Data Recovery

Having trouble with my new Laptop computer

August 12, 2011 by Tricia

Remember that Laptop computer that I bought back in February? Well … it’s been giving me a lot of trouble this week. In fact, it took about two hours just to shut down on Wednesday night and since then – all day Thursday and now today I’ve been desperately trying to figure out what’s wrong with precious computer.

Last night I was so frustrated that I felt like picking up the computer and throwing it at a metal building or something.

Now after taking a few things out of the startup, and using CCleaner to cleanup the registry it’s working a little better. I actually think that my Firefox browser might be causing all the trouble. Windows just keeps freezing and it keeps getting that blue spinning thing like it’s working working working or busy doing something .. for minutes or even HOURS at a time! I mean it’s literally taken hours for my laptop to shut down. Nothing I did would shut it down. I had to unplug it and wait for the battery to die and then it finally shut down.

The odd thing is that the computer seems to work fairly well in Safe mode. It was while I was in Safe mode that I discovered that Chrome seemed to work fine, but if I started up Firefox all the webpages I visited were sort of in text mode. Even after I updated Firefox the pages are still in text mode. I have no idea why … but the computer seems to be working better in normal mode at this time … I’m cautiously optimistic that it’s a software problem.

If anyone has any ideas for any more things that I can do to fix my Laptop. It’s running on Windows 7 – 64 bit. Thanks!

I killed my laptop!

October 9, 2007 by Tricia

You know how I mentioned in my Thanks Giving post that I bought a new all in one printer on Saturday? Well, after I was done installing all the software for that on our desktop computer and my laptop I finally decided to install the software that came with my husbands HD video camera when we bought it three months ago.

I’d hesitated to install that software because it said it might cause problems with computers that had Roxio easy cd writer installed. I had a feeling that our laptop had that so I was really leary of adding the software. I hemmed and hawed about it for months as you can see …

Anyway, Saturday rolled around and I put the video camera software on the desktop and that seemed to go well so I went over to the lap top and I did a search on it for easy cd writer. I didn’t find any files that had that name or that phrase within them so I decided it must be safe to install the software. So I began installing it and went to do something on the desktop computer while it was installing.

When I came back to the laptop the software install was finished and there was a message to reboot the computer. So I did.

Bad Move!

The computer restarted and all I had when it was finished was a black screen with three of the scariest words that I’ve ever seen printed across the top left of the screen:

NO OPERATING SYSTEM

Ahhh! What? What did I do. What did I do? Why didn’t I listen to myself? I shouldn’t have installed that software! Ahhhh!

I rebooted the laptop a few times to be greeted by the same horrifying message.

I eventually shut down the computer in despair. I had the very tiniest hope that if the computer was off for a little while it’s memory might clear and if I was really lucky I might get a different message the next time I turned it on. Small hope I say …

In the meantime I remembered that I had tried to make restore disks when I first got the laptop last year. It took forever. I think I made 17 cds or something. I had the distinct feeling that the restore disks were not being created properly at the time, but I know I saved them. After all you can only access the system once to create restore disks so if they didn’t work I’d be up the creek without a paddle.

I went to look for the restore disks. I searched every room upstairs, the living room, dinning room and the basement. Chris was out at that Saga concert at the time so I was on my own in my search.

I never did find the restore disks. More than likely Chris moved them to some obscure place that I didn’t think to search, but I believe I searched through at least 70% of the house in all the obvious and not so obvious areas that one might hide 17 restore cds.

Eventually it was time to look at my dead laptop. I approached it slowly, sure that I’d see that terrible No Operating System message again when I turned it on. Much to my surprise and joy the computer actually booted into windows when I turned it on.

Of course it was full of error messages and my cd wouldn’t work right. I decided to go to the system tools folder and try system restore. My system wouldn’t restore itself back to the last restore point! I tried it a few different ways several times, picking different restore dates and it still wouldn’t work. I don’t believe I’ve ever had any errors on the laptop so I think this was the first time I’ve used system restore on it. I’ve used system restore on my desktop computer and it works fine. So I don’t know why it would on the laptop. I’ll have to try it sometime in the future.

I spent several hours using my “nurse” healing powers on my laptop. Manually uninstalling every program that the Video software program had installed. 20 programs installed – 20 programs removed. Finally … finally … the laptop worked with only one error for HP Photosmart Premiere (software installed for the new all in one printer).

That error seems to be sticking around, but I can live with one error message for a while until I figure out how to get rid of it.

The main thing is that the laptop is working again! It took hours and a mini heart attack to get it working again, but it’s running and I’m not going to try to install that video camera software again.

DTIDATA Specializes in Hard Drive Recovery

September 28, 2007 by Tricia

I frequent quite a few forums and it’s not uncommon for me to read posts regularly about someones computer breaking down or how they got a virus and can’t boot their computer anymore or worst of all how they heard funny noises coming from their computer and then their hard drive suddenly failed.

Did you know that when you hear strange sounds or a clicking noise coming from your hard drive that it’s probably best to shut down your computer and not attempt any recovery attempts? You can end up causing more damage to your hard drive if you continue to run it when it’s in a degraded state. Doing this could make your data unrecoverable!

If you suspect that your hard drive isn’t working properly and could fail or know that it’s broken thats the time to get in touch with a hard drive repair specialist.

DTIDATA specializes in Hard Drive Recovery. Their staff of engineers keep themselves up to date on the latest technology related to hard drive data recovery. In fact, their R&D team is responsible for developing new recovery technology so you can rest assured that when you have your hard drive repaired by DTIDATA they are using the latest and likely best techniques available.

DTIDATA has a class 100 clean room that they use for all Hard Drive Recovery. This will help ensure that no dust or particles will get into your hard drive as they work on retrieving your data.

Once you send your hard drive to DTIDATA for Hard drive recovery and it’s received by the company they log it into their database and assign a case number. They then send you a message that includes your case number so that you can track your hard drives recovery.

One thing that I really like about this company is that they don’t charge any diagnostic fees. If they can’t recover data from your hard drive there’s no charge, in fact they don’t charge you at all unless they recover 100% of your data. That’s how confident they are in their service.

Hopefully your hard drive continues to work well for a long time to come, but if you ever do need to have your hard drive repaired or have the data recovered remember DTIDATA.

My sites are using too much CPU resources? Help!

July 1, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve gone through a nightmare in the last few days!

I got a message from my web host on Thursday evening stating that my sites/ domains were using too much of the web hosts resources on the server that they were on and that they had moved my sites to a non-production server until I could either figure out what was causing the drain on resources or until I decided to upgrade to a VPS hosting plan or a dedicated servers hosting plan.

Well, both of those options are more expensive and while I know my traffic has gone up recently and continues to rise I’m certain that it’s not high enough to warrant upgrading my hosting account just yet.

So I stayed up Thursday night and worked on my sites. Looking over all the stats to see if I could figure out which files were being used too often or if there were any files or folders in my domain directories that shouldn’t be there.

I didn’t find anything abnormal but I did deactivate a few plugins that I thought might use more of the servers resources than the others. That’s all I could think to do.

I’ve also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin that I was using to the newest beta version as that one is said to go easier on CPU resources than the last stable version.

So today … well today is Canada Day. We had a friend over for the weekend so I left my sites alone briefly last night and earlier today. We’d been supposed to go out of town, but that wasn’t going to happen when there was the possibility of me losing my sites or of them going down. You see I was still waiting to hear back from my web host. I’d written to them twice since I got their message on Thursday evening and didn’t end up hearing from them until today! Grrrr.

Unfortunately the message that I got from them today was that my sites CPU usage had increased! Aaaah! It shouldn’t have increased! What the heck????

They also told me that they’d disabled the index.php file for this site because:

We have been forced to disable your script(index.php) located in
(/home/thewe22/public_html/feverishthoughts/index.php) as they appear to have
been exploited.

Well what does that mean? Was my site hacked? Did someone try to access my site with a script?

I have no idea, but the result was that Tricia’s Musings was down for the count.

I was advised to again search for any scripts of files in my directories that didn’t belong (didn’t find any) and to upgrade my software.

So I’ve upgraded Tricia’s Musings to the most recent version of WordPress. As I said earlier I also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin. I’ve turned off Bad Behavior (now I’ll be hit with spam!) and I’ve installed WP-Cache.

I still have a number of plugins running. I’ve turned off a number of them, but I do still have several activated.

If CPU usage is still high I’ll turn off all but Akismet and see how that goes.

If you have any ideas for me as to what else I might be able to do to limit the CPU usage on my sites I’d love to hear it.

Accidently deleted a file? Use active file recovery to get it back

May 18, 2007 by Tricia

Have you ever been working in a program and all of a sudden you either go through a virus attack,formatting, or perhaps the power fails and you lose what you were working on? Maybe you’ve just accidentally deleted a file and couldn’t find out how to bring it back because it wasn’t in your Windows recycle bin?

Now, I know for some of you it’s kind of scary to think about tinkering with your computer either to find a file or to fix a problem. How would you like it if I told you that there’s a program out there called “Active File Recovery” that can easily recover deleted files and folders? Even from an already emptied recycle bin?

I’ll bet it sounds pretty good. Am I right? I mean, I bet there isn’t one person out there reading this post that hasn’t accidentally deleted or lost a file in some way at some time or another.

The program is easy to use, and what’s more its also and efficient data recovery tool when you system has crashed and isn’t bootable. I say that because the Active File Recovery software Enterprise installation package comes with a CD/DVD ISO image that you can burn in order to get a bootable CD or DVD with a lightweight version of Windows Vista that will run in RAM. That’s fantastic because well, you can’t fix your computer and recover your data if you can’t even get it to boot for you! Booting up a crashed system is half the battle isn’t it?

Active File Recovery will also allow you to perform Partition recovery. This means that after you’ve had disk partition loss, or format damage to a partition you’ll be able to repair it with Active File Recovery professional. You can also use the program to recover photographs and other media files, even those deleted from flash memory, or data that has been lost due to formatting a memory card.

The standard, professional and Enterprise packages range in price from $29.95 to $99.00. Corporate licenses are also available if you’d like to use this software for your business. All of the products include free technical support and free updates.

Visit the site and take a look at what this software package can do. If you want to thoroughly check this software out before you purchase a copy you may download a demo copy through the main page of the site.

Having trouble with my new Laptop computer

I killed my laptop!

DTIDATA Specializes in Hard Drive Recovery

My sites are using too much CPU resources? Help!

Accidently deleted a file? Use active file recovery to get it back

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