Posted on 04/23/2018 3:46:45 AM PDT by poconopundit
Having trouble with my PC. Here are some of the issues:
Any hints on how to solve such problems would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Nothing beats “Ghost” for backup/clone for Windows for Mac use Carbon Copy Cloner.
SSD’s are nice, fast, and if they get damaged internally by a chi going bad, they are unrecoverable.
Windoze 10 has nothing to do with any of that.
It is the nature of the SSD device. The spinning disks can be recovered unless the bearings seize.
Your user data should be stored/backed up to a NAS or removable media. Ditto your ISO’s of any software you have on CD/DVD disk.
You should also have a bootable USB stick for recovery of your PC and create a backup image of your system at first boot, and then another image generated at a later date that includes your installed software.
That was the second question (I should have asked.. desktop or laptop)..
If you have a laptop using an SSD, you should definitely have an external HHD for backup. You never know when you are going to have issues with the SSD (any power surge can corrupt your data).
While I love the idea of the speed of an SSD, they still are far from the stability of true HDDs.
Also, consider having a dual boot with Windows AND Linux on your onboard HD, and have an external HD to install your wanted/needed apps on. The Linux partition can be very small (maybe 7 gig for full OS and some side apps for tools) and the dual boot can be used in place of having to boot from USB. Linux can read (and repair) Windows.. but Windows cannot see Linux.
This too..
“Windoze 10 has nothing to do with any of that.”
But, I still stand by my dual boot option.. (remember, he said he has no CD/DVD drive).
save for later
I do not keep my programs on an SSD drive. I install everything after Windows 10 to a separate Hard drive. Can’t do that with laptop and USB stick performance would be horrible.
There are hybrid SSD drives with built in Hard drives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive
I have no experience with them, but looks suitable for a laptop. and has been supported since Windows 8.1. I’m not advocating that you have to spend more money. I’m just old school. Love the speed, distrustful of the increased failure rate — perceived or otherwise.
My order of troubleshooting would be heat, voltage, hardware, software with and emphasis on age of hardware So I check:
Fans and intakes for dust/crud buildup. A good temperature monitoring program is useful just to see if you are overheating. Everything else you’ll need a good service tech or become a good service tech.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI ) is the successor to that, and UEFI can support remote diagnostics and repair of computers, even with no operating system installed
You can get a USB optical drive for under 25.00
Your problem however, may be with memory or the motherboard. Create or buy a Linux live copy, which you can run off a USB flash drive by which you should be able to see Windows files. However, uness you use Knoppix or Puppy Linux buy on USB if you want may not allow you to edit files therein.
If Bitlocker is enabled, you will not be able to clone, no matter what software you use.
I have been using the free version of Macrium Reflect successfully for years. You can save an image of your drive to USB flash drives or USB hard drives and also load the recovery program from a USB flash drive by booting from that drive. It has never let me down.
I replaced all my spinning drives with SSDs. The speed increase is dramatic. I've never had one crash.
Good point about enabling Trim on SSD’s.
It’s interesting that there has been no mention of NOT defragmenting SSD’s - they just don’t like it.
Ausilogics has a defragmenter that has an SSD option, I use it to analyze my SSD and find that it’s never over 1% fragmented.
Bkmk 4l8r
Lol.. defraging SSD is losing SSD life :p
Anyone that is semi-tech-savy should know NOT to defrag an SSD
btw, what ever happened to the squared crystal that could hold petabytes (from an article from about a decade ago)..
Never clone a problem computer. You may be cloning the problem.
Try doing a System Image Backup (Control Panel, File History, bottom left)
Lol.. I didn’t think anyone else remembered Puppy Linux :D
Whatever backup you use.. be sure to do it right after you install and apply updates (but before you install anything else).
You are going to hate this suggestion but Google Drives are good for files you don’t mind people seeing. I don’t keep anything on my computer that I want to keep secret. If I want to keep it secret(bank data, etc), it gets encrypted and put somewhere off the computer.
+1
Windows 10 is as big a disaster as the Democrat Party!
I have a USB CD/DVD drive and I create ISO’s of all my software that is on those formats. Everything is loaded to a NAS, and then a mapped network drive is added to the “This PC” directory.
The NAS is backed up monthly.
I have used the SSD drives and they are nice and decidedly faster than even the 10K RPM stuff, but I still remember the first USB flash drive I bought. In the documentation, it said I could expect “X number of bits” transfers (don’t remember what X was). I never forgot that, and have always viewed the SSD stuff through that lens. I used it a lot, but when it failed, I wasn’t angry. I expected it. Even the new stuff, while considerably better than that stuff that I bought in 2005, it still has the same weakness. Failure is total, and unrecoverable.
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