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.
https://www.cyberguys.com/product-details/?productid=83260&rH=1628
However in the case of switching to new hardware you want to make sure the vendor provides drivers for Windows 7. They don't all do that.
Another option is give up on the old drive and your nice Windows 7 that you are used to. Plug the old drive into the new computer with an external connector (USB to SATA connector, e.g. Walmart link That will make you old drive an external drive on the new computer and you can find and reuse your files. But you will have to recreate your whole working environment (buy the applications) on the new computer with its new disk and new OS.
You can also buy a small box with the SATA to USB and put your old drive in that box and use it as a permanent external drive.
You can also try to find an old used laptop with Windows 7 and recreate your working environment on there (probably have to buy Office and other apps). Then copy the files from the old drive into the new computer.
However, the first thing I would do in your case is pull the old drive from the old laptop, get the Walmart thing, plug that old drive into some friend's computer and look at it. Make sure it works, and try to find the files you want to save.
i buy Dell refurbs. Use an external hard drive hook up. copy off the profiles (windows 7 up C:]\users\[profile names] go into public directory and save all that. Then I save programdata (hidden by default at c:\programdata
Look for all shared files and common data, copy that off.
Then start SELECTIVELY bringing the stuff back
All your data is easily recoverable however your software will need to be re-installed
Since you use Outlook as your email client, your PST file can be imported into your new installation of Outlook and all your emails will be there
You need the services of a tech. Buy your new PC from a place that has the ability to do this. Of the chains, Microcenter can do all this and I favor them over BestBuy etc.
If after getting dry the power supply fan doesn't come on for a moment when you plug the power cord in, and if the computer doesn't show some CPU fan activity when you press the start button, it my be that only the power supply is shot. It is the only place on the computer that has high voltage that is susceptible to water.
The power supply can be checked by unplugging the 20/24-pin motherboard connector and shorting the proper POWER GOOD connector to ground. If the power supply is wotking, iys fan will come on and stay on. If the power supply is dead, replacing it is very easy, because all you have to do is to unplug the connectors from the board and from the drives, unbolt and remove it, and put in a new one that meets/exceeds the power rating and leads configuration.
You may not want to do all this, so just take out the hard drive, mount it as a second drive in another windows computer, and use that operating system to transfer the complete set of files by copying the "My Documents" directory contents to an adequate USB flash drive.
Dismount and store the hard drive as the backed-up files in case you have to re-access them.
Putting the hard drive in another machine is OK, but you'll have to reinstall all the pertinent applications that use your important documents, images, or audio/video files.
(From an experienced computer technician.)
You got some direction when the mods moved this tripe into chat. You people need to stop cluttering up "news" with your silly threads. It wastes bandwidth and detracts from important threads.
Buy something like the Anker 3.0 USB dock (or a hard drive enclosure), plug it into your old hard drive, and copy your files to your new computer. Or you could just use your old hard drive as an external hard drive.
Tell us more about the porn.
Use onedrive or google drive and put everything you want to save to it. Basically it appears as another drive on your pc but it’s on the cloud. The bonus is that you can access it from other devices as well.
You simply need to remove the HD and either use a 2.5 adapter to install it into a PC or use a USB external enclosure (like https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=+external+enclosure+2.5&N=4024%204093&isNodeId=1) to plug it into, and transfer the files to a new laptop.
Unless your OS is on the (rare) Retail channel, versus one that came installed with the unit from the manufacturer, then it is legally “married” to the mobo and cannot legally be transferred another unit.
To find out and to see the the Product key, run in a command prompt (paste cmd in the Run command in Windows [Windows key and r], or use Windows key and x and choose command prompt) and run this: slmgr.vbs /dlv
The best place I have seen for Refurbished units is here under Refurbished https://www.newegg.com/Computer-Systems/Store /ID-66
But may it be used for God and good.
bookmark
I’m probably worse than you. I have about 5 laptops laying around my house that have various ailments. I’m going to try a few of these suggestions.
Prayers you find a solution to your problem.
The good news is your data is most likely safe. Look on this not as a disaster but as an opportunity.
First of all it’s an opportunity to upgrade your old hardware to better, faster, safer with more capacity at about the same price you paid way-back-when for that old Acer.
Also buy an exterior HD case. Wait to buy the case until you find out if your Acer drive is SATA or IDE so you get the right connections in the case. Removing the HD from your Acer is easy. . . A less than five minute job. You can recover your files from the external HD drive once you install it there.