Laptop help/suggestions

[jab step]

So I've had my laptop for five years now and it's been great for me. Barely has given me issues. Today I got a message stating a Smart Failure, basically meaning my hard drive is gone.

I'm not tech savvy and I know a few of you guys are so I have a few questions. Don't worry I googled too haha.

1) Why did my hard drive just burn out? Any way to avoid this in the future?

2) How much are hard drives? Replacing one seems easy, but I also need a windows disk to reinstall windows which I unfortunately don't have. How much am I looking at in terms of fixing this thing? Fyi I own a Vaio with an is processor.

3) I want to buy a beater laptop. A laptop I use for browsing, youtube, word, ppt, pdfs, and streaming NBA games. That's all I do with a computer. School work, browsing, and streaming games, movies, etc. Any suggestions on a very cheap beater? Are chromebooks good? I'm accustomed and enjoy windows.

Thanks

Inb4 get a mac haha.

 

[yeah]

1. Hard drive failure is, unfortunately, unavoidable. Regardless of how well you take care of your machine, with enough use the hard drive will fail. These days, there is a practice called planned obsolescence that most manufacturers employ. Products are built to fail. Just a reality of the world we live in.

The best way to mitigate it is to take care of your machine. Try not to let it overheat, clean it on occasion (2-3x a year,) and avoid too much prolonged use. Your HD will still eventually fail, but you'll get some mileage out of it.

2. Depends on the hard drive, if you want it to be solid-state, and the machine you're buying it for. You can get a pretty good HD for