My Computer

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Hi Everyone

Last Saturday I had a major problem with my computer. I was doing my weekly maintenance and when I was in the middle of a virus scan one of these pesky Windows Error screens pop up. I shut down the computer and a very lengthy disk scan occured. Once the disk scan was finally done the computer got stuck on a Windows Starting Up screen and never went any further. I called Dell and we tried several things. I had to call someone from the Yellow Pages to come and pick up my computer. They had to clean out the Hard Drive, fix several bad sectors and reinstall Windows XP. It's working, finally, after a week! I'm just getting use to it, since I have to actually reload some programs that were not loaded but other then that, it's okay.

after 20 years in the PC repair business, I can tell you there's 2 kinds of PC users (mebbe Macs too, just not as often..

1) Those who have lost their hard drive
2) Those who are going to.

I don't know from the sector business; most sectors that matter that much are on track 0 (or not too far away). Sorry to hear about the drive.

Back up early and often. Set restore points in XP (should be in Help). Save your serial numbers for programs, 'you will be seeing this material later', as they say in the service.. And be happy you're not stuck with Vista...

Oh, lord...
Reminds me of my old computer. I forget what the problem was called, but it had some sort of memory problem that made it reboot randomly. All the time. Whenever it felt like it.

memory leak? Thats a software issue.

Ok

You should really look into investing into an external hard drive "just in case" a similar thing happened to my computer (I turned it on. It didn't go on. Reason: the CPU fried)
Thankfully I duplicated all my important files to an external hard drive.

if it was just the CPU taht fried you could still get the info off the HDD. infact if teh MOBO is stil intact, just need to replace CPU and comp would still work.

still it is a good pratice to back up

I went through a whole re-install on my mac because I have this bad habit of peering through all my files and deleting ones that 'look' like I don't need them anymore... lol... did that with my windows computer too.

Last week I received my new hard drive for my macbook... a 120GB to replace my 60GB.
I FINALLY backed up everything for once.
I used Backup3 from Apple, putting everything onto disks and onto my Maxtor external Harddrive.
I also used SuperDuper to create a bootable copy of my hard drive onto the Maxtor when I replaced the drive.
So now...
I have my old system on DVD's, the Maxtor as a backup, the Maxtor as a bootable drive, and in the original 60GB drive which I will turn into another storage drive later.

I am about to have my daughter backup all her files to the Maxtor also and to disk.

I've learned my lesson about that.

Now... if I can only recover the information from my other external drive that took a fall and no longer talks to me....

I experimented with Linux on a laptop and had to reinstall XP but prior to that had hardware issues such as bad CPU, bad RAM, and latter a bad motherboard (Thank you Best Buy and HP )