Ironically, my backup machine, the one I am currently running, was owned by my brother and broken by my brother. It had so much CRAP on it, it would barely boot. So, I took it out of a closet and got it ambulating again. His wife got a iMac to replace the HP and all they have experienced with that machine is frustration.

Sam buy a new computer already. I would have had a new machine an hour after mine went down. You don't have to have much money either. I bought my pc from sinistercrayon in the buy/sell forum and put about $200 into it and i play all the latest and greatest games out right now. If i spend a total of $400/approx to have a bad ass rig, imagine what you can get for $200.

Damned shame about your computer Sam. I remember when my 486 died. Not as much stuff on that but it still sucked. At least it was on diskettes albeit inaccessible.

I worked in a tape library and know the joys and importance of making a back up.

And reading this thread reminds me that I have a certain job to do this weekend on my computer.

Good luck and hope the restoration is a full success.

THE DEATHTOLL:

17.7gb of music
5 Top Gear Episodes I enjoyed
1 Tragically Hip video
2 episodes of "How It's Made"
45gb of porn
4 months worth of my mortgage 'e' receipts (august to February)
and a recently downloaded copy of Doom 95.

as it stands, as soon as Shael gets her income tax, I inherit her two year old laptop. BUT, I still am looking at buying a cheap tower, something new, something that no one has ever had before...

i do say this, though, the HP keyboard that came with my brothers computer is far superior to the old Gateway keyboard I have been using since 1998.

I've found a few Sam as far as cheap towers go, but not much so far. I'm not fond of anything I'm seeing yet in terms of processing power versus price. I'll keep looking, but until then, you get the one I have and a fan setup after next week. I just might need a ride to Williston, VT to go pick it up, if I can't just order it and have it shipped here, depends on the delivery service/time I can get.

There's a few things you don't want in regards to a cheap tower, one...you want dedicated video ram, you do not want integrated video/cpu and integrated video and system ram. You are just asking for trouble there, mostly because your video chipset and cpu are constantly fighting over ram, no matter what you are doing. You can find something relatively cheap in regards to that. Soundcard, it really doesn't matter too much, but you at least want something that offers something close to high def sound and can handle more than 3 channels, again, this is experience, I had something way back in a replacement tower which had a lousy video setup, a good processor chip, shit for system ram and the lowest of the low quality sound cards. I couldn't even watch streamed video without the sound lagging and crackling and the video messing up. That was a $499 special my sister found because she thought I broke the computer. I didn't, she filled it with viruses, spyware and other shit and broke it herself, but made me pay for it and blamed me.

Anyway, I'll keep looking, I know a few places...the one thing I do know though, avoid Tiger Direct at all costs. I'm sure there's a few people that have had good experiences with them, but I'll stick to Newegg myself.

Shael

Have an interesting funny ha ha update on the not so deceased as I was thinking drive. We loaded the drive (it was a Maxtor after all) into a Dell tower as a slave drive. It ran through a Check Disk utility and loaded the drive just fine. I was able to take all off my important data off the drive and as far as I know this morning, it continued to run after I left for work. One thing we are thinking is that the drive may have been infected with a virus or worm that kept it in a neverending bootcyle. Anyways, when I get up this afternoon, I am going to pull more stuff off of it and maybe stuff it in this tower I am running now to see if I can stretch it's longevity out.

Odd, very odd. I've never heard of that happening.

Today I ordered my replacement laptop, it should be here either the middle or towards the end of the week, provided they don't dick me around too much with addresses or anything.

Thanks to blackomegax for pointing me towards one that kicks a lot of ass for a smallish pricetag.

http://www.bestbuy...t&id=1218043606827

Newegg ran out of those last week, so Best Buy, as much as I hate them, were the next best option for the same model for the same pricetag. And before anybody says anything else...I already know it's a Gateway, but Gateway has deals with ASUS, Nvidia, Western Digital, Intel and Acer for parts. The case is an Acer case, but with good parts inside since Acer bought them out not too awful long ago. If it's as good as the old Gateway I had that blew it's AGP bus after 4 years, it won't owe me anything.

So Sam inherits my circa 2006 ASUS G2 laptop this week, something better than what he's running presently, needs a little work, probably a cheap part and he'll be back in business.

Shael

Posted by Samurai Have an interesting funny ha ha update on the not so deceased as I was thinking drive. We loaded the drive (it was a Maxtor after all) into a Dell tower as a slave drive. It ran through a Check Disk utility and loaded the drive just fine. I was able to take all off my important data off the drive and as far as I know this morning, it continued to run after I left for work. One thing we are thinking is that the drive may have been infected with a virus or worm that kept it in a neverending bootcyle. Anyways, when I get up this afternoon, I am going to pull more stuff off of it and maybe stuff it in this tower I am running now to see if I can stretch it's longevity out.

Could be something to do with the BIOS or a chip in the motherboard going bad and constantly making your computer reboot. I've known a few people that have had their motherboards go flakey.

I've had a machine endlessly cycle through rebooting, solely as a result of corruption of critical Windows files, so it could possibly just be a (somewhat severe) software issue, or an issue solely with the hard drive. That's not to say something else hasn't died, of course, just that it isn't necessarily the case.

After talking to Sam, what I think it might have been is a worm or virus that got into the boot files...something along the lines of a rootkit that he may have had and never known about until it started causing major issues.

Looking at a few of the ones I've encountered over the years...I think that's what it was. I got hit with one when I first got a computer that took over my computer, it would fuck with my cd drive, I could boot it, log in, do what I wanted but when the controller or whatever it was realized my computer was connected to the internet, it would start the freakouts. Random opening and closing of my disk drives, random reboots, all kinds of fun stuff. The coup de gras was when it deleted my boot files, the DCOM files 98 used to start up with. That was an old Sub7 thing though, way back when. That's almost what this is acting like.

Well, that's what you get for looking at porn. J/K.

Shael