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OT computer issue

Sounds like a case of jealousy. It's spiting you. Give it more love.

Reply to
Micky
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Find a used (known good) power supply and change it. Could even be bad RAM memory.

Is this a Dell brand? Those older Dell machines were known to do odd things....

Reply to
Paintedcow

Unplug ALL drives. Hard drive, CD drive, floppy drive (if it has one) and so on.

If that dont do it, remove all plug in cards such as video card, sound card, modem card, etc.

If it still wont stay running, remove the RAM. (if it tries to boot, at least without the RAM, you'll get an error message, but it should stay running.

Once you get to this point, any short or overload MUST be the power supply or the Motherboard.

You can likely buy an identical tower on Ebay for $20 or less. Buy one, swap power supply. If that dont do it, the MB has probably failed.

If that's the case, just swap your HD over to the ebay machine and whatever cards, drives etc you want to transfer.

Reply to
Paintedcow

Same here, but the computer I use the most is (this one) and it's 16 years old and runs Win98se and Dual Boots to Win2000. Strangely enough, it's a lot faster than any of the XP machines I have. Plus I like Win98 better than any other OS.

Reply to
Paintedcow

Good idea, but you'd need a 128GB one, probably could use a 64GB with compression. And for the price you'd pay today for that, for not much more you can get a 1TB HD and have a lot more backup space to save multiple copies, etc. I made an image of a clean install of Win 7 fully updated and then one of Win 10 right after the upgrade. You can get a USB to SATA powered adaptor for $20 to connect it and make it convenient to use with more than one PC too.

Reply to
trader_4

If your C: only has the software on it, you have a hard time filling up a 40g drive. The worst thing Microsoft ever did was default everything to "My Documents" in the applications and vendors jumped on the band wagon. That is buried down in the guts of the C: drive. You are much better off to create a directory on your D: called my documents and point your applications to that. Backing it up becomes a lot easier. I really prefer losing the whole "documents" idea and creating a directory for each application so I know where things are.

I suppose most people are not really comfortable with understanding file and directory structures so they take the easy way out ... at their own peril.

Reply to
gfretwell

I have an HP that I did a restore to Win 7 factory software on, followed by all the updates, then Win 10 upgrade. It's 68GB. I understand I can go back to Win 7 within 30 days by doing an undo, so Win 7 must be saved on there somehow too. Maybe after 30 days MSFT gets rid of it and the space will go down. But right now, when I backed it up, I needed something that's 69GB+

The worst thing Microsoft ever did was default

I've been mostly doing what you do too. I tend to create folders in the C drive and put my stuff there. But it's not that hard to find where MSFT puts pics, documents, etc. It's under

C:\users\username where username is your user name

Yes, I see that with most of the people I know too. How they get by, IDK. A lot of it is because they don't have all that much to find and organize, they don't make backups, and they haven't had a drive failure.

Reply to
trader_4

The problem there is that here is a ton of other stuff there...stuff in which most users have no interest.

I'm with gfretwell on this one. I made a folder on C: named _My Stuff. The underscore is so it will sort at the top. Under it I have...

Archives which is where I keep everything that doesn't belong in the following

My Programs. I install everything to a folder heirarchy here

Photos etc.

My Toolbars

I use a keyboard shortcut to Karen's Replicator to copy those to a USB3 thumb. I can copy just "Archives" which is usual and very quick (5-20 seconds depending upon how much has been changed) or the whole works which takes 1-5 minutes depending upon the same factor.

I also got rid of all the MS "special" folders except Desktop. Ctrl + E now gets me something that is legible :)

Reply to
dadiOH

I imagine that W/7 is in a separate directory so you should be able to split it out. Two sets of bloat ware is going to be pretty big tho My C: (XP) with 10 years worth of software is about 25g.

The problem with C: is that is the one where you really need an image for backup because of the way software is "installed". I do not want that image to get too big because I keep multiple copies over time. Data is just data so backup is as simple as drag and drop. Trusting system restore is only going to save you from most of the stuff you do (but not all) and it is useless if you get hacked. The last time I tried to restore my way out of a driver screw up, my restore points would not work. It went through all of the motions and when it rebooted it said that restore point was not usable. (for all of them). I was rescued by an old image and since all of my data was on another drive, I did not lose anything.

Reply to
gfretwell

snipped-for-privacy@aol.com posted for all of us...

+1 on that. Plus the screens are attached and they break and another PIA to r&r. The plastic ages and what is supposed to release just breaks and ...
Reply to
Tekkie®

Visually check ALL of the electrolytic caps on the mother board. They should all hace concave tops - or at the very least flat. If there is ANy sign of swelling at the top (skightly domed) or ANY sign of leakage (light brownish scale opr stain) you have bad caps. If you are a skilled electronics repair person you MAY be able to replace the caps and get it working again, but a lot of those boards have up to 16 layers in them - and if your solder job misses one of them, or causes an internal short - the board is DONE.

Reply to
clare

Change that. For the symptoms describred, most likely a bad motherboard (or video card) followed by power supply., with the hard drive well down the list. The power supply powered up. It then shut down - likely from too high a startup current on the motherboard, due to shorted capacitors. VERY common problem. Been in the computer service business for 26 years now. Seen WAY too many of them behave that way. Usually start out being very slow to boot - then just die. Sometimes show no problems until total failure - and "occaisionally" will actually reboot after 10 or more retries - but run very slowly and possibly lock up or quit after a few minutes.

Reply to
clare

I think we have a winner - -

Reply to
clare

Do you have SATA or IDE deive? IDE ius pretty much history - you can still get IDE/USB adapters but IDE on board is very rare.

If your XP was a retail package, not OEM, the chances are pretty good that a newer computer ( more than 3 or 4 years old) will actually boot from the old drive - you may need to download some drivers to get it fully functional. The newer computers do not use a full hardware bios, and will NOT boot from an older drive.

Reply to
clare

You can even get adapters to connect IDE to SATA.. Some actually even work - - -

Reply to
clare

I have worked on both for over 2 decades - on a fairly regular basis

- and I'll work on desktop or tower PCs over laptops ot all-in-ones any day of the year. Thoe AllInOne units are even worse than laptops - and a lot of laptops today need to be totally dissassembled to even add additional RAM. "They don't make 'em like they used to" in the case of laptops is NOT a good thing - unlike with automobiles.

Reply to
clare

The Dell from Hell syndrome.

Reply to
clare

Thanks Clare and everyone for the help. After ignoring it for a week or so - this computer has, mysteriously, started working again. I was about to do some more trouble-shooting. I'll buy a couple thumb drives and back-up some stuff and see what happens. Backing-up old emails will be " a first " for me .. so they can be accessed on a newer computer .. with a different email program ... John T.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

Reply to
hubops

Just check all the caps for swelling before you install the "good" board. I've purchaced replacement boards and even "refurbed" computers with bad caps. Any sign of swelling - send 'em back!!

Reply to
clare

I've re-capped a LOT of monitors successfully. Actually never had a failure. Recapping recent motherboards my record is not quite as good.

Reply to
clare

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