I have a Dell D620 laptop. It died on me a few days ago, it refuses to turn on. On eBay, I found a stripped D620 (no battery, no hard drive) for less than $50. If I took the hard drive from my D620 and put it in the one from eBay, would it work just like my old laptop, or is the eBay computer not going to like my HD?
It should, even to the point of not “knowing” anything had changed, especially if you move your RAM (assuming your RAM isn’t part of what stopped working, of course).
It is possible that a Dell laptop has a special flash memory thingamabobbie that stores certain parameters (on a Mac it is called the “parameter RAM” or “PRAM”), and which, as a piece of the hardware, would fail to carry some of those parameters over —most likely things like preferred boot order of devices, for example.
Before you buy anything, remove the battery and unplug the power supply from the wall. Let them sit for a good half hour. I’ve had this bring some apparently dead laptops back to life
Thanks for the replies.
I tried everything I could do to bring it back to life, but it just wouldn’t do a thing. I found a Dell help board online that had a few tests to try, and it failed all of them. The post on the Dell board said that if they did not produce a response (at least a boot to the BIOS screen) that the motherboard was toast. I’ll only sway RAM if the eBay computer has less RAM than my old one, and even then, once I have tried to boot it.
Like I said, the eBay offering was less than $50, delivered in 5 days. If it will put me back where I was, I’ll be happy.
You may need to re-activate Windows.
I’m running XP on that machine.
Hmm. That used to require re-activation over the phone, but since XP is no longer supported by Microsoft, I’m not sure if they’d even do that.
I’ve done “brain transfers” many times with Dell Latitude laptops and as long as it’s the same model I’m sure it’ll be fine.
Have you confirmed they are the same hardware? It looks like, like most Dells, there are variations. It could be running a single core or dual core processor, for instance. And it looks like it has different GPU and display resolution.
That could be a bit of a hiccup, though I’d hope it would just detect the slight hardware changes.
With a D-series Latitude it’ll be fine. Worst case scenario you’d need to switch from an Intel to an AMD video driver or vice-versa but nothing that’d cause a BSOD. There’s usually not that much of a variation if it’s the same model.
Thanks. I did make sure the stickers on the (Intel Dual Core and Microsoft Windows XP) stickers were affixed as they were on the older unit. Now, just to wait for it to get here.
Sounds like you’ve already ordered, but make sure you’re not dealing with a bad power supply.
But for your OP, swapping the hard drive over will work fine so long as the HD isn’t the failure. I’ve done several times at previous employer that was all Dell. We had a few hundred of that model at one time.
In my experience a dead laptop is usually the power supply (the cord that plugs into the wall.)
No, I have another Dell D-Series laptop, a D600, which works fine with the power supply. I suspected the power at first, as Dell plays games with their power supplies, but not in this case.
For anyone who is interested, I use the computer to run the inventory for a small business. All freeware (except for the XP install, which is legit on the machines I’m using). Open Office is amazing!
Anyway, the hard drive (a SSHD I installed just for this build) is fine. I’ve removed the data files I need from it without any problem. By Friday, I should be back to where I was with the [del]new[/del] eBay computer.