Well gang. this should be an interesting post fer ya...

My main computer had a problem Sunday or Monday after my last post. I still don't know what did it, but everything was normal until I did a Restart. The machine wouldn't get to the Windows 'splash' screen, just kept restarting over and over and over. I found I could get to the bios settings without it restarting, I could boot on a floppy or a CD and things would be normal, but I just had some kind of problem with Windows.

There's a feature in the new Windows XP whereby you can put the Windows XP CD in a drive, boot on it, and hit the R key at the appropriate moment to restore a damaged Windows installation. This gets you to a Recovery Console screen that's a lot like booting to a DOS prompt on Windows 98 and down. I got here and did a CHKDSK (Windows XP's version of Scandisk, and a throwback to the old days of DOS for those that remember). Nothing was wrong here that I could detect. I finally did a reinstall OVER what I had on the hard drive, but the system was so SLOW it was actually S L O W . By this time I figured the problem might be a video card or hard drive problem or maybe memory. So, what does one do in a case like this? Take the suspect 'stuff' out of the computer and replace it with known good parts and retry. I did this, one at a time, with no real changes in system behavior.

We're now well into Tuesday and Dave's not having a good time. I had another machine handy so I could still do email and I also had a way to get to the Internet to try and find answers to what was wrong (this is always a big help, so don't throw out that older computer you might have sitting in a basement or closet if it still works and you can go online with it... better still, stay tuned to club reports and I'll show you how to network so you can use that old machine just like I do if you have a Broadband Internet connection (DSL or Cable).

I finally gave up trying to figure out what was wrong with the old box, and I thought I'd try a reinstall to a bare hard drive. The safe way to do this if you don't have a strong backup of your documents, pictures, and email stuff (mine was about a month old), the safe way is to get another drive and just build it up and then put the OLD drive back in as a second drive and pull the stuff you need from it to the new installation. This works if your old drive isn't completely dead... if it's dead, then the only thing you can do is punt it into the trash ** unless the warranty is still active ** and start everything from scratch and use what backup you have. It will be a struggle, but you'll be wiser after you're done, and maybe make a better backup and keep your stuff better organized. Also, having your screen name, email address and settings, passwords, and perhaps a list of the programs you have installed... have that handy on paper somewhere. A good tool (except for passwords which you could then write on the printout) is the Belarc Advisor. Use this to take an inventory of your system every time you make a major change. You could then use this as a roadmap to recover from a disaster.

Well, I'm gonna post now... I'll wax about this a little more later on, and you can be sure we'll be talking about it at future club meetings.

Dave