This just another one of those questions I get asked on a daily basis. Well I usually answer the questions by looking first at how old is the machine. If it is a laptop and is three years old or older I tell the person I would not put a lot of money into it. I have seen quite a few times when someone wanted to put at least $200 to $300 into the old machine just to have it work for three months and then the motherboard dies.
Well now you have spent $300 and have nothing to show for it. No one will buy it for parts so all that's left is to recycle it and take a loss. Usually the warranty is over due to a part maybe having 90 days or less. Sometimes a part may a year or more, but the labor was only 30 days, so now it will cost to have it replaced. Either way it is a lose lose situation and you are at the losing end.
I will advise the person to go in to a new machine for a few reasons beside the fact that the machine is older. One the motherboard, memory and processor are older and run at a slower front side bus speed. The second reason is that you generally have a windows xp operating system. I try to explain that windows xp will not be supported in 2014. This means no more security updates so the machine becomes more vulnerable to virus attacks. At some point the virus people will not support the older operating system.
My advise to the person is to come in and talk with a sales person and get prices on a new system and transferring data to the new machine. If they decide to go with that plan, then I explain that the could take that old hard drive and put it into an external enclosure and use it for a back up drive it it is big enough. If it say is 250gb or less then I suggest just using it to back up their data. They can always keep it in a static bag, so this way if something goes wrong with the new hard drive they still have their data.
I have found that most customers tend to go with the above plan and use the old drive as a back up drive. I will have to admit the choosing to do this depends on how expensive the old machine was. I never try to force anything on anyone. I merely give them their options and let them make up their own minds. The customer is always right and honesty is always the best policy.
Thank You for reading . All comments are always welcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment