Chickensoup's trusty Acer Aspire E1 met its fate with a bottle of Pellegrino water yesterday afternoon. Stupidly instead of turning the computer off when the accident happened, the Soup thought it was ok to run it, and after about 5 minutes the whole thing turned off. No power nowhere. Something shorted out.
Acer has not been backed up in a few weeks and the new data needs rescue.
Trusty Acer needs to have a hard drive recovery including .pst outlook files
The Soup has been looking online and except for Staples and one Asian company all the rest of the data backups are far away and look sinister.
Except for the ones that are porn sites...on a different subject... Chickensoup was shocked! shocked! at the variety of uses of common household objects in the sexual adventuring world...
Ahem, back to the poor broken computer...chickensoup needs to save the hard drive and access it to order another computer same build.
So the first question: Where to get saved?
Second question: is there a current computer out there of similar build?
https://www.cnet.com/products/acer-aspire-e1-731-4699-17-3-pentium-2020m-4-gb-ram-500-gb-hdd-us-international/
It has a dvd player burner, the big port for the blue cord to the internet, wireless, 3 usbs 17 inch screen Win7 and it loves me.
I would be grateful for some direction.
I had to fix a PC for a church about 2 years ago. They spilled something on it and stuff stopped working.
Luckily the hard drive was OK, the motherboard and other stuff was bad.
I went to the Dell auction & refurbished site and spent $200 for a machine with more capability on it.
I put in the old hard drive, booted it up and after getting new drivers everything just worked.
I then had to buy a new license from microsoft for about a hundred.
I gave the PC back and everything was fine.
I would appreciate a ping to your list of silicone and chip warriors...
If you didn’t move the computer suddenly while it was on, the HD may be OK, it’s in a sort-of-sealed case.
I spilled a beer onto my laptop a few years ago while it was on, and immediately lifted it upside-down to let the beer drain ... but that sudden movement destroyed the spinning HD and I lost everything
But I learned 2 valuable lessons from it - backup regularly (expect failure!!), and keep drinks the hell away from your computer
You have my sympathy. I killed mine last fall. Drowned the poor thing, just like you. I so miss my Windows 7. :(
Buy a used Dell with a Win 7 license from someone on Craig’s List. You likely will be able to find one with a fresh Win7 install. If not, you can buy an install disk on eBay for under ten bucks. A Dell install disk works with any licensed Dell PC of the same OS. Then plug your old drive into the PC you just bought as a secondary disk. There are two cables, one for power, the other for data. You may need another cable for the data. If the disk is good, you should be able to read all the files and copy them. I’m assuming your disk is a serial disk. If it is IDE (quite old), you need to buy a PC with both IDE and serial interfaces.
When hardware changes significantly re-Activation is triggered. So record the CAL from the sticker on the blown ACER. Use that when activation pops up in the new system.
First step is to see if the hard drive is still ok.
Dismantle the laptop. Remove the battery, the DVD, the hard drive, and any other removable parts.
Completely dry out the hard drive. Place it in a cloth bag and pack it in a plastic bag with a kilogram of dry uncooked rice and leave it in a warm place overnight. That should pull out any remaining moisture.
Place the hard drive in an external USB enclosure (you can often find these for sale for under $10), see :
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usb+enclosure
Plug it into a working computer or a smart TV and see if you can see the directory structure.
I believe MS is going to stop updates on Win 7 next year and Win 10 is not bad - I use the shell and the screen is exactly like my Win 7 was.
I think it is about $15 or so for an external case for your hard drive.
I spilled a beer on a laptop that stopped working. All I had to do was replace the keyboard and it was fine.
As for #2 - It looks like mwave.com has a pretty close match for $490:
When I've had to buy a new laptop, my search always starts here.
Get yourself a new/used laptop and one of these:
...remove the hard disk from the old laptop and place in the above dock and transfer your files over to the new machine.
Seriously? You post this under news?
Liberals who browse Free Republic are encouraged to drink Pelligrino water while typing on their computer.
We have a yearly contract with “Tech to Us” and they’ve been wonderful. Even when we were hit with ransomeware, they were able to find and restore everything. It’s all remote, and they’ve never failed us for three years. They support all types of devices. (They have, however made fun - in a nice way - of my Windows 7.) 800-516-7989.
" They are inexpensive, will provide Connection to All types of Drives. All You needs is a functional computer with USB PORT.
Try some damprid rather than rice. Got my backup PC from ebay after a major crash, same model with all my settings.
Watch out for tech repair places staffed by “cool kids”. Had one delete all my “really old programs” from 2002 that were vital to my business and installed all sorts of browsers, video players and gaming support mess. Had to revert the drive back to normal from backups when I got home.
Also, you’ve been reported. Let’s see how long it takes to move this silly thread.
Get a Mac.