Computer took a sh*t last night

My old workhorse of a laptop finally took a crap on me last night. My acer of 9+ years was running totally fine when the screen got some vertical bars and then seconds later the screen went black. I was in the middle of some business prep so naturally I pooped my pants a little bit and wondered what I lost. Luckily, it was a hardware issue rather than a HD crash. I had an old junker desktop that I did a full restore on. Hooked up the laptop HD with an old ide to usb adapter I had lying around and all info was intact. Ran out today for a new laptop. Hooked up the same old HD in an enclosure and the new laptop says "there may be an issue do you want to run a test". I'm using the restored junker to hold a full backed up copy of all that was on my dead computers drive just,to be sure. All my business info was backed up to a jump drive about a week ago so I'm not too worried about that. It's the 27gb or so of music that I don't want to give up. Lol. Perks of an ewaster. Plenty of spare equipment at hand to use in unison, restore, and make sure nothing gets lost forever. Who else has used some old scrap equipment to save some recently dead hardware that otherwise would have been lost?



Hardest part of the transition is gonna be going straight from windows xp to 10. I've been using xp since I got my old laptop the 9+ years ago. My only experience with 10 is the 3 desktop shortcuts I use at work about every 3 days at the most. I barely have the new one set up and already it looks like Japanese to me. Lol.

Yes, I wish that XP was still an active OS. I am typing this on an old Compaq Vista machine probably as old as your old machine. As far as using old machines, my desktop is a Windows 7 I picked at a garage sale for $5 that works fine. I have two small laptops, one for my car that runs 7, and one for my shop that runs XP. My wife has a desktop bought new that runs 7 and a brand new laptop that runs 10.

If i can remember right .... the last computer i bought was sometime around the early to mid 1990's ? It was from Radio Shack had a 33 mhz processor and 4 MB of ram running windows 3x. Built a micro ATX out of new parts sometime in the early 2000's.

Since then i've pretty much been working with whatever comes my way. (I did buy a couple of new SSD's last year.)

Mike: Nine years of use is really good for an Acer. By any chance did you do a memory upgrade recently ? For some reason the older Acers can give that line problem with the display if the installed memory is above one or two GB.

Wouldn't worry too much about the error message. It's pretty common for the later versions of windows to want to run checkdisk on something that is hooked up to your machine. It seems harmless and actually makes things work better.

If it says that it needs to format the disk before it can be used don't allow it to do that. It's a quirk in the later versions that can accidentally wipe out all of your data.

I've been running win 7 on all of my machines except for one. Got win 10 on that machine. Can't say as i like win 10 all that much.

I had upgraded the ram from 2 to 4gb but that was about 5 years ago. I did read some threads on other forums suggesting reseating the ram, doing a hard reset by taking out the battery and plug and holding the power button down, one guy even said try to bend the front half of the laptop firmly while it boots. Lol. Being so old it was probably time anyways. Did stick with acer. Got an aspire e15. Core i5 6200 2.3 ghz, 6gb ram, 1tb hd. Normal price 475 on sale for 330. With Antivirus and a lifetime office subscription, about 625 out the door. And that included an enclosure for the old hard drive which cleared up the read issue. Reads it like any other jump drive now.

I've been Building, Repairing Upgrading Hardware and Software, Tweekeing and, Yes Pirating Software Applications for the past 18 years. I'll be glad to help anyone here with there questions PM,s are probably best