Bonneville America Forums Forums Off Topic Discussion Forums Lounge Killed two computers

Had a nice Dell lap top that had served me well for 2 years.. Well 2 months ago it finaly gave up.. I needed a new one anyhow.. SO I got to ofice depo and buy a nice Sony Viao.. Well it last 2 months and crashed real hard on Friday evening.. I was pretty upset, I mean if you pay a lot of money you expect things to work.. I took it back to Office depo and they told me I have to send it in to get repaired.. Why should I have to do it? heck give me a replacement and i wont get on my soap box aobut all the pics and business stuff I am going to loose cause the hard drive crashed.. But would they? NoOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.. I had to buy a new computer cause i can wait the 2 to 3 weeks to get my Sony back.. Looks like Jess will be gettign a slightly used Lap Top for Christmas lol..

yea man getting electronics fixed just sucks these days. I think you're better to buy cheap and just chuck it out when it goes bad.

Wendy bought a 3.3 GHZ Sony Viao laptop, the darn thing has never worked right. My much older 2.4GHZ Gateway runs circles around it. If you don't need that Dell Wendy has been looking for a screen for hers so we can fix it. I don't remember the model number anymore. She took it camping once and one of the kids stepped on it. The screen is cracked but thats the only thing wrong with it. She got the Sony because the screen cost almost as much as the new puter,

buy an Acer cheaper and bullet proof mine has almost 3 years ,few thousand miles in bags on my bike and works like new, recently I bought second one to have it only at home

geez, i would have trusted sony! I bought an hp which is fine except for a noisy cd drive but i lusted after the sexier looking vaio - just couldn't justify the price diff.

Wendy got lucky at Circuit City and got the last one they had at a greatly reduced price. It had been used as a display but not the kind where everyone can play with it.Had full warrenty and all. Everyone says it has nothing wrong with it but it is very slow. Our kids Emachines we got for $300 a pop are faster and those are slow. I have a flat screen Acer downstairs that was given to me, I didn't know that would be compatible with the Dell laptop.

The Dell was tossed when i got my new Sony..

Well it last 2 months and crashed real hard on Friday evening..

What exactly do you mean by 'crashed real hard'? Software thing or physically? If it's a software thing, that's pretty easy to fix and you shouldn't need to send it out..

Cheers,
Brad

turn it on, it clicks, then restarts.. I do get the sony welcome screen for about half a second. I tried to do a system restore by hitting F10, but it is teling me it can not find the operation system..

Sounds like the hard drive quit on you.

Soren

can not find the operation system..

Try to get into the BIOS setup screen at power-up.. don't know what you need to press for that particular machine, but it's usually F2. Check to see if it recognizes the hard drive as being there, and check if you can hear the drive spinning up. If not, try removing and then re-inserting the drive in the machine as it might be a loose connection. If the drive is recognized an you hear it spinning, you can recover the data pretty easy using another machine and an external USB hard drive adapter. Once you get the data you need, you can then reformat and re-install the OS. I have done this many times on friends windoze machines that have gone south for no good reason.



Cheers,
Brad

A Knoppix or Ubuntu live CD works well to recover data if you can get it to boot. Google "Spinrite" if the hard drive needs to be repaired.

Powerbook, running since 2002. 'nuff said.

My old Gateway was struck by lightning and still works just fine just needs a new modem. Bought it in the late 90s. Just has files stored on it now and sits under my desk. Back then 450mhz was smoking fast and a 10GB HD was HUGE! LOL

I will try all the of that stuff and see what happens.. If they were not so dang pricey I would buy a "toughbook" from panasonic. We use them at work and they are bullet proof. I have slung one against the wall many times ( dispatch fault) and still works like new.

Get a Mac!!

Dave

I have to say my first couple computers were Mac and I liked them much better than Windows based machines. Much more user friendly. Every Mac I ever had still works like the day it was made. Only reason I didn't buy another one after the last one I had,well 2 reasons, they wouldn't run many things back then and when I priced then at the time a new Mac was over $3000 and a faster machine with larger storage and more extras that would run everything was about $2,000. So I got my first Windows machine. Took awhile to get used to how it was set up. My last Mac was an old Performa 575 that I still have and still works fine just painfully slow. I have them all the way back to an Apple 2.

I actually had one of the first Powermacs, the 6100 with a DOS card (486PC) in the expansion slot. It was pretty slow, even compared to the dog of a 486 card (although it ran DOOM just fine ). The thing lasted about 3 years before dying. I went back to PCs because I could build/upgrade/fix it myself. Something ALWAYS goes wrong eventually with ALL computers. Tis the nature of the beast. They aren't, and likely will never be, as reliable as your average refrigerator. That's also why I build my own -- it's a lot cheaper than buying a new Dell or Apple or HP. Less sunk cost, easier to fix each component as they fry.

Wendy loves Doom!

Tangent: it's amazing to me that 14 years ago you needed a state of the art 386 or 486 to run the original DOOM and now it runs on cell phones. Am I getting old? At least I don't remember punchcards.

They aren't, and likely will never be, as reliable as your average refrigerator.

You obviously have never worked with a sparcstation



Cheers,
Brad

Not sure how old my Powerbook is, but it runs fine. I have a Gateway that came with Win98 that still runs well. I would have an Atari 400 with 2 external disks running just fine, but the OL insisted that it had to go when we moved. I did manage to hide my Sinclair ZX81 from her, that is out in my shop and it still works.
Used to work with a SUN workstation that never gave me any problems in hte 14 years I was working with it.