For budget, probably not too high, although I'm not terribly sure what that means right now haha. I would probably use it mostly for music production on the go, so something with a decently fast CPU and a good bit of RAM would be fine. Not looking for a main production system, just something that will work.
The Ultrabooks are a good place to start if you have the budget for them - thin, light, great battery life. The CPUs are typically on the less-speedy side, because you have to trade off size to get the cooling and battery life for more beefy CPUs, but honestly, having a solid state drive in there will reduce a lot of that. I really like the look of the Lenovo Yoga systems, and they've gotten good reviews. I know you said you don't need a convertible but the nice thing about the Lenovo is you don't sacrifice anything to make it a convertible - it's just a regular laptop, and you can fold the hinge further back. The Samsung ATIV Book 9 is a really nice piece of hardware and is more traditional: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-NP940X3G-K01US-13-3-Inch-Touchscreen-Laptop/dp/B00DVFMDN8/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-NP940X3G- ... 00DVFMDN8/</a> I'm tempted by the Samsung every time I look at it.
Any way to recover the data on a laptop that took a bath? I removed the hard drive, put it in front of a heater (low-med setting) for about 6 hours and then put in a zip loc bag with a bunch of desiccant packs. I just put the hard drive in an external enclosure and plugged it in. The computer recognizes it but nothing happens except for the HD making a slight squealing noise.
Honestly? Sounds like you're fucked. im dubious about the heater, for immersed tech I use a jar of rice at room temperature, but I live in the tropics and can't actually quantify why a heater makes me uncomfortable while half awake. But the slight squealing noise? That's not good. That sounds to me like moving part has seized, and for practical purposes on a platter style srive, that means it's fucked unless you've got a five figure budget or very high end skills.
The heat was probably okay as long as it was fairly low heat and the drive wasn't powered up. You don't want your drive to get too hot but the big danger is heating it up and then having the components being out of alignment when it gets powered on. Depending on what you mean by "squealing" it's either fucked or really fucked. If squealing sounds like one piece of metal rubbing on another piece of metal, then you're damaging the spinning platters because a head is crashed and is rubbing on it. If squealing sounds like electronic noise or is very high pitched, it's probably the drive trying to spin up and failing. Cost can vary a LOT but there are some places that will do it for ~$1000-1500 now. Some companies will charge less if you're not in a hurry for your data, but even at that it's usually around $600-800 depending on the amount of data.
It's an electronic squeal. Definitely not two parts rubbing together. The heater... I had the HD laying flat with the heater blowing down on it. I had it set to low-med, wasn't really much warmer than room temp. I'm going to give it one more shot and then call a local company that has recovered data for us. Yesterday was apparently a banner day for our company laptops. I had 4 others come in with different ailments. One has some kind of ransom thing going on. I may be asking more questions later...
If it's the Cryptolocker ransomware, researchers cracked it and you can get the files back: https://www.decryptcryptolocker.com/
This is what I got when I tried to open of the files... I've run 3 virus scanners and 2 malware scanners. One showed a couple of registry keys, the rest showed nothing detected.
My understanding is that CryptoWall has not been broken and you either have to pay the ransom or give up on the files.
No big deal, I mean, you just have to restore files from your versioned backup history. You have a version-aware backup system in place, right?