I bought a new laptop this week. Brand new, never been used. I decided to see if my skeptisism was warranted with new laptops. I always advocate buying a new laptop and immediately changing the hard drive drive for a retail one. Laptops are cheap now for a reason. The reason is,  they are skimping on something. Usually the screen or the drive. For as many bad hard drives I see on relatively new laptops, I knew something was fishy.

My test is random, but it's my experience and I thought I'd share. One of the first things I did when I got my new laptop was to run Drive Inspector Pro on the new laptop drive to see how things are. Sure enough, my findings were as expected.. At boot, my drive had a 47% reliability and had issues reported with the S.M.A.R.T system. See this link  for the screenshot. I cloned the drive onto a brand new-in-box Western Digital Scorpio laptop drive and ran the test upon first boot. You can see those photos here . Quite a difference. 100%'s all the way around as it should be. In addition, the drive temp is much cooler than the previous one.

So, my question to Lenovo is...just when were you going to fail? When I needed you the most? When I was in the middle of an important presentation or when I was giving a PC Party to a group of 10 people?

I bought a Lenovo (IBM) T60, reportedly one of the most reliable laptops and a staple in the business market.My laptop had a dirty little secret. My drive was half way in the grave when I got it. I suspect it is happening all over and with most manufacturers but since I do not get fresh laptop computers every day I thought I'd test this one out.

 As a laptop goes, after a week with the new drive, I like it. I am feeling much better with the data being on a new drive too!

My point, download Hard Drive Inspector Pro and run it on your system. NOW.

Oh, and never trust new laptops.