Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 09:21:00 05/17/04
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On May 17, 2004 at 11:04:05, Stephen Ham wrote: >Dear Readers, > >Most of you already know that I'm probably the most computer ignorant person >ever to post here. Well, my ignorance partly explains why I'm posting again. I >have computer problems and need advice regarding 1) diagnosing what's wrong, and >2) what the solution is. > >I have a 3-year old AMD 1.4G computer with a 20G hard drive, 512MB RAM and >Windows 98. > >I began having problems a few months ago when I was trying to attach some family >photo's to an email, and the photo's (.jpg's) wouldn't open. When I clicked on >them, my computer locked up. I assumed that I had some unkown virus or perhaps >there's some corruption of Windows 98. No big deal. I ran all my McAfee >anti-virus stuff and Adaware and Spybot stuff, but found nothing. > >But soon after that, the computer wouldn't immediately reboot. It always asked >if I want to wait. When I click on restart, it sometimes failed to do anything. >I had to frequently manually turn it off by holding the power button down. > >Next I noticed that my scheduled defragmentation of my hard drive failed. I had >to do it manually. Then I got messages warning of a possible hard drive failure. >When I did defrag, suddenly about 18-bad spots appeared. Nonetheless, most of my >hard drive is unused. > >Next, when clicking onto the Internet, the entire screen went yellow and the >computer locked up. > >I logged on to PC Pit Stop where it told me everything was fine except for very >slow performance from my hard drive. > >A few days ago, I ran an engine tournament over night. When I turned my screen >on the next day, the screen was black and there was a message warning of a "Disk >Write Error." > >So some or all of the above appears to be hard drive related. Is this due to a >virus, or simply a defective hard drive? A buddy said I should just install a >new hard drive with the latest Windows, next to my existing hard drive. He seems >to think that the new hard drive and the current Windows will over-ride the >defective one. In this fashion I won't lose any of my data from my old hard >drive. Is that true or is he dreaming? > >Any thoughts/suggstions, gents? > >Thanks in advance. > >Stephen My advice would be to buy a new hard drive. Unplug your old one, and install windows on the new one. Plug the old one in and salvage what you can. anthony
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