Author: Stephen Ham
Date: 08:04:05 05/17/04
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
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