Getting hard drive from laptop

[Suzieb]

Hi all, I posted a question last week about my laptop possibly being broken. Apparentley it is - the motherboard is fried and it's going to cost too much to fix.

So now I want to get all my music, photos and uni work from it. Please bare with my total stupidity now - I have no idea how to do this. My laptop is still in the computer shop. My parents seem to think I need to buy a USB stick to take all of my files off of it, but I have a HUGE amount of files - is that right?

Somebody mentioned something about a USB Caddy - I'm not sure what this is either.

Lastly, where can I sell my Toshiba laptop for parts? Is ebay my best bet?

Thanks in advance!

[ChuckFickens]

A USB caddy is an external enclosure that can have the hard drive from your laptop fitted into it, you then plug the enclosure into another computer and you can access all your files that were on the drive.

To be honest, if your computer is in a repair shop I'd be tempted to ask them to supply a USB caddy and fit the drive into it for you (unless they try and charge much more than about £25 for the caddy and about £10-15 for fitting the drive)

If you want to do it yourself and save a bit of money you can buy caddies for about £15 (+p&p) off the internet but you need to make sure you get one with the correct type connector in it for your hard drive.

[Halifaxmum]

I don't know owt about computers, but I did sell my knackered Dell laptop for £60 on ebay, as well as the next cheap laptop for £30 - I think computer know-alls will say it's not worth s@@t but try ebay - I did and was surprised!