Green Tech Girl

I have an old Sony Vaio laptop, a Pentium III. I had installed the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on it back in December. It was working OK but the computer was starting to freeze at odd moments. The breakdown would inevitably occur after a very ominous KACHUNG KACHUNG sound from the hard drive.

I wasn’t sure if it was the Linux distribution causing the problems. I had heard from a friend that PCLinuxOS was a very good Linux distribution that happened to run very fast, particularly on older computers. So I downloaded it (Linux is, after all, free) and installed it. No go. The computer was now worse off.

I then went back to XP, which seemed to be a little better, but the computer was still not stable enough. It was to the point where I thought the computer may need to be retired as a giveaway to the local charity thrift shop.

I ran a utility on the hard drive and found it had a few fatal errors that could not be fixed.

Luckily, like any good techno pack rat, I happened to have an old laptop drive lying around from a Dell that had died two years ago. I had data that I was unable to get off the machine before the computer’s power supply completely fried. So back then, I had the forethought to remove the hard drive (in case I could get the data somehow) and gave away the computer shell.

Many tiny little annoying screws removed later…I opened up the Sony Vaio to find out that it did, indeed, use the very same hard drive (brand and model) as the long-lost Dell had. Now I just had to remove the Sony drive and put the one from Dell in there.

Easy enough, but for some stupid reason whoever had put the box together for Sony used some sort of industrial strength electronic screwdriver…the screws holding the drive in the metal frame were stuck in so far, they had practically merged with the frame.

My own attempts to remove the frame resulted in stripped screws. Now here’s one way being a female helps sometimes…I went downstairs and got my apartment manager to remove the screwheads with his drill.

Voila! I was able to replace the hard drive and now my Sony purrs like a kitten. I was also able to get my old data off the hard drive and backed up onto an external USB drive.

I then installed PCLinuxOS and could not be happier with it (review to come).

The moral of the story is this: Don’t throw away your old working hard drives, even if the machine tanks. You may be able to use them later to replace a fried drive. Don’t be afraid to take a screwdriver to your old hardware and poke around on the inside. Learning to fix your own computers will keep your computers healthier and happier in the long run.

And that, my friend, is one good way to cut down on the electronic waste. Keep those old computer parts out of a landfill and turn them into useful tools instead.