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It seems that if it is not one thing it is another with me and computer stuff these days. I went to fire up my laptop this morning, as I quicky wanted to check something before going to work. The operative word being quickly.

Anyway, the computer went through all the opening screens, but then nothing. No desktop, no nothing. Tried rebooting in safe mode, and several other things, nothing.

Brought it into work, and called tech support for Compaq. He had me hook it up to a remote monitor, to see if there was a problem with my video card or something. He figured if he could get in, there were some things he could try. No dice.

So he said, "I hate to break this too you, but it seems your hard drive may have been corrupted by a virus or maelware or something". He went onto say I would have to do a complete dump and restore to "see" if that fixed it. I immediatly called my daughter in law as she had JUAT had the same thing happen to her PC...and we do share alot of files and pictures and stuff. She suggested bringing it in to whre I bought it to have the geeks look at it...just to make sure. She thought if my hard drive was bad, just restoring it may not solve the problem.

I of course went into total melt down mode...the last thing we can afford right now is to shell out more money for fixing things..so much has gone wrong in the last few weeks. She reminded me I may end up putting out less than $100. She had spent close to $400 on hers..as she had them do a bunch of things, and expedite the process. I left her call not feeling much better.

She must have been pretty concerned..as less than five minutes later, Rick called. He said.."I just got off the phone with Brenda...she was a bit concerned as you were melting".

So, he said. just bring it to Circuit City, leave it if I have to and don't worry about the money.

I am far from a happy camper right now. But just wanted to keep you all in the loop of the ongoing saga of my life.

Oh, maybe it isn't anything too serious. Your Rick is a sweetie.

So, afterwork I went to Circuit City, laptop in hand. Wend back to the Firedog guy and said...fix this please. He did the PC recovery thing for me. No charge. Now I am back to reinstalling all my softwear and all my cookies.

I am doing a Norton system update now.

Glad it worked out.

When mine melted, John had a spare hard drive so we still had all my photos and files on the old drive to recover later. Hope you didn't lose anything irreplaceable.

Marie5656;563958 wrote: So, afterwork I went to Circuit City, laptop in hand. Wend back to the Firedog guy and said...fix this please. He did the PC recovery thing for me. No charge. Now I am back to reinstalling all my softwear and all my cookies.

I am doing a Norton system update now.






You have cookies ? I do like cookies. :-6

My laptop had a meltdown about 2 years ago!

And it was the hard drive! Lost everything!! :-5 Boo hoo.

Fortunately it was still covered by one of Dells repair plans. It was repaired within two days and didn't cost a penny more than the original policy!

Next to lawyers, computers have got to be the biggest drain in the world on a person's finances. You reach a point of desperation where you can't see any end to the throwing of money at the damned thing! Talk about rackets!

About a month ago, I finally decided to make the jump from dial-up service to DSL. I ended up making 3 or 4 roundtrips by transit bus, out to the suburbs, which is where the computer parts store I usually deal with is located. I had to buy something I'd never heard of before called an, "ethernet adapter," (Does this mean they give ether to computers?) And of course, you can never tell for sure you've gotten the right thing until you get it back home and try it out. It's on those occasions when the part you've bought doesn't work, that another roundtrip by bus to the suburbs is called for. Do you see what I mean? I don't have a car.

After I'd gone running to and fro, one of the technicians I spoke to on a toll-free technical assistance phoneline, informed me I needed to have a minimum of 128 mgbytes of hard drive space in my computer in order to acccomodate DSL. Well, fortunately, with the installation of a memory expansion card, my computer's memory was capable of being enlarged to 128 mgbytes. In fact, for safe keeping, I went ahead and expanded the memory to 256 mgbytes, the maximum amount my computer can handle. But here again, I had to make still another run out to the computer parts store.

It was while I was in the process of buying the expansion cards that the salesclerk mentioned I was going to need a more powerful operating system to run DSL, than the system I told him I currently had. He suggested I simply buy a new computer but I didn't feel like doing that, since this one is only 7 or 8 years old. I ended up buying a copy of Windows XP Professional at a cost of an additional $209.00. It then took twelve hours to install that.

They don't tell you you're going to need all these other things when they try to sell you one of their DSL packages, do they? They let you find out the hard way instead.

There's a happy ending to this story, though. I don't have much free disk space available at this point but, with that exception, the computer's running beautifully, DSL and all.

Nomad;567418 wrote: You have cookies ? I do like cookies. :-6


I will be more than happy to send you some of mine, Nomad.