Karaoke Forums

A few weeks ago my almost 4 year old HP Pavillion went south. I was picking up some friends from the airport and when I returned my monitor just read "No Signal".

I feel proud that I kept this old PC running well over time thru the virus blitzes etc. I thought the great old lady had finally died but after doing some disassembly I found a bad power supply unit. Apparently the cooling fan on the power unit stopped and the unit burned out.

Needless to say finding a power supply unit for this long discontinued PC is almost impossible. I was using my work computer for dialogue during my home PC down time.

By chance while taking a friend to a pc store I saw a bunch of power supply units on sale. I brought mine in and although it was a longshot, I matched one lonely unit on the shelf to my PC.

I rebuilt this old fine lady PC tonight and am talking to you via her, Hell maybe she has a few good years left, BJC

Big Jimmy Glad t see to you goin again Sometimes we just one run out of power then a spark pops then we go again.... But it helps when we get the spark when we think it is done..

Man Jimmy , I wish I had your luck..the Thursday before last , wifey and I were watching tv. we (had) a 32" Sony Wega XBR that we've had for about 6 yrs. never a problem with anything , always a perfect picture ! It all of a sudden just shuts off and starts clicking like a timebomb. As I'm tryin' to look at that, my Hard drive starts clicking. I shut down unplug the hd (Slave) and search "clicking hard drive online...Baaad News, hd gone south. 90 gigs of mp3's , passwords , Karaoke song books ,and much more. (I had the books and passwords backed up) thank God , but lost a whole buncha other stuff. I even tried as a last resort FREEZING the hard drive and reinstalling to try in vain to recover some files. It was a Western Digital h-d by the way. So I went to Bestbuys and picked up a Seagate 160 Gig drive and am starting all over. fun,fun,fun. !

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Gotta' Sing , Gotta' Sing !!!

I went through the same thing not too long ago with a 160Gb drive and 110GB of MP3's (all legal) and lots of documents. It was just corruption and not the hardware failure though. I spent the better part of 40-50 hours using different recovery software and was finally able to get about 95% of the data off the drive. I consider myself lucky at this point and have a complete backup of my mp3's on a spare drive.

BTW, I have an old Toshiba Libretto (Pentium 233/64MB ram) that I use quite often for a variety of tasks along with a Pentium II 433 that I use for recording off my board (using Audacity). Just becuase the hardware is older doesn't mean it's not still useful. The only reason I've seen recently to upgrade to the fastest and greatest is because the new games require it (check out the requirements for Doom 3). Some people doing rendering and heavy video/graphics editing might use that power but the average user ends up with a PC that just waits faster.

I'm happy you were able to find a power supply. I've had good luck finding obscure parts at Computer Renaissance (it's a franchise store).

As for the failing hard drive, you can try tapping it while it's spinning on your hand if it's not spinning up, but when it starts clicking it's usually the head motor/hardware driver having problems and not the platters failing to spin. Most of the remedies you see on the internet (including freezing) are geared towards the platters not spinning. A long shot if you have an identical drive is replacing the board on the bottom of the drive with one from another drive (same manufacturer and model). Only takes a few minutes and it 'might' fix the problem long enough to recover your data. Of course there are data recovery services but they're usually quite expensive and usually charge by the amount of data to be recovered.

Damn Jimmy, I thought from the title this was going to be about your "Political Corectness"