Computer Support.

You have to believe this. My hard drive has been failing for about two months. However, because I've been 'of no fixed address' for a few months while relocating from Houston to San Diego, it's been difficult to send my laptop to the manufacturer. So, eventually, I just decided to pay for the technician to come and fix it.

First visit. Puts in new motherboard. No new hard drive arrived.

Second visit. Puts in new everything from fan to  keyboard to power cord, to casing, but no hard drive arrived. Calls level 2 technician who tests hard drive and says bios isn't working. After some talk, decide to send new hard drive.

Third visit. We'll wait and see.

Just frustrated. I have been generally out of commission for the past month or two because I don't dare to do too much in case the hard drive goes. Grrrr!! 

I feel your pain. 

Sorry you're moving to San Diego! I live in Willis. We coulda had a meet up! Well, hope it's for a good cause!

Tess,

Go and buy a USB based external hard drive. Manually select and copy all of your documents, music, photos, articles, emails, pictures that you truly want to keep and send it to an external hard drive.

That way if your laptop goes kaflooey, you still have all your important information and can transfer it back to a new internal hard drive in the laptop when you get it replaced.

Windows, programs, web browsers can always be put back on a computer when its been deleted. Your precious personal information as I suggest to copy to a hard drive cannot be replaced unless it is stored somewhere else.

I have a Squidoo lens about backing up data called tips-and-tricks-to-backup-your-computer-information.

Hope this helps.

Hi Tess,

I, too, vouch for the usefulness of an external hard drive. I used to do backups on DVDs but now I use hard drives.

I once had a virus that compromised the data on my whole hard drive. I was lucky to have done a backup 3 days before that. I lost very little data that way, and got to keep all my files virus-free on an external support.

Great advice!  So who here is selling external hard-drives online?

Hi Sheri, just go to any of my articles and click an amazon module then when you arrive on amazon use the search box to search for "external hard drives"... that should take care of it *smiles* 

Hi Guys, Have the external hard drive, and as it happens, the Dell technician is finally coming at 2 this afternoon! :)

Also, it's really weird. This is the third time the technician has come. I've had my motherboard replaced, the fan replaced, the keyboard replaced, the outer console replaced, a new power cord replaced, and with the new hard drive getting put in, I guess, I have a virtually new computer!

Tomorrow I can start writing flat out!!! I can't wait. I will load Word this afternoon after he has put on the new hard drive.

I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating this is. The technician witnessed how in the middle of writing something, my computer would just go black and I would lose everything I had written! 

I'm just started using Google Drive and now save everything externally so I don't lose anything. 

Thanks for the support! :)

Yep I don't mess with technicians (that can't do anything I can't do) but even before I could if the motherboard went that was to me like a TV tube going out- scrap the POS and get a new one, a new powerful laptop with all the bells you need is less than a grand these days, hell walmart has a few for under 400.00- why pay a technician whose only giving you generic parts (so they make more profit) anyway, when for the SAME money or less you can get a new one with the latest windows? You'll also find they may have to come out again and again because the last technician messed up... in the end there are two certainties in my computing life- 

1. If I contract a virus I never trust an AVP to remove it completely, fact is if my AVP doesn't catch it the first time what makes me think it will catch it now?- Format drive and back up.

A word about external hard drives, I have a 2 Terabyte drive I move copies of EVERYTHING to just in case, that's it's use for me, the on board HD is, in my eyes, like memory, software can wipe it out so it's no safer there than in memory in the long run, and a crashed drive can take all your data with it. (yea so I moved 3 years worth of data to another drive and it crashed, lost 3 years of my life (pictures work etc...)... although I'm holding out to see if it can be recovered somehow mechanically...

2. If my computers hardware is shot especially the motherboard, it's cheaper and less frustrating (and more exciting) to get a new one, especially laptops... they have a 3-5 year shelf life I'm finding...

If you run into more trouble really think about how much it's going to cost you, not in the short run, but in the long run when you have to keep calling expensive techs :)

Good Luck!

Jerrrico

Hi All,

Well, Jerrico, my daughter agreed with you. As it was, by 2 pm yesterday, after four or five hours with Dell, I put down the phone, or rather I told the lady at the other end that I was putting down the phone. She said, "We want to run a diagnostic on your hard drive remotely."

Um. How does one run a remote diagnostic on one's hard drive when there's a black screen on one's computer that says, "No boot manager."

Close to hysteria, I called a friend, explained it all in three minutes (2 months drama in 3 minutes). She said, "I'll call you back."

She called me back to tell me there was a technician on his way.

Three hours later, I had a computer - a working one!!!!! 

Anyway, I'm back to writing this morning. I've now got thumb drives on my shopping list and am looking for some sort of online back up.

Thanks for keeping me sane. :)

Ryank. None of this cost me anything financially as I am insured to the hilt. I always do that when I buy new computers so that I don't have to pay for support. Someone once told me that computers will always go down so it's best to prepare for the event. However, there's no way you can prepare for the fact that the people who insure you are trying to do the cheapest job out with as little time spent as possible. Otherwise selling the insurance isn't worth their while. In this case, because they were slopping, I've essentially had about everything replaced at no cost. I still landed up getting a technician from somewhere else, though.