O/T Computer troubles need ideas

You got a lot of suggestions, but nobody told you how to determine whether you have a software or hardware problem. And that's the first step to troubleshooting a computer problem.

The best way I know to figure out if the hardware on a computer is bad is to see if it will boot up with a totally different operating system. You could do this with a Windows installation CD, but you won't have a usable system after it boots and you could mess things up. A better way is to see if the computer will boot under Knoppix. Knoppix is a "live" Linux CD, meaning that you can boot right off the CD and have a totally usable system if there are no hardware problems.

To get Knoppix, go to knopper.net and download an ISO image from one of the mirrors. The latest English version of Knoppix is:

KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso

Then burn the image onto a CD with whatever CD burner software you have.

To use Knoppix, just stick the CD into the CD boot device and reboot the PC. Knoppix will boot pretty much automatically. If Knoppix boots successfully, you can be pretty sure that your hardware is good.

Knoppix will mount any filesystems (disks) it finds "read only"; meaning it won't write to them. So there is no risk of harm to your system. You can opt to mount a disk read/write and use Knoppic to recover data or fix the boot disk, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.

• Knoppix mirrors

old_bc

I've seen that on several PC's. I've seen several that have had the video driver go corrupt. BUT, I'm pretty sure in some cases, Microsoft update can also load an incompatible driver onto the card. Sometimes vendors like Dell or whoever will have a customized driver for a specific card that works ONLY for their brand of PC and other drivers, even for that same card, will not work.

In other words, then the MS version autoloads on it and kills the machine.

Try going to the safe mode menu and going to "VGA" mode. If that doesn't work, you're running out of options.

The easiest thing I've found from that point (since you CAN sometimes swap another video card in), is do a clean Windows reinstall from the CD. You don't have to format the hard drive, so you can leave all your files out there, just put Windows in a new subdirectory - for example, I always just put the new OS in C:\WINXP on most machines I rebuild...

HTH,
Howard

She said it used to only do this after using it for a while and then stopping for a little bit. Now it won't even go to a screen. If I can get it to sontinue after Safe Mode I'll try the VGA and see what that does.

Is it possible to hook my laptop to it with a networking cable or something and work on the drive that way? I can't open hers to do the network from that side would be the problem I guess but I have never set up many networks.

That usually is a bad driver.

There isn't a way to "hook up" a laptop and get video like that. In the old days, you could hit a DOS command key, dump all the output to the printer as you typed, and watch what was going on that way, but no way to do that with Windows...

The easiest other way would be to try another video card in it and hope it plug-and-played OK.

If they had any inclination at all to buy a new PC, you can get a smoking fast Dell with 19" flat panel for less than $500 these days.

For one that old, you usually can't justify putting much money in repairs into it...

Howard