or even more powerful than many new netbooks coming out just focused on internet access. You probably won’t have built-in WiFi on these oldies, but there are WiFi dongles you can get for a song to make an old laptop WiFi-enabled. But it’s almost certain that most 2-year old laptops do have one.

You can then lug around malls and café’s with hotspots and work from there on Word or Excel files you need to finish in time for a meeting or report submission. You could even leave it on overnight to download large video files of application executables and get them first thing in the morning without fear of getting any virus infestation. Use your new PC or laptop as a standalone workstation with no internet access so you can be sure your new toy won’t be getting any new viral infection soon. Downloaded files or email attachment you need to upload can be sent via blue tooth between your old and new computers or from a flash drive.

Archiving Workstation

Old PCs can remain useful as a data storage device. Same with laptops which you can use as a desktop PC rather than a mobile computing device. Just make sure the laptop is forever tethered to the battery charger all the time. Using more capacious 500 GB and 1 TB USB-connected external hard disk drives, your old laptop can provide you with back storage capacity for current files on your new laptop as well as provide archiving storage for old files that you won’t need to access on your new laptop buy but can be useful as references. Storage solutions don’t need powerful CPUs as they are essentially I/O intensive operations with little CPU intervention other than to as interrupts for start and stop disk operation.

A Music Center

A laptop is certainly an overkill for merely acting as your mp3 player. But not when it’s already a 2-3 year old computing gadget. If it has a 256k memory and an 80 GB hard drive, that’s good enough to make it as a music center for your home listening needs. About the only thing you can consider spending on it is to attach a USB-powered external hard drive. Those 500GB to 1TB drives would be suitable for storing high definition video files. GP

Article Source : http://www.articleseen.com/Article_What to Do With an Old Working Laptop PC_7305.aspx

Author Resource :
ITC Sales are a leading supplier of Dell and HP Laptops such as the Dell Precision and Vostro. ITC also supply servers such as the Dell PowerEdge

Keywords : Dell PowerEdge, Dell Precision, dell, poweredge, sc1430, 1900, 2900, SC440, 840 tower, server, solutions,

Category : Computers : Hardware

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