Hi all,
My (usually) trusty notebook has been feeling a bit ill of late…the dreaded Blue Screen of Death has been appearing more and more. :bluemad: This is usually after the computer has been in use for a number of hours.
After it blue-screens, SOMETIMES it will reboot, but lately more and more it will not. It claims that it can’t find the boot media, and sometimes gives an error relating to the network card (go figure). This last time, the post-blue-screen party featured CHKSDK which changed a few indexes, and I now notice that I’ve got a few more or less random empty files that were full before.
Since this happens after several hours of continuous use, I’m wondering if it’s a heat issue. I’ve bought one of those little heat disperser pads as a temporary fix (or attempt at a fix) but…if the worst happens and I need a new HD – can anyone recommend a good place to have this done? Teh computer is a Gateway (still under warranty but they only do the work in the US 
) less than a year old and I’m very happy with it otherwise. OH, yeah, it’s got an English Win XP Pro OS on it, which I’d like to keep. Everything else is backed up. 
Terry,
I would suggest using Norton Ghost to create an image of your hard drive, then just unGhost it onto another drive.
This would be easiest if you have (or can have) a second drive in your machine, or at least a second partition of about the same size. If not, I think it could still be done by putting the drive in another machine. I have a recent (November 2003) version of Ghost, and I don’t think they support USB drives yet.
Have you updated your antivirus software and run it, just to be sure it’s not some new creeping crud?
It’s a new laptop so there shouldn’t be an OS problems with it. Regular TLC (e.g. defrags, virus scans etc, proper installs/uninstalls) will keep it happy and humming. Not sure about Win XP Pro but I don’t think memory problems are an issue with super long-running computers since after W2K.
When you get the Blue Screen of Death 
, what sort of error messages is it saying? Sometimes it could be a hardware problem/conflict, not a software one. That’s my guess based on your description.
Maybe you might want to google for Gateway notebooks issues and see what pops up. Doesn’t Gateway also have on-line support? You can pump them for information and then someone/somewhere in Taipei will know what to do I’m sure.
I’ve pumped them for info and they were non-responsive. They addressed the no-booting-on-restart issue (“Must be a wrong boot order” – well, guys, it’s NOT), and ignored the root cause of the blue-screening in the first place.
I CAN’T not have a working computer, so I’ve bought a nice little Acer TravelMate (dont tell me what crap it is, if it is!!) and I’ll mail the Gateway back to the US for repair at their leisure. Probably it’s the fan/cooling devices…but it was annoying that the “tech” uninstalled and reinstalled Windows (I had to show him how to open the CD-ROM drive) and then charged me NT$1000…what nerve!! I mean, I could have pushed “Enter” myself if I’d known it was a $1000 key tap!! :fume: :fume:
Oh well, sorry, that sucks.
Travelmates have had good reviews in the past. Word to the wise on laptops, road warriors should stick with IBMs and Toshibas. Anything else is a crapshoot.