Ladies & Gents: learn from my experiences and be happier for it!
Two months ago (2/18), my 9 y.o. desktop died, so I took it back the the shop that had assembled it for me in 2005. They had it for SIX WEEKS and didn't appear to do anything to it.
I contacted another person about 20 miles north of here and took it to him. Within 24 hours, he found that the power supply had at least one line that was seriously under-voltage. Even after replacing that, my system continued to have problems, possibly with the motherboard (mobo) but also with the XP Pro. I haven't been able to get into "User Accts." for a couple of years but this wasn't an inconvenience for me as I'm the only user.
More annoying is that the system would not maintain the correct time when the system was off, even after replacing the BIOS battery. This system is plugged into a large surge protected block that is then plugged into the battery power supply. The second repairman found that, if the power is completely turned off (like the switch on the surge strip), the tower lost the time, but if plugged in to the battery and just powered down, it doesn't! Problem is there is STILL power going to the speakers AND the keyboard (KB) after the tower has powered down! Go figure!
Part of the problem MAY have been that this mobo was running a pair of drive in a RAID 0 (mirrored) array. But these weren't set up as SATA drives but as a SCUZI pair, and the first shop was saying that they have had other customers reporting similar problems with similar set-ups.
FORTUNATELY, I had a separate internal hard drive (hd) to which shop #2 was able to back-up "My Documents" to and save my info. I have an external 1T hd BUT I had not backed up "My Documents" to it since LAST AUGUST. I had done a full system backup to that drive just a month before using XP's backup - BUT this is a proprietary format that can't be opened by any computer and I couldn't get my laptop to see those files so I had to reconstruct many of the files from 9/13-3/14. NOT FUN!!
Now I am having "fun" reloading all my programs (still not done), "Favorites", as well as getting the files in "My Documents" back up to date again.
SO - here is yet another reminder of that famous quote be realtors that the most important part of real estate is "location - Location - LOCATION"! If you have either internal OR external (preferable) hds, USE THEM!! If you have a sufficiently large USB/thumb drive, use that! And don't "just" do a backup using Microsoft's "backup" utility because of its proprietary nature, also backup your "My Documents" folder to that external drive! Do it AT LEAST every other week (weekly better!) and try and keep that external hd someplace else in the house - just in case!
Remember - backup - Backup - BACKUP!!
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