Coastal Computers & Design
I’m all for customers trying to maintain and repair their computers themselves, but like any piece of complex machinery some computer repairs are best left to those that are qualified and experienced.
I sometimes get systems in for repair after a customer has followed the advice of ‘Uncle Bob’ or a neighbour who ‘knows all about computers’ and attempted to repair Windows XP by running the installation CD and, not knowing exactly what they are doing, have formatted and reinstalled Windows instead of repairing or installing a new copy of their operating system. As a consequence, they have lost all their files, photos, emails etc.
Their question is always the same, ‘can you recover all my stuff…. PLEASE?’. My response again, is always the same – well it may be possible but it’s probably very unlikely!
So, if you are not sure exactly what you are doing – please get some help. The ’safer’ options of repairing and existing XP installation and installing a new copy of XP are both not entirely without risk, so at the very least try to backup anything vital that you don’t want to lose. If you can’t do that because XP won’t even start, then take to a repair shop that can do the backups for you.
I have some very clever software that I can use to do this without needing to remove your hard drive which speeds up the process (and reduces the cost) somewhat.
By all means have a go at repairing your Windows (or other) problems, but do be careful especially with using the WindowsCD recovery process.
Finally, I often encounter computers that their owners have been using over a period of time that require several restarts to get into Windows. I’m usually told that ’sometimes it takes 3 or 4 goes but it eventually starts up, so I figure that it’s fixing itself’ – or something similar to that. I have two comments to make about that scenario. Firstly, the vast majority of problems don’t fix themselves – they just don’t. Secondly, behaviour like this from your computer very often means a dying hard drive, so get it looked at sooner rather than later!