blue screen of death ?????

[bull]

I got it, and my computer is out of commission !!! tried 3 different repairs and reloads of software, time to bring in the specialists......   Thankful for my son's spare computer !!
Wish me luck..... hope, i can retrieve everything... it appear to be mostly internet relates

[Warbird]

Did you try booting it into Safe Mode?

[mburrow]

a lot of times it is a corrupt MBR (master boot record)
and can be repaired with the windows install disk
format and reinstall should also fix it, if that dont possible bad hard drive

[Onthesauk]

And thanks Bull for reminding me to back-up mine more often then I should! ;)

[sprucebunny]

Macs have the 'flashing question mark of death'

Lost my hard drive and two years of pictures this week.
Pictures seem to have fallen out of the backup from last December.

I'm sad.

[Ianab]

Welcome to my Day Job  :D

Usually I do OK out of old PCs that aren't worth fixing. Free disposal / recycle for parts on old PCs. Usually you get 3 dead ones, you can make two live ones. Rebuild them and give them to friends or worthy causes

Last 3 are all weird motherboard faults, so they are still three dead units   :(

I need some brain dead patients with dead hard disks or power supplies now as organ donors ...

Ian

[pineywoods]

Ian, I do the same thing. The back room of my shop is full of scrapped out pcs. My experience is that most of the time if it's a compaq, the mother board is dead one way or another. The old gateways seem to be the easyest to get going.  I haven't had much luck with laptops, too many brand specific parts. When I build up one out of parts, I usually load it up with some variant of linux, plus open office and firefox. Have you had any success fixing flat screen monitors? I find them just about un-fixable.

[Ianab]

Yeah, one of the DOAs is an HP/Compaq. Caps on the motherboard have fizzed, it boots and runs for 30secs or so, even on a Linux CD.

Most common fault on the flat screens is the electrolytic caps in the power supply again. The cheapo ones fail after a few years. Not as spectacular as the high voltage ones in the old CRTs, but they shut  down just as quick.

In the old days monitors cost $500 to replace, so $100 to fix them was OK. Now they cost $200 to replace, who would spend $250 to fix one....

Ian