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Haynie

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Joined
May 20, 2011
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Page Arizona
This is just a rant, and it is a very bad day.

This is nuts. Every time I turn around one of our PCs is dying. We are down to one out of three, and I get a a blue screen of death every 30 minutes or so on this one. Okay, the other two were like 13 years old, and this one is 6. I am learning that things don't last for ever, and I have to plan to replace. It ticks me off though. I have tried to restore to an earlier date several times. Errors make the restore fail.

The big issue is this is our office computer. If I take it in for repairs I have nothing else. Repair places here want it in their shop and in line before they will put it in the line, and they are running a minimum of a week out. I can't be without this computer for even a day.
 
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Back it up the best you can and go get a new one. I know that not what you want to hear but that maybe reality. You could try and new Hard Drive and see what happens. If you can get an external Hard drive and transfer all your important files to it, then either get a new puter or hard drive. It is probably the hard drive that is on it last legs
 
Mark; My sympathies are with you. It is time for a new computer or three.
Take a look at Craigslist for good deals on computers. Dell makes good, inexpensive computers. Don't count out a laptop.

The most difficult part of replacing any computer is reinstalling all the software to make it work. DO NOT REFORMAT/ERASE THE HARD DRIVE YOU HAVE!!! The data on the hard drive can be transferred to your new machine even if the machine will not boot.

You may want to try one of the computer cleaning programs, but be careful, some of these are just ripoffs.

Added later: A USB memory stick can be used to copy all the data from a hard drive and then easily copied to a new machine.
 
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Sounds like you haven't done hard drive maintenance and there are deteriorating sectors or information on good sectors getting corrupted.

Try copying it to another drive (usb hard drive or second internal drive, etc.) then repairing your disk with software and copying it back, or just copy to a new drive and use that (sometimes not really easy in terms of time but better than lost data and programs).

Wouldn't hurt to check your DLL files first, I've seen a corrupted DLL cause that kind of problems - of course there are all kinds of other things that can cause it too and it's usually the last one on the list to check that turns out to be the problem after you've done everything else first.
 
My neighbor dumped one my way a while back because it had blue screen issues. The only thing wrong was a layer of lint on the heat sink that blocked all the air flow. It just kept overheating. They need to have the dust taken care of once in a while. Good luck...
 
A word of advice. If it is a business computer, DON'T get windows 8. Check Amazon. They have LOADS of window 7 machines available. Two months ago I couldn't find a windows 7 machine for love nor money, but the vendors are actually listening to their customers, and now everyone is offering windows 7 systems again.
 
frank123 said:
Sounds like you haven't done hard drive maintenance and there are deteriorating sectors or information on good sectors getting corrupted.

Try copying it to another drive (usb hard drive or second internal drive, etc.) then repairing your disk with software and copying it back, or just copy to a new drive and use that (sometimes not really easy in terms of time but better than lost data and programs).

Wouldn't hurt to check your DLL files first, I've seen a corrupted DLL cause that kind of problems - of course there are all kinds of other things that can cause it too and it's usually the last one on the list to check that turns out to be the problem after you've done everything else first.
Click to expand...

And I thought this was an english forum :biggrin: I did not understand a single thing in the first or last paragraph.

All this computer is used for is Quickbooks run off and stored on a separate drive, MS office, and accessing go daddy. My boys play games on it when they are stuck up there. Nothing fancy.
 
Haynie said:
frank123 said:
Sounds like you haven't done hard drive maintenance and there are deteriorating sectors or information on good sectors getting corrupted.

Try copying it to another drive (usb hard drive or second internal drive, etc.) then repairing your disk with software and copying it back, or just copy to a new drive and use that (sometimes not really easy in terms of time but better than lost data and programs).

Wouldn't hurt to check your DLL files first, I've seen a corrupted DLL cause that kind of problems - of course there are all kinds of other things that can cause it too and it's usually the last one on the list to check that turns out to be the problem after you've done everything else first.
Click to expand...

And I thought this was an english forum :biggrin: I did not understand a single thing in the first or last paragraph.

All this computer is used for is Quickbooks run off and stored on a separate drive, MS office, and accessing go daddy. My boys play games on it when they are stuck up there. Nothing fancy.
Click to expand...

Hard drives store information on portions of the disk called sectors, they can deteriorate in their ability to be read and the information contained there can be destroyed or become erratic to read. There are disk maintenance programs that can identify this and copy the information to good portions of the drive then mark the bad sections so they are no longer used (recover the information, sometimes works but sometimes not perfectly).

The information itself can be written and re written all over the place to the point that the computer can't find and put it all together again in useable form, this is called fragmenting. Windows does a reasonably good job of de fragmenting these fragments and put them back together sequentially so they can be easily read, but it doesn't hurt to use a program that totally fragments it that is not a part of windows. (copying it to a new disk then back again removes fragments as well if a program cannot identify and correct it).

DLL's -dynamic link libraries- are sort of mini information programs within windows that other programs use to perform their various functions. They can get fragmented or otherwise corrupted and will cause all kinds of problems if they do. Many of them are installed by the program that uses them without you being aware of it when the program is installed. some are inherent to Windows. There are various ways to check this, I think there are programs that will do it for you and don't require you to know how to do it on your own (when I suspect this problem I usually just delete the suspected file then reinstall it, or find a copy on the internet and install it over the one on the disk).

Gaming, particularly if over the internet, carries all sorts of potential problems and shouldn't be done on a critical computer if it can be avoided. One of those things that may or may not cause a problem but why take a chance if you don't have to.
 
Check to see if all your fans are running. That sounds like heat related problems. You have at least two fans, one in the power supply (blows out the back of the machine) and one on the CPU. There may be others as well, depending on the system.
 
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