[wdvltalk-social] BIG emrgency - wife's machine limping ;-)

[PatrickG]

joseph harris wrote:
> Patrick,
>
> When I finally got round to investigating the laptop it started correctly but windowed a 'serious' error and asked to phone home. M$ identifies a number of possible cause which i think centre on a dying HDD. As one reason can be scanning, and the machine was chuntering away not long before nose-diving, that seems to tie in.
>
> The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 [not quite out of the ark, but bought refurbished about 5 years ago] running Windows XP Pro. It had been little used, but recently has had a lot of games played on it; that may explain a great deal.
>   

Sound quite plausible. And probably the most accurate assessment. If you 
know what brand of HDD and you have the capacity via another computer, 
there are quite a few tools that can run from either a boot floppy or cd 
to analyze the drive.

> I also did find clear instructions for taking the machine apart - I am relieved to not have to think about that; not for a bit, anyway.
>   

As it is a laptop, there is not really that much to re-seat anyway. 
Memory and hard drive are about it, and those usually have there own 
access covers.
I have taken apart two laptops (the most recent to replace the hinges) 
and while it was not what I would call difficult, it was not all that 
easy either.

-- 
PatrickG.

(are we the only 2 on the social list these days)?