Back from the West Coast. My PC burned and had a fire.

[billymach4 Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close billymach4]

Went to boot up the good old PC yesterday only to find out that there was an internal fire that fried the machine.

All data is lost. Thank goodness the fire was contained and just burned out on its own. What I suspect happened was that somehow it was left on, or got turned on unknowingly and overheated. DS was here but working during the day.

Total mystery but nobody got hurt, and there was no other damage. Thank God!

[bigfrank Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close bigfrank]

Something close to that happened last year to my sons desktop. It turned out that the usb ports caused it.

[katiemack Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close katiemack]

Wow! The angels were watching.

[billymach4 Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close billymach4]

Went out and built a new system .

I tried to salvage, but everything is just toasted. Nothing was functioning. Went to Microcenter and did a BYOPC.

Chassis
Motherboard
CPU
4gb of Ram
320gb HD
DVD/RW

Got it turned on now. Updating the OS to Win XP SP3.

This whole experience is a pain in the A@#@#@!#.

But at least I got to finally build my own system! Something I have been avoiding for a while now.

[lawren2 Malibu Beach Barbie & A Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close lawren2]

Billy that is scary. Thank goodness nothing or no one was hurt.

Here's hoping you have back-up...

[billymach4 Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close billymach4]

Well I did not back up everything on this particular machine. The pics will have to be recovered from Costco's photo site.

I had tons of music that I will have to scour the internet for. I love 60's and 70's music. Some music I can recover from the ipods. Most of the other stuff was garbage crap taking up time and space. My finances have been backed up.

All in all it is still a great pain the the ass. We a so vulnerable to this technology.

But hey, now I have a new clean fast running machine.

[lawren2 Malibu Beach Barbie & A Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close lawren2]

Well I did not back up everything on this particular machine. The pics will have to be recovered from Costco's photo site.

I had tons of music that I will have to scour the internet for. I love 60's and 70's music. Some music I can recover from the ipods. Most of the other stuff was garbage crap taking up time and space. My finances have been backed up.
All in all it is still a great pain the the ass. We a so vulnerable to this technology.

But hey, now I have a new clean fast running machine.

I feel your pain.

[billymach4 Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close billymach4]

Thank you for the sympathy

This is my first post on the new Billy Machine!!!!

The previous posts were from the laptop.

We are cooking with gas now!!!!

[billymach4 Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close billymach4]

Recovery update.

All of the family photos (digital) have been reproduced on CD from Costco's photo site. I ordered a total of 9 cd's over 5000 photos!

I had a copy of my 25 fav songs on a flash drive.

Some other personal stuff was also on a flash drive.

Feeling alot better now!

[shaggy Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close shaggy]

Sorry to hear, but be glad you did not have a fire!! You at least know what you're doing to recover most of your stuff, me would have no clue!! shaggy

[taffy19 Gold Contributor Find all posts View Profile Close taffy19]

We had twice a little Mac burn out when we were gone. They had a problem with the power supply for this tiny little Mac (Mac Plus). The second time we came home we could smell immediately that something had burned out and it scared us but it was only the computer. Can you imagine if the house had burned down?

Now about backing up. My husband's computer crashed the day we went to Hawaii so we couldn't print the boarding passes and all data was lost too. We also crashed an external hard disk about the same time so that did it for us.

After that, we started backing up online with our little notebook and were going to sign up for the new PC too which we did last week but now we are in the process of returning this computer because they forgot to install an item that I had ordered so I have to start all over again but everything on this computer is backed up online so it should be a breeze.

The service with HP was dreadful. They want us to send it back rather than have someone take care of it here so now they can keep it. I was so angry but I don't know what to buy now.

I can highly recommend the online back-up service as it works like a charm and it is easy to recover files too but it won't back up movie or video clips but all photo images that are on the hard disk and everything else.

PS. The service is Online Backup: Easy, Completely Automatic. Secure. Carbonite..