Computer woes

[fini]

bake some cookies for a single IT guy and have him over?

...and hide them inside the computer. The old "carrot on a stick" technique.

Good luck, Amy! If it were me, I'd ask my youngest daughter to invite over one of her geeky friends (she attends a tech high school).

[peshewah]

If your back-up fan runs more than normal does not mean your power supply is going out. It simply means that your computer is running warmer so the fan will run to throw out the heat possibly because of warmer weather and/or your computer is dusty inside and needs to be blowed out. As far as the main problem goes, do you have a stand alone video card or is it integraded in your motherboard? If you have a video card open your case and see if the fan is running on the card itself. Make sure all your wires are connected to the card good and tight. I wish you lived near. I love tinkering with computers. But I bet its not your power supply.

[fenderbender]

It needs to be diagnosed by someone...it could be the Bios or the Motherboard may be going bad....Sounds like what happened to my last windows machine

Either way pull the hard drive and install on another pc to make a back up.... Don't worry your data should be there

You can get a 500 gig external for a couple hundred bucks good investment or do online storage ...or do like a friend of mine who is cheep and email a copy of everything important to yourself and don't take it off the server!

[JJkizak]

1......Make sure the processor fan is running and that it is clean. Same with video card fan and cabinet fans and power supply fans.

2......With the power off and unplugged remove and re-insert all memory cards, and connectors on the motherboard and the hard drives and dvd drives.

3......After turning on the computer go into the bios and check the fan data, that is if will stay on.

4......Bad memory chips will cause that problem. Also power supply, processor fan, and bad caps on the motherboard. Also a loose connector.

5......Absolutely get rid of all Symantic software and use something else. If this was on when you installed SP-3 your machine is corrupted.

6......If your machine is 3 or more years old consider a new one. At this age it is probably 10 generations behind.

7......Hard drives have special test discs that tell you if it's bad. If the data is critical I would try it in another machine. If it works Ok that means something failed in the other machine.

8. ....These are the simple things to check. Good luck.

JJK

[Ray Garrison]

Hi Amy.

I was going to send you a direct email, then thought that was kind of dumb...

While many of the suggestions you've gotten here are good, I would strongly advise you to do absolutely nothing, resist the urge to keep trying to fix this, and call Geek Squad or your local trusted IT professional. There are many more ways to make things worser than betterer. Unless something truly catastrophic (and unusual) happened to your disk, you should be able to recover the documents and pictures and such - applications might be another story, but those are replaceable.

Once you get this fixed, I'd suggest looking into something like Carbonite or iBackup - these are on line services that are very inexpensive and maintain an offsite backup of your files. I use Carbonite at home and iBackup here at work, both are great. iBackup runs a scheduled backup of our network server and the office PC's every night at 2AM, and Carbonite automatically backs up everything in your Documents folder whenever it's changed in real time in background.

[BigStewMan]

have you checked the configuration.sys file? sorry amy couldn't resist...that was a line from an 80's Mac commercial. a guy is doing a presentation and his computer fails--the audience is computer geeks and everyone starts yelling out suggestions. good luck and i hope you get all of your pictures back.

[Dflip]

Is it an HP machine? If so when you install XP SP3 it will do this. There are instructions on the net as to how to solve this. I have to get ready for work, but can take a look later. HP used the same image for both Intel and AMD chips and this seems to have caused the problem. The AMD machines seem to be the problem. A friend of mine had this happen, I was able to go back to an early version in SAFE mode. Then I found the information on the net, Microsoft even put out instructions.

Not sure if this helps or not.

[Amy]

No, it's not an HP machine and I haven't installed SP3. I bought the computer 2 years ago...it has Win XP Pro installed. I have not run any Windows updates since purchased.

Here's the latest:

I talked to my computer guy (where I bought it) because I'm scared to rummage around in there myself (thanks for all the tips, though..I decided I'm just not comfortable enough to do myself). Because I told him about the loud fan noise before the computer shut down, he said to open the case, clean it out, and call him back. When I did that, I must have blown out a pound of dust. That could not have been good... Note to self: Schedule Routine Dust Maintenence.

Anyway, I called him back, still no luck booting. Just get to Starting Windows, then a restart (infinite loop).

He suspects a corrupt Win file, so I'm getting a disc to load missing files from. Hopefully, that's as simple as it is, and I can recover my stuff. I should know tonight.

If successful, next step: buying a second harddrive for a clone.

[rscotth]

Get a MAC!

[fenderbender]

 

Get a MAC!

Amen brother!!!!

Mac and Time capsule = []

[LarryC]

I would strongly advise you to do absolutely nothing, resist the urge to keep trying to fix this, and call Geek Squad or your local trusted IT professional. There are many more ways to make things worser than betterer. Unless something truly catastrophic (and unusual) happened to your disk, you should be able to recover the documents and pictures and such - applications might be another story, but those are replaceable.

Absolutely take Ray's approach, IMO. I wouldn't try anything further yourself if I were you. I hope it doesn't go this far, but I used someone I found in the yellow pages who specializes in data recovery, got it all back as far as I can tell.

Tell the data recovery person what files are important to find and preserve, e.g., past emails that you keep from a private (non-Klipsch.com) e-mail account.

[Invidiosulus]

He suspects a corrupt Win file, so I'm getting a disc to load missing files from. Hopefully, that's as simple as it is, and I can recover my stuff. I should know tonight.

If successful, next step: buying a second harddrive for a clone.

If it is a currupt windows system file then it should be rather easy.

I've had a number of computers come into my office(happens to be Marvel's office as well) this past year that were doing similar things.

It hasn't been as common for them to reboot as it is for them to display an error message about a file being corrupt, although I have seen it that way.

If you have a windows XP CD you would just boot to the CD, either by setting it to boot to CD first in the BIOS or by hitting one of the function keys to bring up the one time boot menu (usually F10 or F12) while the computer is starting before it gets to the loading windows part.

Once it loads from the CD it should ask you whether you want to install windows or try and repair windows using the recovery console.

If you hit R to get to the recovery console it should load into a DOS type command line.

You can type CHKDSK /R (check disk / repair) to check the hard disk for errors/corrupt files and then it will automatically try to repair/replace the damaged system files.

This will check the entire disk for errors but obviously only the windows system files can be automatically replaced, sometimes orphaned or damaged files such as pictures and documents can be recovered but that is not all that common.

It sounds like your tech guy has a disk that should work for you though.

Hope you get it all figured out.

Peace,

Josh

[Colin]

I had that problem, did not know removing the battery (for two days! That seems strange, 15 seconds should do it) clears the BIOS, or that recordable discs only last 5 years

damn, that Ray gives good advice, don’t think I have ever disagreed with him in all these years!

Not a PC pro, just a computer geek (will work for home-cooked dinner)

mine was missing dll files, probably from a virus, data fine, put in second internal hard drive for $40, used FREE Iomega back up software (https://iomega-na-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/iomega_na_en.cfg/php/enduser/cci/platform.php?prod_lvl1=8&prod_lvl2=63&p_prods=8,63&p_pv=2.63&p_sid=NZJCA66j) to back up all changes in all files, both eher at at work to 2 different drives!

Ceelox Vault will also sync and encrypt your folders to a second drive

You should keep up with the Windows updates – they make your PC more secure (which is good English meaning a little less un-secure)

[Amy]

Josh, Thanks so much for the instructions, that's exactly what I needed! All is well again. Will back up shortly ... Thanks everyone!

[Marvel]

That's my boy! [][Y][Y][Y][Y][Y]

[Daddy Dee]

One among many reasons to be proud!

[Invidiosulus]

Glad to have helped.

[Canadian_Dude]

Good thing that fixed it. The last time my computer did that I had to buy a new motherboard.

[synthfreek]

[Marvel]

What is the pic of the Mac supposed to mean? Is this wehre I mention the Macs we have gotten at our school that came in DOA? I didn't think so. The only reason they don't fail as often as the myriad Windows PCs is because there aren't as many of them. []