ARGH...Murphy stikes!

[Steve]

My "new" Dell computer at the house decided to crash last night. Of course the 1 year service warrenty expired on Feb. 8th. Par for the course!

:bhd:bhd:bhd:bhd

[Remo]

That sucks Steve!! Murphy is a b!tch :sl

[equetefue]

sorry to hear Steve. Did you lose the hard drive? or is the computer not booting up. I'm praying is the power supply that failed.

[Blueface]

Murphy sure sucks, specially when he hogs up the ice, not once, not twice but 3 x's.

[maninblack]

Haha. I was thinking this was a bomb thread about our member Murphyslaw. Oops.

[bruceolee]

This is why I left PC's and went to Mac's. Nothing against PC's, I just got sick of the constant spyware, malware, Viruses, and crashes. Since going mac 2 years ago, not a single issue. :)

Sorry man! I hope you get it fixed and back in working order. I know how bad this sucks.

[equetefue]

Jason is right. I personally haven't gone that route yet, but I built and setup a server in my house which backups every computers I have every night.

[Steve]

sorry to hear Steve. Did you lose the hard drive? or is the computer not booting up. I'm praying is the power supply that failed.

I'm afraid it's the hard drive. It locked up on me last night while burning a dvd. When I finally got it to reboot, the Dell diagnostic tool came up, then it told me it was "repairing" the drive, then that the drive could not be repaired.

Doom on me.

[icehog3]

Murphy sure sucks, specially when he hogs up the ice, not once, not twice but 3 x's.

Simmer down now. :)

[CigarNut]

It might still be recoverable/repairable -- at least enough to save your important data (p**n, etc. :)). I would suggest taking it into a local repair place. In some areas the Best Buy Geek Squad is pretty good -- you might check them out. Otherwise, I would get recommendations from friends/co-workers on a good computer repair place.

[Blueface]

Simmer down now. :)

:lr

[Remo]

It might still be recoverable/repairable -- at least enough to save your important data (p**n, etc. :)).

:banger:banger Save the important stuff!

[Steve]

I actually did a backup of my data (music, documents, etc.) a week or so ago. What's going to be a pain is finding the program installation files for Office, Nero, etc., not to mention the original install of Windows Hate. and the drivers for my video card, etc...

[equetefue]

Im telling you p**n kills PCs

:r:r:r

[MurphysLaw]

I thought I was sleep bombing...hope you get everything restored bud!

[Steve]

Of course I never "got around" to creating a recovery disk of the original install image.

:bhd:bhd

[bruceolee]

Jason is right. I personally haven't gone that route yet, but I built and setup a server in my house which backups every computers I have every night.

I'm the semi-computer literate person at my job and even today my coworkers still bring in their computers to me LOADED with spyware and viruses asking me to fix it for them. My first response is always "buy a mac" and my second piece of advice is buy external hard drives and set up an automated backup system. I've had to play the role of "doctor" to them delivering the fatal news of "it's all gone" and "I did everything i knew how to do"

I convinced my parents to go mac despite their protests and having to learn a new system and once they started learning they've fallen in love with it. There's not a huge difference between them other than you don't get too many viruses on them just due to the fact that they don't make a lot of viruses on macs and when one is released it's practically national news and within a day there's a patch for it. All I can really say is I'm happy with what i've got but there are ways to prevent them on PC's but backing up is the smartest first step.

[Blueface]

Jason, one word:
Time Machine

Well, one word if you say it really fast.:D

[Steve]

Fortunately I have "most" of the data files backed up. The last backup was a couple of weeks ago, so not that much lost. It looks like somehow the partition got jacked up. I was not able to just restore (which would have left my data) but am in the process of resetting it back to the out of the box condition from a year ago. At least I won't have to go looking for drivers, etc. Just the registration codes for Office, Nero, etc.

I love computers!


Hey, I bet those pesky SUn Spots caused by Global Warming did this too me...:noon:noon

[Steve]

Also, somehow this happened 2 days BEFORE my warranty expired. How did that ever happen???

[Steve]

Two and a half hours in and I am 44% reset...gonna be a long night!

[bighairlogo]

I'm the semi-computer literate person at my job and even today my coworkers still bring in their computers to me LOADED with spyware and viruses asking me to fix it for them. My first response is always "buy a mac" and my second piece of advice is buy external hard drives and set up an automated backup system. I've had to play the role of "doctor" to them delivering the fatal news of "it's all gone" and "I did everything i knew how to do"

I convinced my parents to go mac despite their protests and having to learn a new system and once they started learning they've fallen in love with it. There's not a huge difference between them other than you don't get too many viruses on them just due to the fact that they don't make a lot of viruses on macs and when one is released it's practically national news and within a day there's a patch for it. All I can really say is I'm happy with what i've got but there are ways to prevent them on PC's but backing up is the smartest first step.

Macs can very easily get Malware, Viruses not really.

[MrClean]

Good luck Steve. I know I hate spending money on drives that I consider to be just 'sitting there', but getting a sizable external drive and creating an image and backing it up really is a must if you keep any pictures or documents that are not replaceable.

[Steve]

I have a WInBook external that I use for backing up, but it's older and only a 500meg or so. Tomorrow I'll be shopping for a new one with a couple of terrabytes.