Hard drives and optical drives are the most failure-prone items on a laptop. They're also among the easiest to swap out, upgrade, or, in some cases, live without. Here are the best fixes for saving, ...

My girlfriend has an old PB laptop (Athlon XP Mobile 2200+ vintage) with a broken (physically snapped off!) CD ROM drive. Windows XP (original install, 4+ years old) finally gave up the ghost. in ...

Recently I became the mostly happy owner of an HP Pavilion dm1z. I say “mostly happy” because I wasn’t thrilled with its performance. To give the system a boost, I decided to swap the pokey 5,200-rpm ...

When I wrote a series of How-To guides showing how easy it was to swap old Mac hard disks for new solid state drives (SSDs), I focused on raw upgrades — slow mechanical drives for fast chip-based ones ...