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Subject: Re: Computer Trouble - Advice requested

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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