The problem with the money-saving scheme described in the subject line is that you need to have an almost-dead laptop with a 70 GB drive. Well, I did.
So I bought a disk enclosure, opened up the laptop, pulled out the hard drive, plugged the drive in to the enclosure, connected the now-external drive into a USB port, and saw that the drive in question was a 70GB. It was very easy. Thanks to:
- The many sources of $10 disk enclosures.
- Prime Electronic Components, who sent the enclosure right away.
- Microsoft Windows, which recognized the external drive right away, with no need to quibble about drivers, ports, etc.
Some of us come out of the episode with more mixed reviews. FedEx got confused because I combined my work address with my home zip code, and that cost us a couple of days. The Cirago Mobile Storage USB 2.0 Hard drive enclosure is rather shoddy. The scary thing is that I chose it in part because it lists for $15 (and was on sale for less). I dread to think what the enclosures that list for less than $10 are like.
The dying laptop was bought, reconditioned, from Dell. It wasn’t in particularly good condition when I first got it.
But the hard drive lives on. I plan to make it my music drive, and, with 70GB, it can handle the job pretty well.