mjmjr25 wrote:I was telling noise my biggest concern was a crying wife and her 25K photos. They ARE on the 2TB external HDD, we did confirm this last night (didn't try to open them as my PC doesn't actually have the software installed to view them, but it seems all is "there", accessing is a different issue but we should be good).
Obviously would be good to still try and salvage the PC and this HDD too, it has her Quiltmaker program too, which she know longer has the program for and was like $180 at the time (Electric Quilts 7).
You should be able to snag something to open them with. I like
IrfanView as a viewer, and it's free. Should open most any common image file type, and even less commonly supported ones.
My
guess is that either the machine had a RAM issue crop up, or the primary hard drive failed. If you'd be up for trying it, I'd second fastbilly1's suggestion to burn a bootable CD of some variation and run a RAM test, and see if the boot drive is working.
They should be .iso files, which (if nothing else) you can use
ImgBurn (which is free) to burn to CD or DVD.
For just running a RAM test, the
Ultimate Boot CD would be fine. It's basically just a bunch of utilities all put on one disc, so you'd just pick the Memory category and use one of the several RAM tests provided.
I had a very similar experience with one of my own machines - clicked a video file to open it, and the machine blue screened, and proceeded to blue screen on boot after that. I assumed HDD, but to be brief, it wound up being RAM.
You can also rotate DIMMs around as described, but if you're leery of cracking the case open the tests might be more appealing.
If you want to try getting into the files,
Hiren's has a live XP environment in addition to a bunch of tools similar to the UBCD. Or you could use a Linux LiveCD or something.
With it sounding like the machine isn't always hanging in the same place all the time, I'd kinda suspect this more. It might be hanging on the HP screen if/when the drive doesn't spin up at all (or due to very slow drive response), and then hits Windows and blue screens if it happens to work for a little while.
A couple additional things you might check:
Heat - usually, thermal management would throttle the CPU, and only cut the machine off if it was really needed. It'd also usually cut the machine off, not blue screen. That said, if you feel comfortable popping the side panel off and making sure fans are spinning and all that, it couldn't hurt. Reseating cards and plugs is often a troubleshooting step.
Also check the ports, namely USB ports. Normally, there's a piece of plastic in there bracing four pins. On occasion, I've seen that get broken off, leaving the pins. Then someone tries to plug something in again, and the pins get crushed against the shielding...and short things out.
I kinda doubt this, since when I've seen it, it caused the machines to hang at boot with a black screen and blinking cursor in the top left. Still, can't hurt to check. I've seen it with USB and Firewire ports, same result.
