Help me out guys quick, I think my PC is dying. It gave blue screen of death this a.m. and took me several attempts of restarting it to get it to come to life again.

 

How do I go about backing up all of my personal info docs and pics before it crashes again. My wife and I are tech illiterate and have never backed anything up which we have talked about doing for years but keep putting it off dumb dumb dumb I know :banghead: . we have several years of pics on the pc that have never been transferred to anything as well as documents and files and also the info in my e-mail.

 

we had a computer crash a hard drive several years ago and we lost everything including years of photos do to the dumb thing we have now of never having backed up.

 

What do I need to do. it is becoming unresponsive even now as I type and try to get through the site, every screen is slow and shows things as not responding.

 

HELP QUICK!!!!!!

I need more sleep will check back in a couple of hours, wife just woke me up and said we had the blue screen.

You need an external HD or some other means to transfer the data you need off of it. Depending on how much data you have, you may be able to use a micro SD card that can hold up to 64gb.

 

Whichever the case, you need something to transfer to.

 

The next step is to get access to the computer to do the transfer. Upon startup, your bootup screen should show you what key to press that will guide you to bootup into SAFE mode. This is a very basic bootup that leaves alot of the more non-essential things out of the equation. But it will atleast let you use the computer to do the data transfer.

 

Once you get everything transfered, its time to find out if you can preserve your computer or reformat the HD. BSOD sucks and I don't remember exactly what causes it. Hope you can make it work! I'd recommend using a different computer to lookup if you can find a solution to the BSOD. IIRC, it usually means your toast, but I've been wrong before.

 

IIRC, there may be an alt. method to doing a data transfer as well, but I cant remember if it was illegal or not, LOL! The waters have gotten a little murky in that dept.

 

The way it works is just kind of like how DELL gains access to your puter to try and troubleshoot problems. You have to be connected to the internet, and I don't even think the computer needs to be on either? Could be wrong...

 

Give this a look over:

 

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-to-transfer-files-from-one-computer-to-another/

Here, try this page:

 

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/stoperrors.htm

Mac!!

...linux!

Just put a large enough jump drive in and then click on your folders you want to keep and send them to the jump drive. Once you get another computer then just copy them to the new one. Also keep the jump drive with the folders on it and you will have the folders forever (or until you loose the jump drive).

_{OK wife is in town and will pick up some thumb drives and will try.}

_{I now see that it wiped all of my contact info from my e-mail acct as well too, was going to send some e-mails and no more contact list. empty?????? Not sure how this happened.}

 

_{It started getting like this a couple days ago and I did the shutdown for auto windows updates yesterday and it has totally wigged out since then.}

My laptop did something similar to that. Turned out the hard drive failed. I don't suppose you use G-Mail do you? If you did then your address book would also be on their server.

I use nothing with an external server as of now everything on my pc only.

I have been printing off as many documents as possible since my wife will be a while from town.

I have & occasionally use an external hard drive...  plugs into USB.  A couple of clicks & step back & all your files get copied to the external "hard drive".  Most are electronic these days.  Mine is a Western Digital...   came from Staples for about $100. 

During bootup process, look for the function key to press to go into setup, etc. Theres usually only two function kets that you press during bootup. On one of them, it should be able to allow you to rolld back to last known good congifuration. This should revert you back BEFORE the updates that you took that may have caused the BSOD in the first place.

So far I have burned most files to cd and wife only brought home two 16G flash drives which is barely enough for all our pics and videos so will head back to town and get 64 gig and do total backup. So far it is holding up hopefully it will hold up until tomorrow morning when I can do a total backup and then go PC shopping.

It if was me... Either laptop or desktop I would remove the hard drive and attach to a second computer as a storage drive. This way you can copy every single file on the computer without Windows making a mess of it. Not to mention this allows you to check the drive for SMART error or problems because the drive is not booted or in service by Windows.

 

Sad thing is if you had Linux I would have you install one program openssh-server and the let me login I would be able to diagnose and tell you what is going on not to mention create a full backup because Linux already has backup software as part of the core operating software.

 

But regardless of what ever software you run you should ALWAYS back up your hard drive at least weekly.

 

 

As you'll see I'm setup with two hard drives one is main runner and the second is my backup drive.

 

 

 

Thumb drive will work for small amounts of data, but burning DVD's might work better if you have burning software. Or the best yet copy all data to second known good hard drive.

 

 

 

 

 

You can get a 1TB external drive at walmart for like $80.  Rather than messing with thumb drives    1TB=1000GB...

 

I bought this one yesterday and cloned a 120GB mac hard drive to it in an hour.  http://www.walmart.com/ip/WD-My-Passport-Ultra-1TB-Portable-Drive-Black/27679867

Well it fired up this morning, a bit slow but still ticking, it seems to do the bsod when left alone for a while, have to unplug it to get it to restart when it locks on the bsod, we did get our files off loaded and all pics on thumb drives disc so if it crashes no worries. I may take it in to a repair shop Tuesday and see if there is any hope for it.

 

Can you buy a PC with Linux system or are they all windows based from box stores like best buy or similar?

 

Next pc will get purchased with an external backup drive and will start doing regular backups from here on out, our last pc crashed hard and was told there was no way to get 5 years of our lifes pics out of it.

 Can you buy a PC with Linux system or are they all windows based from box stores like best buy or similar?

 

Well there is one company...

 

https://www.system76.com/

 

But like me I bought a laptop from Staples which came with Windows 7 on it and formatted the hard drive and installed Ubuntu directly to the hard drive. I've got a thread started over on Tractor Farm and Family trying to help others convert to Ubuntu...

 

http://forum.tractorfarmandfamily.com/showthread.php?t=15556

 

If you get the software installed I'll gladly hop on the phone and the internet and remotely configure and tweak and teach you Ubuntu Linux.

 

I might have you help me with that one if I get me a new laptop, Mike!

May be a stupid question, but have you checked to make sure your fans are all clean and working so it's not just overheating ?

Most laptops have sensors to report heat, fan and other things it just that Microsoft doesn't use these sensors much at all. You can buy external software under Windows to do to read some of these sensors but still limited in what the software can do. Under Linux is a different story the ACPI and APM and used highly and all sensors are used as well. After a bit of studying I managed to increase battery life and reduce CPU temps while on battery use.

 

I can't remember what software it was, but I got it for my desktop pc I have and I used it to overclock my GPU. It was nice too, cause it would allow me to monitor everything on the pc. It would even let me control the fans speed % and set it to be whatever I wanted at whatever heat.

May be a stupid question, but have you checked to make sure your fans are all clean and working so it's not just overheating ?

I blow my PC out with shop air a couple times a year and the last time was just a few weeks ago. I still hear the fan run like normal.

 

It is really hit and miss, works perfect for a long time and then just locks up out of the blue, restart it a couple of times and then the same again.

 

I did do the safe start and did a recover two times to before this happened and I keep getting a message that the recovery process has failed for redundancy reasons