The family laptop that coasted through the summer holidays is about to be doing homework, coursework and video calls every single day. September is the worst possible time to discover it won’t hold charge, has run out of storage, or has quietly stopped backing anything up.
Here’s the checklist we’d run through ourselves. None of it is dramatic — it’s the handful of things that genuinely make a difference, so a student starts the term with a machine they can rely on rather than one that lets them down in exam week.
Start with an honest health check
Before spending anything, work out what you’re dealing with. Is the laptop actually broken, or just tired? A machine that boots but feels slow, runs hot, or fills up constantly is usually fixable and worth keeping. A machine with a failing screen, dying hinges and a worn keyboard is telling you something different.
The quick self-check: does it turn on reliably, hold a charge, connect to Wi-Fi, and get through a normal task without freezing? Anything that fails those basics is worth sorting now rather than in week three. If you’re not sure whether a machine is worth keeping, that’s exactly the kind of thing an honest laptop repair assessment answers before you spend a penny.
The upgrade that makes the biggest difference
If a laptop is simply slow, there’s one upgrade that outperforms everything else: fitting an SSD (solid-state drive) in place of an old mechanical hard drive. It’s the difference between a laptop that takes two minutes to become usable and one that’s ready in seconds. On an older machine it’s genuinely transformative — and far cheaper than replacing the whole laptop.
Where the laptop allows it, adding RAM helps too, especially for students juggling a dozen browser tabs, a video call and a document at once. Between them, an SSD and a memory bump can give a five-year-old laptop another few years of useful life for a fraction of the cost of a new one.
Battery: will it last a school day?
Batteries wear out quietly. A laptop that lasted all day when it was new might now be dead by lunchtime, and you only find out at the worst moment. Test it honestly: unplug it and use it normally. If a full charge no longer covers a morning of lessons or lectures, the battery has had its day.
Most laptop batteries lose meaningful capacity after around 800–1000 charge cycles, so a well-used machine that’s a few years old is a prime candidate. Replacing a tired battery before term is a small job that removes a daily source of stress.
Back up before term starts — not after a disaster
This is the one we plead with people about. The single most upsetting job that comes through our door is a student’s laptop with a failed drive and the only copy of a dissertation or coursework on it. It is heartbreaking, and it is almost always avoidable.
Set up two layers before term begins. Turn on cloud sync — OneDrive, Google Drive or iCloud — so everyday work is protected automatically, and keep an occasional copy of the important things on an external drive. That way, if the laptop is lost, stolen or the drive dies the night before a deadline, the work still exists somewhere else. If the worst has already happened, data recovery can often retrieve files from a failed drive — but a five-minute backup beforehand beats it every time.
New vs refurbished: what’s actually the smarter buy?
If the old laptop really is beyond sensible repair, don’t assume brand new is the answer. For the same money as a cheap new laptop, a good refurbished business machine typically gives you a sturdier build, a better screen and a proper keyboard — the parts a student notices day to day — because business laptops are built to survive years of daily use.
The things to check: that it’s been genuinely refurbished and tested rather than just wiped and resold, that the battery health is reasonable, and that it comes with a warranty and someone to call if it misbehaves. Our own refurbished laptops are cleaned, tested, set up with a fresh operating system and backed by a warranty for exactly this reason.
The five-minute pre-term checklist
- Turns on and runs without freezing or overheating
- Storage: an SSD fitted, with room to spare — not a drive that’s 98% full
- Battery: genuinely lasts a school or lecture day
- Backup: cloud sync on, plus an occasional external copy
- Updates: operating system and browser current, so it stays secure
- Clean-up: trial software and junk apps removed so it’s not fighting itself
Run through that in August and September looks after itself. If any line on it needs attention, we’re happy to take a look and give you a straight answer on what’s worth doing — drop into our Putney workshop or give us a call before the term-time rush.
