Hey everyone, I have to make this quick, I'm using my mom's computer. Mine died this morning.
I guess I won't be going to Musical Echoes this year afterall.
This will kill my festival fund, but I have to have a computer. I'lll be back online as soon as I can.

That is a common occurrence, these days. Kinda reminds me of state of the auto industry.......recall after recall, but with computers, they just let you pay to replace, after they sell you junk, because there's no one forcing them to do recalls.

Jim, I take it you are a bit of a computer geek, you know most of the time they can be revived & recovered after the initial panic attack recedes!
The problem with building and knowing computers is.....mine is older than (....) and I still keep patching it up!

Exactly what's wrong with it?

Yes, I'm no computer geek, but when my Macbook fried I thought I had to buy a new computer. Turns out I just needed a new hard drive, which I bought locally for $100 and I installed it myself using a Youtube video! My computer has been working great for a couple of years now and I am only out a hundred bucks. You can find anything on the Internet now: diagrams, schematics, tutorials. Basically, you just Google what went wrong with your computer and sift through the results until you find something that fits. I'm a techno-phobe and I have fixed my computer twice!

My computer was going. I was having a hard time booting it up. I tried replacing the power supply but that did not help. Finally it crashed and I threw in the towel. I bought a new HP ProBook running Windows 7. I was able to stay online and hang in there through the whole process because I had bought a little Netbook for Echoes last year. The Netbook is a little inadequate for a main computer but its great for emergencies and to get online.

Its not just the cost of a new computer but also it takes a lot of time to get the new one configured, install/re-install software, update drivers for the new operating system, restore data,etc.

I must admit, I dropped out of sight for a week or 2 during that process.

I hope you get your computer issues ironed out quickly, Jim.

Art

Hope you recover without too much cost. Probably a hard drive failure, especially if it is windows.

Hiya, Jim: (and, "Hi" Mom!)

I'm kinda' a tech. (PC, not Mac). Do you want to try to troubleshoot your computer? Like zone1 said, they can often be salvaged, and replacement parts are cheaper than a new PC.

What symptoms?
Was it acting up for a while, or just happened all of the sudden?
What's your Operating System?

My MacBook Pro is less than a year old and recently started having problems with the video display. Fortunately it was on the Apple Care plan (through my college) ... didn't cost anything to replace a motherboard and LCD screen--and they were amazingly fast. Didn't even lose anything on my hard drive (though I also had it backed up).

Never had anything go out on any Mac, but one hard drive, and one monitor, over 18 yrs.

Still, those were both in more recent years, and now Apple is designing with more off the shelf kinds of components, so less reliable hardware, is going to be more common from this point forward.

PC, on the other hand, at work.......well that's a constant battle, that never ends. I have been on a temp computer now, for weeks.

Rick, I think you hit the nail on the head!
Even a home built Win Pc can be fairly reliable with a good choice of components, skip the ----m-rt deals!
In my opinion the latest Os (win 7 64bit) is probably the best yet (a very comfortable intuitive feel) as long as folks don't poke around under the hood too much or use obscure software.

That said, overall the components and software are not nearly quality controlled and configure tested as Mac.

Hey, it's me... Hopefully tomorrow I'll be back up and running.
As for what's wrong, not sure. The tower just keeps crashing. No blue screen or anything, it's just one second fine, the next dead. But it isn't the power supply, that was the first thing I checked... it still has a green light, so it's internal, motherboard or something.

It's an older Vista machine and it's been having problems for a while now... I need a new one anyway. I don't know if I'll be able to retrieve any of the old hard drive yet or not... there's a couple way of doing it. But honestly I'm not so sorried... I need it ASAP for something new and very much flute related I just started. I need the ability to record, everything else, including Echoes, is not important...

Hopefully tomorrow I'll be back on my own system.

Jim, first check all your fans (south bridge, video board and case fans) if all are turning and everything seems well there, boot it up in safe mode and see if it hangs in there a long awhile. That will give you a small clue if its a hardware or an Os related problem.

Agree with zone1 - could be overheating and shutting down. Did you hear any of those "fan bearing" noises the week before she started acting up? Your hard drive (and data) is likely intact.

We use Samsung LCD monitors where I work and have had several internal power supplies die prematurely (after 2 years). The culprit are some bad capacitors - apparently, there were a bunch of counterfeit capacitors on the market and Samsung bought a ton of 'em and used them for a while before the problem became an issue. I believe I read somewhere that Asus (a motherboard maker) had used some counterfeit CAPS, too. If you look at the capacitors on your motherboard, and some are bulging, perhaps even leaking, you might be able to replace those bad CAPS and be back in business (these CAPS are cheap and pretty easy to solder to the board).

Let us know if you need help retrieving your data, if necessary.

Good Luck (Win7's way better than Vista anyway!)

OK, I'm back. I found a really nice system onsale... this time with Windows 7... woohoo!!! I am so tired of Vista.
Gonna have to skip Echoes, but that's OK... there will always be other festivals.
I've been also thinking it might be an overheating problem, but I can't find anything obvious. I can get it to run maybe 15-20 minutes and then it dies...
So anyway, I'm using a memory stick to try and get what I can transfered before the old one kicks off... it's a pain in the butt, but it's working. I tried doing a dicect file transfer, but the old one dies before much of anything gets done. And I haven't slaved a harddrive since windows 98... I'm not going there on a new machine.
But using a memory stick is actually working out fairly well. Just gonna take a while. Hopefully I'll be able to retive the important stuff before it quits for good.

Then I have to go install all the music programs, etc... bleckkkkk... I hate this part...

Sorry for your pain......but that is the windoze world.

If your new computer has an extra hard drive bay and it will accept the hard drive from your old computer, then the simple thing to do is simply put the old drive in the new computer's extra bay. You'll have to change the jumpers on the drive to make it a secondary drive, but once that's done, it will show up as a second drive and then all you have to do is open it up and copy the stuff you want from the old drive to the new. Very easy and simple. (Assuming the old drive is compatible with the new computer.)

That was fast Jim!
Your bummer crash was a very good reminder for several of us to back up our important files . . . again!
Besides super slow dial up, it's mostly my photoshop program that gives me fits, but such is the yin yang of life.
I really wish that my overall computer usage was as reliable and handled with as much ease as my flutes.

Or a similar route: buy a cheap usb2 external Hard-drive case = ide or sata, whatever your old drive requires, then simply plug it in and find and transfer the files you need at your leisure!

I haven't slaved a hard drive since Windows 98, but I have a friend that's gonna try to get the rest off of it for me.

Only reason I could do it quick was to spend the festival fund...

But yeah, I will be paying much better attention to backing up everything I do from now on... and I would recommend you all do the same.

Yep. Backing up is so important. I had my 1.5 terabyte music drive suffer a catastrophic head crash and die on me a few weeks ago. Fortunately I had most of my music backed up on a drive at work and I was able to find some software that allowed me to transfer music from my iPod back to my computer. (Apple won't let you do this in iTunes.) The rest I cobbled together from a couple other sources. I believe I've got most of it restored except some of the CD's I ripped more recently. I'll just have to pull them out of the garage and rip them again. If I'd had an up to date backup, I'd have been golden. But I'd gotten lazy and didn't have a recent backup. Sigh........ It would have saved so much trouble.

Yes, I use the newer Acronis True Image Home which has a continuous non-stop back-up to another drive and then I back-up to a external drive also when I remember too!
The great thing is the image can be transferred to a new PC if need be without any boot record problems....although I hope I don't need to do this in the near future.

Jim, if you put the old drive in an external case you don't have to slave anything, just plug it in via USB2!

I did this and it works great. Now my old hard drive can be used as an external drive for future backups.

Even less expensive, buy a SATA to USB adapter (unless the new computer has an eSATA interface). You leave the old hard drive plugged into the old power supply but hook the SATA cable to the adapter. Then you turn on the old computer. It doesn't have to boot. As long as there is power going to the hard drive you can transfer data. The adapters are cheap. Here's one for less than $6:


http://www.amazon.com/USB-to-eSATA-SATA-Adapter/dp/B002BC32OG/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1302079222&sr=8-10


Good luck!

Art

Sounds like what you have is a bootable backup. An excellent idea if it works.