If you can get me the computer early tomorrow I can pull the HD and get a copy of it on a external drive.

Damm, wish this was yesterday because I am heading out of town tomorrow at 18:00!

Joe A

If you can see the external drive in Windows explorer while in safe mode you can push your data to it. If you can't, you can do as stomachmonkey suggested.

I got the backup going and it's gonna take a lot of hours. But it's been a while since it's run this long without locking up, so I'm just letting it sit and back up. I might be ok here. I can live without the laptop, but I need what's on it.

Do the fans run a lot? Could be overheating. If the fans are dead (or full of dust bunnies), that might explain something too. This freeware program Dell Inspiron Inspiron/Latitude/Precision fan control will show you all the temperature sensors and let you control/force the fan settings. Works for most Dells.

Is the memory flaky? Try seeing how long MemTest86+ will run for. Swap in good memory, or test your memory in a machine that doesn't crash.

Universal Boot CD is full of motherboard/disk testing programs. Free, bootable.

Almost never a hard drive, unless you can hear it either constantly ticking or recalibrating (slow recal to track 0, followed by a fast seek back to the sector it was trying to read).

If it has data you want, I'd yank the hard drive and back it up in a machine that's usable first. Stick a scratch 10 or 20Gb drive in for testing purposes.

I hear that all the time! Dammit, back up your data more often!

I do it at least twice a week. Just keep a USB drive handy and copy it there, or network it with your desktop and transfer it across.

If you want to strip the drive and do it right will be back in a couple of days.

I don't even recall if my fans have run in the last few months. My wife always uses this one on the couch and rarely on a hard, flat surface. It's often almost too hot to touch on the bottom. I figure its hardware is largely on its last legs and I don't mind buying a newer shell on eBay and throwing in this hard drive. My external hard drive has been backing everything up for the last eight hours or so. Should be done in another few hours.

PM me your mailing address. I have one which should work.

From this, it sounds s if you have an overheating issue. Get a can-o-air and blow it through the exhaust vent. Take it outside :).

The symptoms you describe fit an overheating laptop.

Thanks. But isn't the damage already done?

Possibly yes, possibly no.

Usually when it really overheats it shuts down within a few seconds.

Best is to get your data off of it and then go from there. I would wipe the drive clean, put a new copy of the OS and your programs on it and see how it does.

Ok, I just pulled the keyboard off and hosed the whole thing down with can of air, got the fan real good and clean. Froze up on me again after about 10 min. and didn't feel warm at all.

You could pull the HD and just boot to the BIOS ...bring up the BIOS screen and see if it locks on that.

or Boot to install CD ... just to isolate the problem (cmptr or HD)

If the problem is flakey hardware, you could try to find the same model notebook on Craigslist, and swap your drive into that.

I just check CL for a Dell Latitude D610 ... that's pretty much a base model to the Dell Precision M60 ...which I have sitting on a shelf. Let me know if you need to borrow it ...or install CD's ...

Island, could I just install my hard drive in there and see how it works to tell whether my issue is hardware or software?

At this point it may not be a heat issue anymore, but, do the fan(s) spin? Also the heat sink has radiator fins and sometimes after prolonged use, the fins become blocked. That's why I suggested blowing the air in at the exhaust port.

Just an FYI, most of the time, heat will not affect the laptop/desktop - other than making it shut off randomly. Processors are really tough and can stand up to the heat for quite a while.

I would suggest, like others, that you take the HD out, hook it up to another pc and get any data you want off of it...

Dave

Dave,

while we are on the subject, the Dell desktop that I called you about over the weekend, I defragged it, got rid of everything that I could in terms of add on games, and did what ever compressing and such that I could find on system maintenance. When my BIL connects to ATT internet it runs really, really slow to load pages, any tips? He's using Firefox. He knows NOTHING about computers, and me, not a whole lot more. Should I use RegCure, or doublemyspeed.com or one of them?

Rick, that's what I was thinking. email me ...

you could also just get one of the USB hard drive enclosures for ~$20

...put your HD in there, and plug it into a working computer.

Hey Rick - I've got a Latitude 600 if you need to check out your HD. Mines been a bit flaky lately, too. Funny (well not really) but it only seems to have problems when I'm streaming something from Netflix.

UPDATE

Got a new 160GB hard drive and hard drive enclosure today. Installed new HD, loaded Windows from an OS disk, copied some files over from my old one via the enclosure and....after about 20 min. online it locked up again. WTF is causing this? How can it still be happening with a new HD and reloaded Windows? Also, I can't get the new AVG free version to load either. Really getting frustrated with all this.

That sounds like a virus... You've been looking at too much porn boy....